Obituary: Former Essex Council leader Paul White dead at 84

One morning in September 2011, Lord Hanningfield was woken by a loud thumping. Disoriented, he thought for a moment he was back in prison. But he was in his bed at Pippins Place, his family farm in West Hanningfield. The noise was a police officer’s hand, pounding on his bedroom window.

The 72-year-old stumbled to his front door and found five police officers, who arrested him on suspicion of abusing his Essex County Council expenses.

Despair washed over him. He had only left prison five days earlier, after his conviction for fraudulently claiming House of Lords expenses. The police were already trying to lock him back up.

This would be Hanningfield’s life for almost a decade: a relentless cycle of fraud allegations, court dates and tabloid scandal – an ignominious end to a decorous career in public service.

“It’s a tragedy, what happened to Paul,” former Essex county councillor Tracey Chapman said this week, after his family announced his death, aged 84. “He was a lovely man and for his career to end up the way that it did was not fair.”

Born Paul White in 1940, he grew up on the farm and went to school in Chelmsford. In his early 20s he became chairman of the Young Farmers. In his early 30s he was elected to Essex County Council as a Conservative.

He became council chairman in 1989 and then leader in 1998 – a position he then held until 2010, save for nine months after a by-election tipped the balance of the council.  

“In the early days, certainly, he was an absolute visionary,” said former Conservative councillor Kay Twitchen. “Councils had plodded along in the same old way. He saw opportunities for doing things better and more efficiently. He was such a dynamic person.”

In 1998, he was granted a peerage and anointed Lord Hanningfield. He juggled his council and parliamentary roles for the next decade. Public service seemed to be his whole life. He never married – nor even dated, as far as anyone could tell – and never left the family farm. He seemed to live for two things: his job and his animals.

“I didn’t give my personal life any time at all,” he later lamented. “I was married to the job… I missed out on a lot of personal stuff.”

He became mired in scandal amid the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal. Hanningfield had claimed over £13,000 in overnight stay allowances for nights that he had actually gone home.

He insisted this was what he had been instructed to do by colleagues when he entered the Lords; that they told him it was an allowance scheme, not a reimbursement scheme, and rather than wasting time itemising his expenses, he could just claim overnight stays of equivalent value.

He offered to repay any claims Parliament deemed improper, but said he was told that because a political rival had already reported him to police, he wasn’t allowed. So while others got away with claiming for everything from pornography to major home improvements, Hanningfield found himself sitting in a voluntary police interview. He gladly handed over all his receipts, a trial would later hear, insisting he’d spent more than he’d ever claimed back.

“I have just put so much money into my public life,” he told the police. “I regret ever becoming a peer. I wish I had just stuck at the county council.”

But a Chelmsford jury convicted him of six counts of false accounting. In July 2011, he was sentenced to nine months in prison – but maintained he’d done nothing wrong, blaming the conviction on negative media coverage over the expenses scandal.

“They needed someone to be made an example of,” he said in 2012, adding that prison itself hadn’t been so bad: the people he met in there were nicer than people in the outside world.

Lord Hanningfield's life and career went into freefall after he was accused of abusing his House of Lords expenses - but he always insisted he had done nothing wrong and his prosecution was unfair (Image: Newsquest)

Just days after his release, Essex Police staged a dawn raid on his home. Amid the controversy over his Lords expenses, it had become public knowledge that around £300,000 had been charged to his council credit card over six years.

He insisted the card was held by staff and used to fund travel, conferences and other large expenses for groups of councillors and staff, not just himself. The expenses had been audited annually and signed off without question.

Police ultimately found no case to answer. Hanningfield sued Essex Police for wrongful arrest and won, testifying in court that he believed the council had called police purely as a PR exercise due to adverse press coverage. High Court judge Mr Justice Eady found police’s reasons for arresting him had been “fanciful”, ordering the force to pay his legal fees plus £3,500 damages – which Hanningfield pledged to a cancer charity, despite his own finances by now being in a perilous state.

Convinced he would be acquitted in the Lords expenses trial, he had hired private counsel, thinking he could reclaim the fees when he won. He was left with legal bills of almost £200,000.

The House of Lords demanded he repay £30,150.50 – more than twice what he had been convicted of wrongly claiming. Then the CPS brought a Proceeds of Crime Act case against him, resulting in an order to surrender another £37,150.50.

In total, he was ordered to repay five times what he was convicted of wrongly claiming. He had to remortgage his home.

Meanwhile, his only incomes were a state pension and a small farming pension. The man the tabloids dubbed “Lord Fraud”, out to leech as much as he could from the public purse, had never claimed his Essex Council pension, despite decades of service. Asked why, he said he’d been so busy working that he “never got around to” filling in the forms.

He began losing his eyesight and was diagnosed with high blood pressure and vertigo. His ordeal also left him on antidepressants. But his financial predicament left him little choice but to return to Parliament, despite his failing health. He repeatedly fell over and fainted during his commutes.

“I remember him not being well or very mobile, which made coming in very difficult for him,” said Adonis Pratsides, his parliamentary researcher at the time.

One fall caused a lasting shoulder injury, making it difficult to perform simple tasks like using a knife and fork. That was how he met Adonis, whose father was Hanningfield’s osteopath.

His return to the Lords would lead to yet more scandal.

In December 2013, the Daily Mirror revealed a reporter had followed Hanningfield on his commutes, timing how long he had stayed at the Lords. On 11 occasions, he had claimed the £300 attendance allowance after staying less than an hour.

Summoned to the Lords to explain himself, he claimed he dealt with 40 letters and emails a day, which he could easily do from home, but could not be paid unless he attended Parliament. He had to collect that allowance, he said, to pay his researcher.

He told peers he suffered bouts of deep depression. His career in public service had by now cost him “everything that I have ever earned”.

“I have been in public life for 50 years,” he testified. “People ring me up in the middle of the night and I do all sorts of things… I have talked to people who are suicidal and tried to help them. Perhaps I need some help now.”

Hanningfield received a suspension from Parliament, an order to repay £3,300 and a summons to Westminster Magistrates’ Court to answer a false accounting charge.

That, like the Essex Council case, went nowhere. A judge threw out the charge in summer 2016.

But Hanningfield later described himself as “traumatised”, saying in 2017: “I’m still taking anti-depressant tablets. I wake up in the morning, every day, dreading what might happen. Every morning, because it’s gone on for so long, it takes me a few minutes to realise I haven’t got to contact a solicitor or something.”

After the pandemic, friends said, he pretty much disappeared.

“I think life was a bit difficult for him; a bit lonely,” said Kay Twitchen. “He had a lot of friends, but he had a lot of critics as well.”

“He wasn’t taking calls or emails from any of us,” said Tracey Chapman. “I think he was just in shutdown. The press were after him, so he was always changing phone numbers.

“Paul was probably the best council leader in the country. He didn’t get everything right, but he saved the council untold millions by transforming the structure.

“For all his faults, he was the most impressive person I’ve ever met. I feel so lucky to have known him. What Paul added to Essex was far greater than anything that he took away from it.”