For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace

by Michael Gillard

  Soon after, more senior officers turned up at the flat. Page approached one of them.

  ‘Skip, there’s all this personal stuff I’ve found in her bedroom, love letters, pictures and half a sex shop. We should remove it so the family don’t see it.’

  ‘That’s not our job,’ said the senior officer. ‘Put it back and keep your mouth shut.’ The police did, however, take away the tape in the answering machine, the suicide note and the sealed letters Hills had so precisely left behind.

  As he recounted the story to Laura that night, the thing that puzzled them most was the coolness of the upper classes in the face of such personal tragedy.

  ‘It’s the way they’ve been brought up,’ suggested Laura sympathetically. ‘You know, not to express their emotions.’

  ‘No, love,’ replied Page. ‘They’re just odd. Had it been one of our kids who topped themselves, we wouldn’t be going out for fucking pizza!’

  The suicide of Snowdon’s lover eventually reached the front pages later that month as ‘friends’ of Hills opened up. Further details of her last day emerged during the short inquest, but nothing new came out about her affair with Snowdon. Nor were any of the letters read out.

  The pathologist had found acceptable levels of the tranquillizer Temazepam and alcohol in her body. However, he concluded it was the large quantity of paracetamol that killed Anne Hills. A verdict of suicide was recorded. ‘This was an intended act,’ said the coroner. ‘It’s quite likely this occurred on the spur of the moment. She wasn’t happy with her life at the time.’

  The Mirror had the best exclusive on the tragic affair: ‘CHIN UP!’ screamed the front page, followed by revelations that this was Snowdon’s last words on his lover’s answering machine. Only Page and his colleague knew that Hills had never lived long enough to hear them.3

  Chapter 4

  Gripper meets Purple One

  On the morning of 22 June 1998, Paul Page slung his 5 Series burgundy BMW around Trafalgar Square and through Admiralty Arch. Cruising down The Mall, the famous tree-lined approach road to Buckingham Palace, the 28-year-old felt relaxed about his move to Royalty Protection. Not every policeman went to work in a 775-room palace that was the seat of Britain’s constitutional monarchy.

  Page had convinced himself he wanted an easy life away from cracking heads on London’s back streets and dealing with ‘the dross’. Laura, pregnant with their second son, supported the move. He’d always promised her upward mobility and it didn’t get much better than telling friends her husband’s new job involved protecting the Queen.

  Colleagues on Royal Protection had assured Page he could supplement his £33,000 salary with overtime opportunities while, paradoxically, having more time to spend with his growing family. The extra money would also help realize their plans to buy a bigger house.

  Royalty Protection, which is sometimes referred to as SO14, has responsibility not just for the British Royal Family but also visiting diplomats and foreign royals. They also guard against ‘obsessives’ with a fixation on the Royal Family. Page was joining a 400-strong unit of largely men who are stationed at the main palaces in London, Windsor, Norfolk and Scotland.

  SO14 officers are not detectives but come from the uniformed branch of the Met. The unit is split in two: SO14 (1) armed protection officers that wear the traditional Met uniform and are stationed in and around the palaces; and SO14 (2) the armed personal protection officers (PPOs) who are assigned to a particular royal and get to wear the flash suits, Bermuda shorts and dinner jackets at home and abroad.

  Page was joining SO14, and would learn during his induction tour that the suit-wearing personal protection officers thought they were a cut above their uniformed colleagues. This didn’t overly bother him. As a self-defence fitness instructor he had the power to pass or fail a PPO. And without a fitness certificate, a PPO could guard nobody.

  However, it soon dawned on Page during the tour inside Buckingham Palace and through meeting officers guarding various corridors or standing outside a royal bedroom that the unit he had joined wasn’t exactly the vibrant mix of young coppers he was expecting. In place of the banter of a busy central London police station there was a stillness and reverence to the weight of history.

