Background and career
Heather Rose Brooke (born 1970) is a British-American journalist and freedom of information campaigner. Resident since the 1990s in the UK, she helped to expose the 2009 expenses scandal, which culminated in the resignation of Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin, dozens of MPs standing down in the 2010 general election and multiple MPs being jailed. Brooke was a professor of journalism at City University London's Department of Journalism and an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School in New York. She is the author of Your Right to Know (2006), The Silent State (2010), and The Revolution Will Be Digitised (2011), as well as a regularly updated Substack.
Brooke was born in Pennsylvania in the United States to parents originally from Liverpool, England, and has dual United States/United Kingdom citizenship. She grew up in Seattle, Washington, where her mother worked for Boeing and graduated from Federal Way High School. According to The Scotsman, she briefly moved to England as a teenager, but returned to the United States when she was 15. She attended the University of Washington Department of Communication, where she graduated in 1992 with a double major degree in journalism and political science. While there, she wrote for the student newspaper, The Daily, covering news stories and acting as the paper's sex columnist, writing with what she called a "feminist" slant.
An internship with The Spokesman-Review in Olympia, Washington to cover the state legislature gave her an early exposure to using public records requests to investigate the expenses of politicians, although she found little beyond taking advantage of frequent flyer miles. After graduation, she worked for a year at the Spokesman-Review, but it lacked the funds to keep her on longer. She then became a crime reporter for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, where she reported on murder cases and uncovered flaws in South Carolina's forensic crime lab. Describing herself as "burnt out" from covering over 300 murders, Brooke took a break from journalism. When her mother died in a car accident in 1996, and her father moved back to England, she no longer had family in America and decided to relocate to the United Kingdom. She enrolled for a master's in English literature at the University of Warwick, then moved to East London with her husband, where she took a job with the BBC as a copywriter. Boyd Tonkin wrote in 2010 that when she arrived in the UK she was immediately introduced to the "British disease": "the overweening haughtiness of bureaucratic jobsworths, and the deference of citizens." She became a neighbourhood activist, describing local public officials as having a surprisingly hostile attitude compared to local governments in the United States.
With the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Brooke began work on a book explaining how to use the law, which was not scheduled to come into effect for another five years. Originally titled Your Right to Know: How to Use the Freedom of Information Act and Other Access Laws, the book was reissued in October 2004 as Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to Freedom of Information, with a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. In October 2006 it was revised and published in paperback and hardcover editions that included a foreword by satirist Ian Hislop.
In early 2007, Brooke won a landmark legal case that led the BBC to disclose the minutes of its Board of Governors' meeting of 28 January 2004. At that meeting, the governors had decided to dismiss director general Greg Dyke and issue an apology to the government in response to the Hutton Inquiry. Brooke, along with journalists from The Guardian, had requested the minutes shortly after the Freedom of Information Act came into force, but the BBC resisted disclosure for nearly two years. In December 2006, the case came before the Information Tribunal, which the following month ruled that the BBC should disclose the minutes.
In October 2004, Brooke started to request details of MPs' expenses, via the House of Commons Freedom of Information Officer, Bob Castle. However, the information was in a bulk format, and could not be broken down to individual MPs. In January 2005, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 came into force, allowing members of the public to request disclosure of information from public bodies. She started out requesting all 646 MPs' expenses, but the Commons claimed that would be too costly. She then asked for request for travel information (refused); then for the names and salaries of MPs' staff, blocked personally by the Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin. She then asked for information on second homes for the details for all MPs, but this was also refused. In 2006, Brooke reduced her request to 10 MPs—the leaders of the parties and a few ministers. After again being refused, in July 2006 she made an appeal to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Her request was considered for a year, together with two other similar requests on MPs' expenses which had been appealed to the Commissioner in 2005, from Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas of The Sunday Times. The Information Commissioner ordered the release of some information on 15 June 2007. House of Commons authorities objected to this order in June 2007 and MPs had, in May 2007, voted in favour of the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill which sought to exempt MPs from the 2000 act. The amendment bill was ultimately withdrawn prior to second reading in the House of Lords because peers were unwilling to sponsor the bill. In February 2008, after referral to an Information Tribunal, it was ruled that Commons authorities had to release information on 14 MPs. The Speaker appealed against the decision on behalf of the House of Commons, challenging the requests for publication of expenses for 11 serving MPs: Gordon Brown, David Cameron, John Prescott, Menzies Campbell, Margaret Beckett, George Osborne, William Hague, Mark Oaten, George Galloway, Barbara Follett and Ann Keen; and three former MPs: Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and John Wilkinson. The appeal was heard at the High Court of Justice, which ruled on 16 May 2008 in favour of releasing the information:
