Billy Kenber
The Times
In April, he revealed that the then-Tory MP Mark Menzies had misused £14,000 in campaign funds to pay personal bills, culminating in an extraordinary late-night phone call to an elderly party volunteer during which Menzies claimed he had been locked in a London flat by “bad people” and needed thousands of pounds from campaign funds - or the volunteer’s own bank account - to get out.
Even more astonishingly, the Conservative party’s chief whip and officials at CCHQ had been aware of the alleged fraud involving donors’ money for more than three months but had sat on the scandal in the apparent hope it wouldn’t become public.
The story, which dominated the news agenda, immediately saw Menzies lose the whip and within days he had announced he would stand down as an MP. A police investigation into his conduct was opened and it continues to assess whether he committed fraud and misconduct in a public office.
The Menzies investigation took more than four months of painstaking reporting, including persuading reluctant sources to speak and obtaining corroborating information even as a deliberate attempt was being made to cover-up what had happened.
It was published just a few weeks after Kenber’s reporting had ended the political career of another Tory MP, Scott Benton. He went undercover with a junior colleague to expose Benton's willingness to break parliamentary lobbying rules in exchange for money.
The MP was caught on film describing how he was prepared to leak confidential policy documents, table parliamentary questions and lobby ministers on behalf of gambling industry investors. He even promised to leak a copy of a market-sensitive white paper at least 48 hours before it was made public.
The investigation led to Benton's suspension from parliament after a damning standards investigation found he appeared “corrupt and for sale”. He resigned in March whilst a recall petition was ongoing. This year, Kenber also revealed how large tobacco companies who sell e-cigarettes had secretly funded a network of scientists and consumer organisations which have downplayed the health risks of vapes and lobbied against potential measures to protect children.
He revealed how British American Tobacco was secretly helping to run a supposedly ‘grassroots’ pro-vaping campaign and tobacco money was behind scientific papers challenging the risks of vapes. The series of articles, published across three days, also traced how Britain had become a global outlier on vaping, enthusiastically embracing e-cigarettes even as experts and bodies like the World Health Organisation sounded the alarm.
Rishi Sunak subsequently brought in tougher-than-expected new rules to try and crackdown on youth vaping.