Revelations about MPs’ expenses exclusively published by the Daily Telegraph have served to boost the newspaper’s circulation by almost 100,000.
According to an unofficial count of the paper on Friday, the initial drip of a stream of scandalous expense claims by Labour’s leading figures bumped up copies by 93,000.
The figure, seen by The Guardian, suggests the splash was more successful in shifting copies of the right-leaning broadsheet than if it had given away a DVD free of charge.
Sales of Saturday’s Telegraph, which listed the expenses of other government ministers, also increased, reportedly by the tens of thousands compared with the previous weekend.
And sales of Monday’s Telegraph, which revealed the claims made by the Conservative’s best-known figures, were not cited, though readers’ interest is not thought to have waned.
The same ‘chandeliers and all’ account of what their party members claimed on expenses was given the following day to the Liberal Democrats, and the House of Lords will be next.
The Telegraph’s deputy editor, Benedict Brogan, last night declined to say what proportion of MPs had made dodgy expenses claims, when asked to scale the problem on Question Time.
The audience of the BBC1 show were given no clue by Mr Brogan about how long the paper would carry the revelations, nor did he provide any word on how they were sourced.
Explaining why he could not predict when the Telegraph would finish its expenses exposé, Mr Brogan said 25 journalists were still in the process of sifting through one million documents.
He also said how, or from whom, the paper’s editorial team obtained the expenses list, thought to have initially come from the parliamentary fees office, was “inconsequential”.
May 15, 2009
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