Making you pay for their porn won’t stimulate the economy

In one sense, it is rank hypocrisy that any journalist should bash poor Jacqui Smith for inadvertently claiming her husband’s porn films on expenses. As anyone with any experience of Her Majesty’s Press can testify, the expenses claim is the genre where the reporter is expected to exercise whatever creative gifts he or she may possess. It seems to be a kind of sacred tradition of Fleet Street.

Shortly after arriving in the newsroom of the Times, more than two decades ago, an old and wily reporter invited me and another trainee out to lunch in order, as he put it, to “show us the ropes”. We had a doleful Japanese meal, in almost total silence, and all paid our way. I was wondering what kind of tutorial this was, when the reporter picked up the bill with a flourish. “See this?” he said. “This is a good bill,” he said, and trousered it.

“But who are these people?” I used to ask one distinguished leader-writer, when I read his restaurant claims, consisting of a series of chunky bills for “lunch with contact” or “dinner with contact”. Was there any way they could perhaps be identified, for the sake of verisimilitude? “I am afraid not,” he would sigh. “Security reasons.” Or there was the TV reporter I used to know in Brussels, who contrived to claim for a lawnmower in spite of living in a fourth-floor flat with no garden.

It is a fact of British journalism – the Telegraph excluded – that when you read an account of something of which you happen to have independent knowledge, you will often see how the facts have been slightly sandpapered to improve the story, or how the quotes have been artistically pruned of their vital saving clauses, and it is no surprise that this poetic licence finds its way into the composition of expenses. How many hacks have sat up late at night watching the porn film in the hotel bedroom? How many have then allowed it to appear as “media” or “extras” on their bill, and claimed back the cost? Hmm?

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