When the MPs’ expenses scandal exploded in 2009, my friend Andrew McDonald, who has died aged 59 after a long illness, was charged with clearing up the mess. As the first chief executive of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), he played a leading role in creating and implementing a new set of rules, removing parliament’s self-policing role and introducing greater transparency. Born in Barking, Essex, to Eileen (nee Sharkey), a former nurse, and Albert McDonald, a civil servant, Andrew was the youngest of five children. Growing up in Hornchurch, he attended Emerson Park school and, to his parents’ great pride, won a place at St John’s College at Oxford University to read modern history. After studying for a PhD at Bristol University, in 1986 he followed his father into the Public Record Office (PRO), where he spent the first half of his distinguished 28-year career in the civil service. Andrew moved to Whitehall in 2000, serving as tribunals reform director and acting chief executive of the Public Guardianship Office in the Lord Chancellor’s Department before being appointed as the first constitution director in the newly formed Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) in 2003. In this role he played a leading part in implementing freedom of information legislation across the government and was later, while chief executive of Government Skills, deployed as a senior adviser to Sir Hayden Phillips’ review of political party funding. Andrew took the Ipsa role in 2009 with a deep conviction that its task was to help restore the public’s confidence in the work of their parliamentary representatives so damaged by the expenses issue. This was not enough, however, to prevent often bitter attacks from MPs themselves, with one describing its regulations as a “bureaucratic morass of irrational rules” and another likening it to “a Stasi operation”. Pressure of a different kind was to have a more profound impact though. In 2007, Andrew was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and six years later was told he had incurable prostate cancer too, forcing his retirement from Ipsa and the civil service on medical grounds. It was a devastating blow to a dedicated public servant but served only to redouble Andrew’s determination to make a difference elsewhere. He took up charity work, serving on a number of boards including as chair of Scope between 2014 and 2019. He led a number of personal campaigns too. One, shaped by his own medical treatment, called for improvements in the way healthcare professionals communicate with their patients. With his health rapidly worsening, Andrew spent most of his last 12 months writing. His book on constitutional reform and national identity, Changing States, Changing Nations, was published earlier this year and, this summer, he completed two more – a personal story of his last years and a novel based on the life of a wartime pilot. An avid sports fan, Andrew was even able to spend a day watching cricket at Lord’s (he was a MCC member) and then see his beloved Spurs lose at Arsenal in the north London derby in the last weeks of his life. He was a devout Catholic, and never felt bitter about having to cope with two serious conditions. “I don’t feel angry about it,” he told the Observer in 2014 just before stepping down from Ipsa. “You have to deal with the cards you’ve been dealt.” In 1992 he married Louise London; they divorced in 2017 but remained close friends. He is survived by their daughter, Juliet, and by two sisters, Janet and Linda, and two brothers, Peter and Hugh.