Former Labour backbench MP Frank Cook has filed a libel writ against the Sunday Telegraph over a front-page story from May 2009 about his expenses.

He is demanding damages of up to £50,000 from publishers Telegraph Media Group over a front page story and two inside pieces in May 2009 in the Sunday Telegraph.

The stories, which he claims were defamatory, were headed “MP claimed £5 for church collection” and “I’m sorry church claim was unfair.”

Cook, who represents Stockton North, is also suing over a comment headed: “Now it is the people’s turn to be heard.”

He says the articles meant he represented low “value-for-money” as a parliamentarian, and that his £5 claim, which was refused, was an extraordinary abuse of MPs expenses, and was particularly embarrassing and hypocritical because of his support for the campaign to commemorate a Battle of Britain hero …

He says the allegations were given “disproportionate and excessive prominence” in the newspaper and online, and that by mentioning his former job as a gravedigger, the paper hoped to ridicule him.

When speaking to a reporter, he had denied he did not represent value-for-money, but says the paper failed to report that he was ineligible to vote on bills he had chaired, which gave a false impression of his voting record.

You can read the full story here.

Telegraph's attack on Danny Alexander is rich
Danny Alexander's behaviour wasn't a patch on the sort of tax avoidance measures the Telegraph repeatedly recommends

On Monday the Daily Telegraph's personal finance editor, Ian Cowie, wrote of the paper's story about Liberal Democrat MP Danny Alexander and his use of a capital gains tax exemption: "News that the chief secretary to the Treasury, Alexander, avoided paying capital gains tax when he sold his taxpayer-funded second home at a profit reminds us – yet again – that politicians are playing by a different set of rules from the rest of us".

Superficially that sounds reasonable. Surely MPs should follow the same rules as the rest of us? It's certainly my view. But taking a closer look at his piece I noticed a strange entry in the recent posts section: "10 tips to beat capital gains tax before the budget". That link has now gone, displaced by more recent posts, but you can still read the story on the Telegraph website.

It, too, is a piece by Ian Cowie, from May 2010, which lays out in detail how Telegraph readers can avoid paying capital gains tax. It even says: "Do as MPs do and 'flip' your home ... large potential CGT liabilities can be avoided quite legally in this way." The story goes on to urge a full exploitation of expenses and maximise the use of exemptions. It is a list of recommendations that goes well beyond what Alexander did.

And it's no rare exception, because the Telegraph has repeatedly run pieces giving advice on how to avoid capital gains tax, including using 'flipping'.

Back in June 2007 it published a 10-point plan to minimise capital gains tax, approvingly quoting a tax advisor who said: "It is possible to reduce a tax bill of a few hundred thousand pounds to virtually zero."

The plan urges people to claim expenses, "exploit personal allowances" and even talks about how you can briefly move in and out of a property in order to claim the 36 months exemption. That, of course, is the same exemption as the one Alexander used – save that he didn't briefly move in and out of a property just to get a tax break.

So Alexander's behaviour was not only, as the Telegraph conceded, legal but it was also not a patch on the sort of tax avoidance measures the Telegraph has repeatedly recommended to its readers.

Perhaps, then, Alexander's mistake was not to be a signed-up reader of the Telegraph; after all, perish the thought that the newspaper is suggesting that there is anything wrong with its readers doing what it recommends to them.

There was no need for The Telegraph to run a snatched doorstep photo of David Laws's partner – but it is standard fare for political coverage across the media

After years when ministers were far too reluctant to resign, clinging on to their jobs regardless of criticism, the case of David Laws has rather turned that on its head.

I say that because, for me, the dividing line between reprimand and resignation in matters of personal financial affairs should be whether or not you have personally gained from a breach of the rules. Even if it turns out David Laws broke the rules (and the Parliamentary Commissioner is yet to rule on quite how "partner" should be defined), he has claimed far less in expenses than he could have had he decided to go public with his personal life several years ago. So, in this ironic situation where a politician gets into trouble for claiming less money than he could have done, I regret that he has decided to resign.

Of course, some have said that Laws should have been more careful to keep on the right side of the rules. However, the coverage by The Telegraph of Danny Alexander's tax affairs – and the subsequent reaction of some of the public – shows that even that is not enough to avoid criticism.

In Danny Alexander's case the capital gains tax rules are clear: he did not switch around any definitions to exploit them and he followed the same rules that apply to the rest of us. Yet still The Telegraph criticised.

It's an odd form of morality to criticise someone for paying no tax when there's no tax to pay. It's like criticising someone for exploiting loopholes by putting money into a pension. You get a tax break if you do that, but it's not dodging tax – it's just how the system is designed to work.

The oddity of The Telegraph's standards is heightened if you read the advice it gave its own readers in June 2007. That piece gave 10 tips on how to avoid paying capital gains tax and approvingly quoted a tax consultant saying, "It is possible to reduce a tax bill of a few hundred thousand pounds to virtually zero". Imagine if an MP had been caught distributing such a list.