  ‘Within an hour I felt like I’d entered the set of Dad’s Army,’ he said. Only Page was in no mood to play Private Pike. Even the preferred choice of weapon betrayed an antiquated approach. The old guard favoured a revolver, whereas Page told the armourer to issue him with the Austrian-made 9 mm Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol.

  In the palace canteen there was no let-up on the serious mood. No one was larking about over a card game or gawping at a newspaper pin-up. Naturally, Page gravitated towards the younger officers and grumbled that the older ones were blanking him.

  His first posting was the Garden Gate – a vital part of any Royal Protection officer’s duty, he was told. It’s the grand entrance to the Queen’s personal quarters, which she is often captured on television approaching after driving through the front gates of Buckingham Palace, or BP, as he would now call it.

  Colonnade lights on the Garden Gate stay on after Her Majesty leaves the palace and until she returns. Just behind the gate is 19 Post where Page would be sitting for the next few weeks.

  All the royals have a call sign by which they are identified within SO14. The Queen is Purple One. ‘When the Queen is coming out or into the palace you will be notified through the intercom by her call sign “Purple One”. You must have the wooden gates open so she can be driven through without stopping. ‘Do not fuck it up because all hell will break loose!’ Page was warned.

  Fuck what up? He thought. It’s just a gate. She approaches in her car, the barrier is lifted and she is driven through. Simple. He was starting to wonder whether moving from cracking heads to opening gates was such a bright career move after all.

  One week later, and Page fucked up his first encounter with the Queen. He was doodling, something he often did when bored or musing on a problem. Suddenly, through the intercom her PPO announced: ‘One, nine, Garden Gate!’

  Page scrambled to open the wooden gates. According to the protocol, the SO14 officer should have both gates open and bolted down by the time Purple One’s car approaches and be saluting as she is driven past. Unfortunately, Paul had mistimed Her Majesty’s arrival and the royal limo was now at the gate with the Queen and Prince Philip sitting in the back, waiting. Purples One and Two were not amused. The Queen, he recalled, was shaking her head, while Philip stared him out. Even his salute looked comical, he felt.

  When the limo eventually passed through the Garden Gate and came to a halt a little down the way near the royal quarters, the Queen’s protection officer rushed out of the car towards Page. ‘What have you done? The Queen doesn’t wait! Don’t you know that?’ he shouted.

  Page wanted to chin the senior officer, but managed to rein himself in. The incident went up the chain of command and Page got another lecture that her Purpleness never waits.

  ‘It’s full of weirdos, love,’ Page complained to his heavily pregnant wife over dinner that night. ‘We were given these maps of the palace to study the quickest route out if there is an alarm. But they wanted me to do it on me own time. Fuck that! I’d rather watch telly in the canteen.’

  Laura laughed as her husband got into his stride over the day’s events. Page found the change in policing culture jarring. It says a lot that it bothered him that older, some might say more mature, officers actually seemed to take the whole job quite seriously. It may not be frontline policing but there had been a number of spectacular security breaches, in particular at Buckingham Palace.

  As early as the 1830s, a boy called Cotton was discovered in the palace gardens and claimed he had lived there for a year. Around the same era another boy repeatedly entered the palace and was finally dispatched to Broadmoor, a secure unit for the criminally insane.

  Over 140 years later, German tourists pitched a tent to sleep overnight in the
palace gardens thinking it was Hyde Park. And in June 1981, a 17-year-old boy fired six blanks at the Queen during the Trooping the Colour ceremony and shortly before the wedding of Prince Charles to Diana Spencer. The following year, in June 1982, unemployed Michael Fagan penetrated the Queen’s quarters while she was asleep. Heads rolled and security was tightened.

  £ £ £

  Within months of his arrival, a split along age lines was developing among officers at Buckingham Palace. Page was establishing himself with a small group of younger officers. They had given each other nicknames, which reflected the generation gap and attitude to the job in hand.

