Torsten Bell, the right wing press and a £900 desk that wasn't

“Hard knock life! Minister behind Labour’s mansion tax spends £900 of YOUR cash on a desk,” ran a headline in the Daily Mail this week, with the paper claiming the parliamentary secretary for the Treasury Torsten Bell had splashed out on the swanky furniture on expenses.

“A minister brought in to help write the cash-saving Budget spent £900 of public money on a desk, it can be revealed,” wrote the paper’s policy editor, Martin Beckford. “Documents obtained by the Daily Mail show Torsten Bell also charged taxpayers £600 for three chairs for his office and claimed more than £200 on his parliamentary expenses for professional help to assemble the furniture.”

Beckford also spoke to William Yarwood of opaque Tufton Street pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance, who said: “If Torsten Bell can’t manage expenses responsibly, how can taxpayers trust him to manage the nation’s finances?”.

News of Bell’s fancy furniture was also reported faithfully by the Daily Telegraph and Times, following the Mail’s lead. All with just one problem: it was bollocks. Bell posted on social media shortly after the stories appeared that it was “totally untrue garbage” and “smear dressed up as journalism”. “Some facts: There is no ‘£900 desk’. My constituency office has Ikea desks/chairs. We significantly underspent the new MPs’ allowance to set up an office.”

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All three titles have now very quietly deleted the articles entirely, with social posts having vanished and links dead. At least Beckford is still standing by his complete non-story, leaving a link to it at the top of his X account (“Also EXC. Torsten Bell, who is helping write the Budget, claimed on his expenses for a £900 desk and for help putting his flatpack furniture together”) despite the fact that anyone clicking on it is now diverted to the Mail’s homepage.

Meanwhile, other writers on the right wing papers must be wishing having something removed from their sites is so easy. A column by the Times’s Janice Turner from back in May has been doing the rounds on social media for ageing like milk. Under the headline ‘Voters are sick of lectures from the lanyard class’, Turner told readers how “Reform is surging because working-class people resent the professional cadre who dismiss them as stupid and racist”.

And who might she have used as the poster girl for the new Reform? “The problem for Reform’s opponents is that its expanding base makes it harder to brand every supporter a stupid racist,” wrote Turner.

“The new MP Sarah Pochin is its greatest asset, defying the idea of Reform as a boys’ club while reflecting surging support among Gen X women. She is a ‘normie’ not a blowhard. She had a business career, was a magistrate and Tory councillor.” Perhaps Turner could have this quietly taken down now, too?