Heather Brooke: Journalism's Erin Brockovich

England is in the throes of a full-fledged constitutional crisis — a very enjoyable and long-overdue spectacle. The woman at the heart of it all is a London-based, American-born and -educated freelance journalist named Heather Brooke.

I frequently flog the media in this space, but I've been filled with pride over the recent accomplishments of Ms. Brooke, and you should be too.

Fearless and principled, Heather Brooke has been pivotal in bringing down an as-yet-unknown number of corrupt politicians. Some members of Britain's Parliament have already been sacked, others will follow, and even the ministers in Gordon Brown's cabinet (including the boss himself) have every reason to fear for their political future. The execrable Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, for one, is rumored to be toast — in small part due to her husband, whom she employs as her taxpayer-funded personal assistant. He was found to have bought pay-per-view movies, including pornographic ones, for which the couple then billed the government. (That's the least of it though; read on.)

Brooke is an expert at using Freedom-of-Information techniques she learned while being schooled and employed in Washington State. The U.K. Guardian gave her her due late last week; the Seattle Post Intelligencer follows suit with a nice profile today.

Her tale is the stuff of movies. All the Prime Minister's Women might not be such a great title (unless it refers to the sort of flick that Jacqui Smith's hubby would probably enjoy), but you know what I mean.

The scandal that Heather Brooke helped uncover with years of persistent digging, and despite threats and bullying from parliamentarians and their now-disgraced Speaker, is both outrageous and delicious. It involves politicians padding their expense accounts in various creative ways, often to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds per person per year.

Where to start? The London Times has a lineup of the 10 most jawdropping personal purchases that MPs expensed to taxpayers. The list includes a glitter toilet seat, a sack of horse manure, and the cleaning of a moat — an honest-to-God fucking moat! — on the country estate of one of the parliamentarians.

Such expenses are trifling but telling; they lay bare the uninhibited arrogance and sense of entitlement displayed by scores of once-high-flying British politicians.

The pols made some real money, however, with a practice now known as flipping (in the U.K., the word, as it relates to real estate, has acquired a meaning different from the U.S. definition.) By frequently changing the "primary residence" designation of their two or three homes (Sarah Palin-style, you might say), the MPs were able to bilk taxpayers for, essentially, phantom housing expenses. Jacqui Smith is among the bumptious overlords guilty of such fraudulence: she has been staying at her sister's house a few nights a week so as to be able to claim her family home as a write-off.

There are worse examples, however. Some enterprising parliamentarians, who owned their homes free and clear, set up a trust to which they transferred the property; then they rented it from the trust and billed the government for the rent.

Now it's all come crashing down. The scandal is the talk of the town everywhere in Britain. For the first time in more than 300 years, the Speaker of the House was forced out (he'd normally receive automatic peerage — that is, he'd be "elevated" to the House of Lords — but given the popular anger, that's an unlikely outcome). The normally staid Guardian senses there is "revolution in the air," and welcomes it. The paper calls for "a radical shakeup of our constitution," which presumably would start with something slightly more current and relevant than the 800-year-old Magna Carta.

Amazingly, the U.K. has never actually had a written constitution; the country has relied instead on a combination of hodge-podge laws and settled jusrisprudence (rather a lot of it keeping real power and oversight out of the hands of the populace). Writes the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland:

[Tony] Blair promised Labour would be "servants of the people." But now we know they never truly saw themselves that way. If they did, they would have had to undertake the revolutionary move our ancestors shied away from more than 300 years ago — and which has eluded us ever since. It is the shift from our current system — which rests on the belief that the crown-in-parliament is sovereign — to the simpler notion that it is the people who are sovereign in their own land.

Plenty of other nations have made that move, most famously the US, whose founding document asserts that power starts with "We the people". But we never did. Instead, in Britain, power still belongs at the top — with the crown and the palace of Westminster — unless our rulers deign to "devolve" some of it outward. That's why MPs could claim hundreds of thousands of pounds of our money: on some gut level, they believed it belonged to them.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

Heather Brooke has filed 600 Freedom on Information requests over the past four years, and thankfully it doesn't look like she's anywhere close to done. There's no telling where her sleuthing will take her. But I hope she or some tenacious colleagues will eventually probe into the questionable expenses that the British royal family sees fit to charge to taxpayers, and into the gaping conflicts of interest that have followed the Windsors for generations, only to be swept under the rug time after tiresome time.

Then Brooke and her fellow muckrakers could perhaps move on to laying bare the equally blood-boiling entitlement culture that is the European Parliament.

I doubt they'll run out of worthy targets anytime soon. I send them my very best, and my gratitude.

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P.S.: I should clarify that Heather Brooke ultimately did not break the story. The Daily Telegraph did, after it bought a terabyte's worth of government expense-sheet data from a whistleblower. However, Brooke was the journalist who placed the issue on the front burner by suing the government over its refusal to release the expense reports. Last year, the British High Court sided with her in the high-profile case, and the controversial information was scheduled to be officially released next month. The Telegraph's revelations stole some of Brooke's thunder, but they don't diminish her fine feats of journalism for a second.

P.P.S.: Over the past 14 or 15 months, Nobody's Business has been following the developments from a distance (see here, here, and here). As most bloggers do, I've piggy-backed on solid in-the-field reporting by newshounds who keep pushing and prodding, often for measly pay. I don't acknowledge this nearly enough, and gladly make amends here. They really do deserve our collective appreciation. A special shout-out goes to the journalists who belong to the excellent Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a U.S. group that, among other things, has traveled to England repeatedly to run workshops for local journalists interested in filing Freedom-of-Information requests (the U.K. law has only been in effect since 2005).

Comments

[Marty]

I want to marry her. Outside of my daughter and girlfriend and Tatiana von Tauber, she's the coolest chic I've heard about in ages.

Thanks Rogier!

[Phil Nelson]

What a badass.

[Erik Sherman]

Sounds like UK citizens should set up a donation account and send money to her. Think that a 10 percent finder's fee on all that untoward expense might be reasonable?

[Jeff Wiebe]

I'd very likely buy subscription(s) to newspapers that did THIS kind of publishing and avoided Entertainment Tonight fluff.

[hermesten]

I'll really be impressed when the Brits start dragging these criminals from their fancy houses and mansions and hanging them from the lamp posts. Maybe that will help kick start a revolution over here (note, figurative hyperbole alert: I am not advocating, and do not advocate, violence or murder).

[Hittman]

If you're going to call someone a hero, you should pick someone better than Brockovich.

http://tinyurl.com/l7ccjd

[Josef]

FYI: Heather's been going after the Royals for a while now - go to this Aussie report and search for Heather's name for starters. Also this Guardian op-ed will whet your appetite.

Oh and Heather's the great tough guy America's got NOT in an armed forces uniform. She's my he-ro!

[Josef]

Oh the Aussie report is http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2947518.htm

The Guaridan op-ed is http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/may/24/royal-appetite-secrecy-only-invite-scandal