  Page was no longer nicknamed Punchy but ‘Gripper’ because he had a flat nose from too many battles in the ring; although one colleague thought wrongly it was because he had ‘gripped the rail’ (stood trial) for some unknown offence before joining the police. Another officer on Page’s relief was called ‘Monkey Boy’. The nickname caused initial concern when a senior officer heard it casually mentioned over the palace radio system and thought it was a racist reference to one of the few ethnic minority Royal Protection officers. The senior officer, an inspector nicknamed ‘Elton John’, because he looked like him, soon calmed down after being informed that ‘Monkey Boy’ was actually white and so-called because he ‘was built like a gorilla’. The third member of Page’s growing crew was close friend ‘Pretty Boy’, seemingly named after his love of personal grooming and sun beds.

  Then there was ‘the Don’. He was an older and trusted member of Page’s relief nicknamed after Don Corleone, the mythical Godfather. The Don was a Police Federation representative, which meant he acted for SO14 officers who were in trouble and facing discipline or, worse still, criminal charges. His policing experience outside of the palace together with an ability to smooth over things with SO14 senior management made the Don appear something of a father figure and highly respected by Page and his new crew at BP.

  The more Dad’s Army types also had nicknames but some were more derogatory than others and often used behind their back. One hapless constable was known as ‘Fagan’, after the 1982 palace intruder, because it was joked among some young officers that he took ‘an unhealthy interest’ in the Royal Family, when he was just doing his job.

  Divisions between SO14 and the Royal Household also vexed Page. He explained:

  There’s a class system within the palace and it is very antiquated. You’ve got the low-level servants, the butlers, the cooks, the cleaners and the handymen and then you’ve got the middle tier of general admin people. And then the top tier of private secretaries and comptrollers and Lords and Ladies in Waiting. We, the police, were a necessary evil. The Royal Household didn’t want us there.

  It annoyed Page when colleagues allowed members of the Royal Household to enter the palace without showing their passes. If there was a security protocol then it should be adhered to by everyone, he thought, mindful of his recent dressing down over the Garden Gate.

  Page did not like feeling he was on the bottom tier. ‘We had our impression of the household and they had their impression of us,’ he griped.

  During one night duty at the front gates of Buckingham Palace, Page thought he had a chance to invert the power play. A senior Palace aide approached the gates a little tired and emotional. The aide explained he needed help to recover the briefcase he’d left in a nearby wine bar.

  ‘It’s not our remit, sir. We can’t leave our post,’ Page explained firmly but politely.

  ‘But I have sensitive documents in the briefcase,’ the aide urged.

  Minutes later the duty inspector was on the phone telling Page to take another officer and drive the aide to the wine bar. Only it wasn’t a wine bar, but a gentlemen’s club, of the lap-dancing kind.

  The doormen informed Page they had ejected the aide. What for was never made clear, but the briefcase was returned and the matter closed. Page would later describe the culture at Buckingham Palace in these terms: ‘You cover stuff up, do what you are told, keep your mouth shut and your head down.’4

  Still, the flexibility with which security rules were sometimes applied to the higher-ups at BP left a mark on Page. He was also struggling with suppressing his copper’s instinct for sizing up the streets for suspicious activity. His job was no longer to make arrests but to make sure no one without an embossed invitation or security pass entered Buckingham Palace. What happened outside the gates of BP was a matter for real cops on division, the different areas by which the Met polices London.

  One incident brought home his sense of professional emasculation. The BP boys had a marked police car for patrolling the perimeter of the palace and responding to emergency calls from other London palaces such as St James’s and Kensington. Early on a Saturday morning, Page was on duty with Monkey Boy in the patrol car. They had clocked a young man slowly motoring past Buckingham Palace. A quick check on the number plate showed the car was registered to a woman. The man refused to pull over and was pursued at high speed around the streets of Victoria. It ended with him crashing into a parked car. When the two SO14 officers dragged him out, he appeared high and had a big knife.