There are two dangers than come with this inconsistent "you're a politician so what you've done must be wrong even if it's better than how I behave" mindset. One is that it makes politicians blank out the media and claim what they can anyway – because if you're going to be criticised regardless, why bother listening to the critics?

The second is that it puts good people off politics. Why put yourself and your family up for such treatment when there are so many other fulfilling careers? There was no need for The Telegraph to run a snatched doorstep photo of David Laws's partner – but it is standard fare for political coverage across the media.

How many talented people will have looked at the story thinking, "Why risk putting my partner through that?" In the end, we all lose if such people are put off – because the complexities and opportunities of government are so great that we need the very best in Parliament.

“Don’t forget to claim expenses”

“Become a butterfly and flit between homes”

“Exploit personal allowances and minimise rates” and more.

The advice urges people to make use of “a range of little-known tax breaks” and quotes a tax advisor saying, “It is possible to reduce a tax bill of a few hundred thousand pounds to virtually zero”.

Oh wait. Hang on. That’s a list of advice that was written for the public and not just MPs, wasn’t it? And the list was written by the Daily Telegraph. Ooops.

Hat-tip: Allan Knox

• In 1999 – 2006 he and his wife owned one property (in London)
• In 2005 he became an MP
• In 2006 he bought a house in his constituency. That house has been designated his main home for Parliamentary expense purposes.
• In 2007 they sold their property in London and bought another one. They haven’t paid capital gains tax on the sale.

Capital Gains Tax rules says that you don’t have to pay Capital Gains Tax when you sell  your main home. If that was all they said then they’d be an issue because it’d look like at the point of sale he was saying one home was his main home for tax purposes and another was his main home for expense purposes. And on those grounds Lib Dems should criticise him, because that’s what many of us have criticised other MPs for doing.

But – and it’s a whopping big but – it’s not actually the truth.

That’s because, as Mike Smithson has pointed out, Capital Gains Tax rules say that if the property was your main home up to three years before you sold it, you don’t pay the tax. Three years before 2007 takes us to 2004. In 2004 there was just the one property owned and he wasn’t an MP.

So, as Mike puts it Danny Alexander “essentially is being accused of not paying a tax when no tax was due”.

And so my confusion. Front page splash story that someone doesn’t pay tax which the taxman says they don’t have to pay is not exactly a scandal. Especially when there’s not being any careful making of arrangements to minimise tax such as switching round which home is defined as which or using front companies or using overseas arrangements of anything like that. Even The Telegraph says, “There is no suggestion that Mr Alexander has broken any tax laws”.

The Telegraph does try to dress this story up as being about a “loophole” being used. But it’s a bit like attacking someone for not paying income tax on all their income because they’ve used the shocking loophole of claiming their personal allowance. I mean you could have decided to ignore the tax rules, skip over a significant part of how the system operates and just paid up some extra income tax couldn’t you?

Danny Alexander’s case is simple, clear and straightforward arrangement: you own a home, you sell it, the taxman says “no capital gains tax to pay” and so you don’t pay any.

(If you feel so moved, insert comments about the tax affairs of the owners of the Telegraph here; if such a straightforward situation as Danny Alexander’s is deemed worthy of criticism, what does that mean about the tax arrangements of the Barclay brothers?).

Of course, the Telegraph has a bit of form on page 1 splashes that turn out to be very different. During the election they ran a big page 1 story about Nick Clegg’s financial affairs. As I blogged then:

Benedict Brogan has taken to the Telegraph blog to defend today’s coverage and comes up with this:

“The likelihood must be that it is evidence of disorganisation, nothing more, but don’t know that yet.”

Even if you agree with the first part of the sentence, that’s a remarkably weak excuse for a huge front page splash of a story. Oh we don’t know. And there’s most likely nothing wrong. So we’ll just splash it all over page one.

Ah bless.

Decent Telegraph journalists (and there are many) will be wondering about why they’ve twice ended up with their paper running big front page stories which fit a particular political agenda and which don’t stand up to scrutiny. And nervous Telegraph journalists should worry about the drip drip damage to their paper’s reputation. All newspapers face a tough future working out how to get the public to pay for their output in some form or other; repeatedly damaging people’s trust in your ability to get stories right is no way to secure your future.

Asked the impact on their voting intention of those papers opposing Nick Clegg becoming Prime Minister, 15% said it made them more likely to vote Liberal Democrat and only 4% said it made them less likely, making for a net +11% saying they are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat.

Of the rest, 19% would vote Liberal Democrat regardless, 35% would not vote Liberal Democrat anyway and 27% said it wouldn’t alter their vote but they weren’t yet sure which way to vote.

The question doesn’t capture the potential agenda setting power of these three newspapers, but on the other hand the question was (deliberately) asked in a low key way, with no reference for example to the tax or residence status of newspaper proprietors such as Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay brothers. Moreover, so far part of the impact of the three titles running strident anti-Liberal Democrat stories has been to generate coverage by TV broadcasters about whether or not a smear operation is taking place.

