David Hencke, the Guardian's long-serving Westminster correspondent who exposed one of British parliamentary democracy's most corrosive modern scandals, died on 27 June 2026 at the age of 79, the Guardian reported.

Hencke's name is inseparable from the cash-for-questions affair. In October 1994, the Guardian published allegations that Members of Parliament were tabling parliamentary questions on behalf of private interests in exchange for payment — a story Hencke broke. The disclosure landed in a Conservative government already battered by sleaze allegations, and its aftershocks extended well beyond Westminster. It prompted the establishment of the Committee on Standards in Public Life — the Nolan Committee — whose seven principles of public life remain the foundational ethical framework for UK officeholders more than three decades on.

The mechanics of the scandal were deceptively simple. MPs, paid to represent constituents, were accepting fees to insert specific questions into the parliamentary order paper, giving lobbyists and corporate clients privileged — and largely invisible — access to the legislative process. The practice exploited a gap between formal prohibition and enforcement. Hencke's reporting made that gap visible.

For a Westminster correspondent, access is the operative currency, and pursuing a story that implicated sitting MPs carried professional risk alongside legal exposure. The Guardian faced litigation. Hencke faced hostile parliamentary opinion. Neither deterred publication. The legal confrontations that followed — particularly the libel proceedings brought by Neil Hamilton and the subsequent role of Mohamed Al-Fayed — became a case study in the interplay between press freedom, parliamentary privilege, and defamation law, one that still surfaces in media law curricula.

The broader significance of Hencke's career is that it coincided with, and in part shaped, the period in which investigative journalism about political conduct became a recognised and institutionally supported specialism in British newsrooms rather than an occasional disruption. His work at the Guardian spanned decades of Westminster reporting, a beat that demands equal fluency in procedure, personality, and the slow accumulation of institutional detail that makes a buried story legible.

The cash-for-questions investigation is the headline, but it was one point in a longer arc. Hencke's sustained coverage of Whitehall and Parliament gave the Guardian credibility on accountability journalism at a moment when that credibility translated directly into sourcing — civil servants and backbenchers who might otherwise stay silent were more likely to approach a correspondent with a track record of handling sensitive material carefully.

His death at 79 closes a chapter that future practitioners of political journalism will continue to study. The structural conditions he exposed — the porousness of parliamentary procedure to private interest, the inadequacy of self-regulation — have not been permanently resolved. They have been managed, periodically re-examined, and occasionally revisited by fresh scandal. The Nolan principles are still cited in conduct investigations; the Committee on Standards still sits. That institutional machinery exists, in part, because of a story filed in October 1994.