David Hencke, the Guardian's longtime Westminster correspondent, died on 27 June 2026 at the age of 79, the Guardian reported. His name belongs to one of British democracy's most damaging modern scandals — and the story that forced the country to confront it.

In October 1994, Hencke broke what became known as the cash-for-questions affair. The Guardian published his investigation revealing that Members of Parliament were using parliamentary questions — the formal mechanism for legislators to hold government to account — as a service they could sell. MPs were accepting payment from corporations and lobbyists to table questions that benefited these private interests. It was, at its core, a breach of trust: representatives paid by taxpayers were instead working for whoever could afford their fee.

The revelation hit a Conservative government already struggling with multiple sleaze allegations, but the impact extended far beyond the week's headlines. Within years, Parliament established the Committee on Standards in Public Life — known as the Nolan Committee — to set clear ethical rules. Those seven principles of public conduct, laid out in 1995, still form the official ethical framework for British officeholders today.

How the scheme worked was straightforward. Parliament's rules technically prohibited MPs from acting as paid advocates, yet enforcement was lax. Questions get tabled constantly, and most go unnoticed. A lobbyist could pay an MP to insert a specific question into the order paper, giving their client privileged, largely invisible access to Parliament. Hencke's reporting made that gap between the rules and how they were actually enforced impossible to ignore.

Publishing a story like this carried real stakes. For a Westminster correspondent, access to MPs and their staff is essential currency. Hencke was accusing sitting legislators of misconduct — a move that risked his professional relationships and his sources. The Guardian itself faced litigation. Hencke faced hostility from Parliament. Neither the newspaper nor the journalist backed down. The libel cases that followed, particularly those brought by the implicated MP Neil Hamilton and involving businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, became textbook examples in British media law of how press freedom, parliamentary privilege, and defamation law collide.

The wider significance of Hencke's career is about how investigative journalism into politics changed in Britain. When he started, accountability reporting on parliamentary conduct was episodic — something individual reporters might pursue, not an established specialism. By the time he retired, it was recognized and staffed as a core function in major newsrooms. His decades covering Westminster required equal mastery of parliamentary procedure, the personalities involved, and the slow accumulation of institutional detail — the kind of knowledge that makes a buried story legible to outsiders. That credibility gave him sources: civil servants and backbench MPs were more likely to approach a correspondent with a proven track record of handling sensitive material carefully.

The structural weaknesses Hencke exposed have not vanished. The porousness of parliamentary procedure to private interest, the gaps in oversight — these remain live questions. Subsequent governments have tightened the rules, investigated violations, and periodically revisited the question of how to prevent such conflicts of interest. The machinery exists partly because of a story filed three decades ago. That institutional legacy — the Nolan principles, the Committee on Standards, the expectation of transparency — is Hencke's most durable contribution to how British democracy operates today.