Birmingham speaker to reveal story behind MPs' expenses scoop

Oct 26 2009 by Graeme Brown, Birmingham Post

A Birmingham audience is to get the inside track on the MPs’ expenses scandal – from the newspaper which pulled off the scoop of the decade.

One of the key journalists from the Daily Telegraph, which lifted the lid on Westminster expenses, is to give Birmingham Press Club members an insight into how the scandal was exposed.

The paper’s assistant editor Andrew Pierce is to be guest of honour at the Club’s annual Christmas lunch at the Radisson on December 16.

Andrew, a former Birmingham Post and Mail reporter, will reveal how the Telegraph went about its exclusive, exposing how MPs ripped off the taxpayer for such items as duck ponds and moats, and also tried to cash in via ‘flipping’ their main addresses from home to home.

Andrew Pierce, aged 46, a former judge of the Birmingham Media Awards, became a journalist on leaving school in 1979. He joined the Gloucestershire Echo, before moving on to the Post and Mail in 1983.

After a spell as a freelance on a number of Fleet Street titles, he joined The Times in 1988, where he was variously a diarist, news reporter and parliamentary correspondent.

He joined the Telegraph as assistant editor in 2006. He said: “I’ve got very strong connections with the media in the Midlands, so it will be great to visit the region to renew old acquaintances and reveal how we set about reporting the expenses scandal.”

Birmingham Press Club chairman John Lamb said: “It’s a major coup for the club to get Andrew Pierce to talk about what could be described as the scoop of the century.”