Sir Thomas Legg, retired civil servant who investigated the MPs’ expenses scandal – obituary

Sir Thomas Legg,  who has died aged 88, enjoyed a distinguished Civil Service career in the Lord Chancellor’s Department. But he came into his own in retirement, conducting inquiries into the “Arms to Africa” affair involving arms trafficking to Sierra Leone, and – explosively – into the abuses of MPs’ expenses exposed in 2009 by The Daily Telegraph.

A stickler for financial prudence rated by one colleague “as dry a biscuit as you’ll meet”, Legg blamed individual MPs and the Commons’ Fees Office for a system he concluded was “deeply flawed”. 

Rejecting the claims of many that they had merely acted within the rules, he determined that 390 present and former MPs had overstepped the mark and ordered them to repay £1.3 million between them. The prime minister, Gordon Brown, was told to return more than £12,400, and the Labour MP Barbara Follett, wife of the millionaire novelist Ken Follett, £42,458.

Despite the public outrage that had greeted the revelations and Legg’s mandate to put matters straight, many MPs reacted with a resentment and personal hostility that deeply affected him. An acrimonious divorce from his second wife, and the death in 2013 of his brother, to whom he was close, intensified the strain.

Thomas Stuart Legg was born on August 13 1935 to Stuart Legg, a documentary filmmaker, and the former Margaret Amos. He was educated in wartime at Horace Mann-Lincoln School, New York, then at liberal Frensham Heights in Surrey. 

After National Service as a second lieutenant with the Royal Marine Commandos, he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1955, reading history, then law. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1960, becoming a Bencher in 1984.

In 1962 Legg joined the Lord Chancellor’s Department, one of only 12 lawyers then on its staff. Until the Labour reformer Gerald Gardiner took the Woolsack in 1964 its workings were archaic, several key offices lacking a telephone. From 1965 to 1968 Legg served as Gardiner’s private secretary.

Legg became administrator of the South-Eastern Circuit in 1977, and deputy clerk to the Crown in Chancery in 1986. Three years later he was appointed Permanent Secretary, Clerk to the Crown in Chancery (whose functions included swearing in a new Lord Chief Justice) and Secretary of Commissions. He was thus responsible for the administration of the English legal system, and its co-ordination with EC law.

For all but Legg’s final year in post the Lord Chancellor was Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a reforming but careful Tory, and the two worked well together. Legg was seldom visible to the public, an exception being in 1994 when he warned the Public Accounts Committee that procedures for free advice under Legal Aid were “inherently vulnerable” to fraud by solicitors.

Radical change was expected with the arrival in 1997 of Labour’s Lord Irvine of Lairg, who had been Tony Blair’s head of chambers, and Legg stepped down the following year. But Irvine, who had grown wealthy at the Bar, was less concerned with reforming the legal system than with out-arguing colleagues in Cabinet and expensively refurbishing his suite in the Palace of Westminster.

Soon after Legg’s retirement, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler asked him to conduct an inquiry with Sir Robin Ibbs  into allegations that the British company Sandline International had tried to sell arms to the exiled government of Sierra Leone, in breach of a United Nations embargo, with government connivance. They cleared ministers and officials of any underhand conspiracy with Sandline, but exposed embarrassing lapses of communication within the Foreign Office.

Legg took up several visiting fellowships, became a consultant to the solicitors Clifford Chance, chaired Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and the London Library and was a member of the Audit Commission. From 2000 he served on the audit  committee of the House of Commons; he investigated the heavy overspend on Portcullis House, the new parliamentary building opposite Big Ben, but his report was not published.

When the expenses scandal broke, forcing the resignation of the Speaker Michael Martin, who had circled the wagons as its full extent became evident, the audit committee appointed Legg to head an inquiry into the extent to which “additional costs allowances” covering second homes had been misclaimed over the previous five years.

There were pressures on him to keep the investigation narrow and avoid upsetting the mighty. But Legg quietly carved out a wider remit paving the way for excessive payments to be clawed back, whether or not they fell within rules that had become spectacularly lax.

His report, published in February 2010, made painful reading. Of £55.5 million paid out in second-home expenses, £1.3 million had been wrongly claimed by 52 per cent of members. In particular, Legg highlighted the practice of MPs buying and renting homes from relatives and friends, which he said “breached propriety”.

He equally blamed the Fees Office, saying the relationship between its officials and MPs had been “symbiotic”. The system was “flawed” and the rules “vague”; decisions taken “lacked legitimacy” and many were “mistaken”.

After Mrs Follett, those told to repay the most were the Conservative MPs Bernard Jenkin (North Essex, £36,250), Andrew MacKay (Bracknell) and his wife Julie Kirkbride (Bromsgrove) – more than £60,000 between them – and the former Cabinet minister John Gummer (Suffolk Coastal, £29,398).

Legg’s rigour upset even some MPs he had found to be on the side of the angels; Ann Widdecombe described his report as “lazy, incompetent and illogical”. Furthermore, nearly half the MPs who lodged appeals with Sir Paul Kennedy, a former judge, found him sympathetic; Kennedy stated that a number of Legg’s determinations lacked “internal coherence”, and cancelled several sizeable clawbacks. By 2013, the total annual bill for MPs’ expenses would be greater than for the years covered by the scandal, leaving Legg feeling traduced. 

Legg was appointed CB in 1985, made a QC in 1990, and knighted in 1993.

He married first, in 1961, Patricia Dowie; they had two daughters. The marriage was dissolved and in 1985 he married, secondly, Dr Marie-Louise Jennings. They were divorced in 2009  and the same year he married, thirdly, Margaret Wakelin; she died in 2013.

Sir Thomas Legg, born August 13 1935, died October 8 2023