I’d just written an email to James Ball at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on the Channel 4 story about Ben Gummer and then realise that they were the ones who originally commissioned the piece. Silly me:
Dear Mr Ball,
On your website you say that you want to get emails from any “journalist, campaigner or member of the public with a story you think the Bureau should be investigating”. I have a rather puzzling investigation.
There have been two investigations done on Channel 4 about expense investigations. These have covered six MPs, Zac Goldsmith, Ben Gummer, Gavin Barwell, Dan Byles, Sarah Teather and Phil Woolas. Four of these were Conservative, one Liberal Democrat and one Labour. That’s not that interesting.
What is interesting is the identity of the second party. In Croydon Central, Ipswich, Warwickshire and Brent Central the second party was Labour. In the other two it was Liberal Democrats. It seems very odd that there are no Conservatives in second place. Was Channel 4 and whatever third party outfit they were using biased on this? And how unusual was it?
I did a quick count of all the seats that had a majority of less than 4,092 (185 seats) where the Conservatives were second (75 seats). 4,092 is one more than the highest majority among these six (Zac Goldsmith with 4,091). Now the probability of any one of these seats at random having a Tory runner up would be 40.54%. So getting a non-Tory is a perfectly respectable 59.45% chance. To get two non Tory runners up and no-one else would be a lower but credible 35.22%. Three non-Tory runners up would be 20.7%, four would be 12.2% and five would be 7.15%. This would be very hard to justify as a fair representation. However six non Tory runners up would actually have a probability of 4.175%. Just under a one in twenty four chance.
Perhaps it was only the Conservatives who overspent, but I got an email today from the Sunlight Centre who said that they “have this week begun a new investigation into the election spending of Zac Goldsmith, Chris Huhne and Ed Balls.” In two of these cases the second place candidate was a Tory and in one they were not. Which one did Channel 4 and Anthony Barnett cover?
I must declare an interest on this (on which more later) and I am a constituent of Ben Gummer and I even wore one of the now famous Tee Shirts. I do like Mr Gummer but even his biggest fans would not claim that he was more newsworthy than Chris Huhne and Ed Balls, one of whom is a cabinet minister and one of whom was a cabinet minister in the recent past. Why have they not been covered?
On declaring an interest, I have watched the two broadcasts and read a lot of the articles on this and the main journalist is a Mr Anthony Barnett. It is not made clear that he was a director of the broadly anti-Conservative Charter 88, a writer for the Labour supporting New Statesman and on the editorial board of the Marxist New Left Review. It makes the one in twenty four chance look very odd indeed. I also notice that he has shared a platform with Chris Huhne in his role as the Co-Director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. Perhaps conflicts of interest of this one time soft left campaigner and new born journalist could be investigated?
I understand that the (non-partisan) Sunlight Centre have scooped you on all the major stories on MPs expenses, so perhaps this would be a story where you could scoop them?
Yours,
James Spencer
UPDATE:
Welcome to readers from ITN (the producers of Channel 4 News), the Labour Party and the Channel 4 Corporate division. You may want to see Panscourer’s post on this. He chides me for being mild.
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