MP Uses Campaign Funds to Pay 'Bad People'
The Times
The scoop revealed how the MP for Fylde had used £14,000 in funds given by party donors for campaigning 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.
Instead, The Times revealed all and the story dominated the news agenda, making the front pages of rival newspapers and leading the BBC for the whole of the next day.
It rapidly led to the end of Menzies’ political career and the opening of a police investigation into his conduct. The Conservative party removed the whip from Menzies within hours of publication of The Times’s story and within days he had bowed to the inevitable and announced that he would stand down as an MP.
The reporting revealed that officials at Tory headquarters had previously received legal advice that the allegations amounted to fraud but elected not to inform the police. After the story was published, a police investigation was launched and Menzies is continuing to be investigated for the potential criminal offences of fraud and misconduct in public office.
The investigation was the result of four months of painstaking reporting efforts in the face of a deliberate attempt to cover-up what had happened. When a key source was first approached, the reporter was unceremoniously turned away on the doorstep. But he worked for months to build trust and persuade her and others to speak, all the while obtaining corroborating evidence to back up the claims. Menzies and the Conservatives made efforts to stop sources talking and one close aide of the MP even lied during an on-the-record interview. The whistleblower, a life-long party member and dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, eventually agreed to give an on-the-record interview explaining how her concerns had repeatedly been dismissed by Tory officials.
The story was the most-read Times investigation of 2024, with more than 200,000 views, and was accompanied by a dedicated episode of The Story podcast which took listeners behind the scenes into the reporting process. It was described by the BBC's Political Editor as a "powerhouse" of investigative journalism and Sky News's Political Editor as "[not] just a marmalade dropper, it’s a tale so astonishing you have to pick yourself up off the floor".