Given that the public says it trusts TV much more than newspapers this, combined with our poll finding, illustrates the risk the three newspaper titles are running with their reputation, especially given the publicity given to the explicit comments by The Sun’s political editor that he sees it as his job to help get Cameron elected.

Journalism overall is a deeply distrusted profession in the UK and it’s a rare business situation where reducing levels of trust doesn’t end up damaging commercial prospects. Therefore not only may a backlash to their coverage drown out their attempts to influence the election result, but a hostile public reaction makes the commercial future look tougher  for all three titles who – along with other newspapers – are trying to find ways to persuade people to pay them for news.

I asked George Pascoe-Watson, former political editor at The Sun, about this trust issue at an event a couple of weeks ago and he rather dismissively said it was “fashionable” for people to say they don’t trust journalists. Even if you agree with that (and I think he misses the more substantial changes at work), fashion is what make people spend or stop spending money all the time.

The end result may be that the newspapers fail to damage Nick Clegg’s reputation but end up damaging their own – winning votes for the Liberal Democrats but losing customers for themselves. That’s at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes, but it shows how much is at stake not just for political parties but also for newspapers.

The poll was carried out 23-26 April online by Vision Critical (Angus Reid), a member of the British Polling Council. 1,810 British adults were surveyed and the data was weighted by age, gender, social class, region, newspaper readership and past vote. The full question was, “The newspapers in this country tend to take a position and support different parties at election time. It has been suggested that the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph do not want Nick Clegg to be Prime Minister. If those newspapers were to take this stance would that make you more or less likely to vote Liberal Democrat?”. Data table here (Excel file).

There's been another example of this in the last few days over on the Daily Telegraph.

The brief summary: Cristina Odone writes piece attacking Lib Dem MP Evan Harris; numerous people post comments disagreeing with her. Cristina Odone then writes follow up piece deprecating all the criticisms and suggesting they were from a 'rapid reaction force'; numerous people again post comments disagreeing with her. There is also then a spin off on Twitter where, thanks to Odone's use of the phrase "spooky posse" to describe commenters disagree with her, people start tweeting how proud they are to be members of the #spookyposse.

It's noteworthy that the comments to her first piece weren't just whistling in the wind; they had enough of an impact to flush out a second piece. Moreover, they are part of a wider erosion of trust in newspapers; the more people see others point out the flaws and mistakes in newspapers, the less trust they have in them. As I've said often before, that lack of trust in newspapers is part of the problem they face: it's not just that people can get news from elsewhere; if they don't trust your source of news, what are the odds of persuading people it's worthy paying for?

Courtesy of social media, there is increasingly a different pattern: grumble online, see other people also grumbling online, grumble some more and hey presto - the complaints reach a much wider audience as online word of mouth spreads the word.

There is a classic example of this old versus new media conflict at work today. Following his surge in the opinion polls, Nick Clegg on the morning of the second TV debate faced a barrage of attacks from a number of British newspapers, including The Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph. Probably weirdest amongst these attacks are those over a newspaper article Nick Clegg wrote and had publised in a national newspaper eight years ago.

So outrageous was this article that, er..., it took eight years for the Telegraph and Mail to get round to reporting it.

One reaction to this has been a burst of spurious other 'shock revelations' posted to Twitter but people angered by the newspaper industry's behaviour - with the hashtag for these messages #nickcleggsfault making it into the Twitter worldwide trending topics list. (See the Metro's report for a selection of the best and this post for the meme's origin.)

As previous incidents such as the Jan Moir controversy have shown, a sudden upsurge of popular opinion via social media can at times be too much for the traditional media establishment to ignore.

The big danger for several newspapers this time round is that they are already rated the second-least trusted profession in the UK in MORI's annual trust surveys (only just beating politicians) and they are facing steady falls in the number of people willing to buy their content. Being the brunt of such public anger and ridicule may firm up support and sales from their core audience - or may further damage their reputation and feed further declines in sales.

I’m a bit confused by your article about hung Parliaments in the Telegraph, where you wrote:

The last time a British election failed to produce a decisive result, in February, 1974, the FTSE All Share Index – a broad measure of the stock market – fell nearly 15pc in a month and ended the year more than 50pc below where it began.

The piece even has a graph starting in January 1974 and going through to late 1974.

Why does this leave me confused? Well, I’m sure on most financial matters you know far more than me. But even I know that British share prices had been steadily dropping since early 1972.

Although your graph starts in February 1974, if it had been extended back to early 1972 it would have seem a long-term, consistent fall in British share prices before any hung Parliament.

Don’t you think starting the graph just in February 1974 therefore makes it a bit misleading? And to understand what happened in 1974 wouldn’t it have been better to give the context, i.e. that share prices were already steadily falling?

Yours,

Mark

UPDATE: SmallCasserole has produced this excellent graph illustrating the point:

The likelihood must be that it is evidence of disorganisation, nothing more, but don’t know that yet.

Even if you agree with the first part of the sentence, that's a remarkably weak excuse for a huge front page splash of a story. Oh we don't know. And there's most likely nothing wrong. So we'll just splash it all over page one.

Ah bless.