  Page thought it was a good arrest and expected a ‘nice one’ from his superiors. Instead, they considered it ‘a depletion of departmental resources’, because two SO14 officers were no longer on post. The reaction got up Page’s nose. Shortly afterwards he was back on duty patrolling the garden when a superior approached him.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself on division Paul?’

  ‘Yeah, I did, gov,’ he answered enthusiastically.

  ‘Well you are not on division now. We have different rules here and it doesn’t entail cavalier attitudes.’

  Page was once again biting his lip. He realized SO14 had a wholly unique remit that was not about serving the public but protecting the Royal Family, in the widest sense of the word.

  From now on his attitude to being a Royal Protection officer changed dramatically. ‘I didn’t want to progress my police career. I wanted to progress my financial career.’

  Chapter 5

  Bubble bath

  Paul Page’s arrival at Buckingham Palace in June 1998 coincided with the beginning of a boom in the British economy. The New Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had won a landslide election one year earlier partly on a promise to be more business-friendly. So the ever-grinning prime minister and his dour chancellor were overseeing a new era of light-touch regulation making London the city where money flowed and big swinging dicks from trading floors and financial institutions across the globe wanted to work and display their gambling prowess.

  In this lax regulatory climate two financial bubbles grew – one in Internet tech firms, the so-called dot.com bubble, and the other in house prices. Both were fuelled by the US-led fiscal policy of low interest rates, which had been cut to boost the lagging economy on a gamble that those who believe their house is worth more spend more.

  Of course, it wasn’t long before the cheap credit-fuelled bubble in US house prices was mirrored in the UK, which continued to froth for nine more years.

  Well before its peak, Page traded up to a detached house with front and back gardens on the new, upmarket Chafford Hundred estate near Grays in Essex, the place he had begun his police service six years earlier.

  Chafford Hundred was built to feed one of the largest shopping centres in Europe. Lakeside, which opened in 1990, has a special place in the Page love story. It was on a fake steamboat restaurant moored on the man-made lake that the couple enjoyed their first date in the summer of 1993. And four years later they had their austere wedding reception at TGI Friday. The shopping centre and posh estate would continue to feature in many future family dramas.

  Laura had only just given birth to their third son, Matthew, when they moved to Chafford Hundred in October 1998. She loved the upward mobility of her new surroundings. It was a huge step up from the ‘shit hole’ of her Grays roots and the tinned mackerel factory of her youth.

>   Unlike Grays, nearby Chafford Hundred definitely had a sense of safety, conformity and whiteness to it. The estate was popular with police families and financial workers, who had a direct rail link into the City.

  Page had secured a £154,000 loan with Kensington Mortgage Company on his salary alone. The mortgage firm specialized in high-risk customers who the high-street banks might refuse. However, traditional banks and building societies were also starting to abandon their previous prudential ways and offer mortgages that were many multiples of an applicant’s income. Page’s mortgage was almost five times his police salary and the property was almost twice the average UK house price in 1998.

  He could have reduced his mortgage by dipping into the profit from selling the old home in Badger’s Dean, or by using some of the money his grandparents had left him. But Page wanted to free up that cash for something else – dealing himself into the dot.com boom.

  The bubble in technology stocks was certainly aided by the availability of cheap credit, especially in the US, but another driver was the belief that new Internet technology would solve the world’s problems, or at least the need to quicken and ease the flow of money, trade and commerce.

  The new economic ethos was one of growth over profits – get big or get lost. So the availability of cheap credit made it easy for start-up Internet companies to float on the stock market before many had earned any revenue let alone turned a profit. Traders, corrupt analysts and tame business journalists did the rest by whipping up a feeding frenzy among ordinary investors who piled into these risky stocks ‘before it was too late’. Certainly the initial public offerings made overnight millionaires of the geeky young bosses of companies with little else but an e prefix or .com after their name.

  What had started in Silicon Valley and the New York stock exchange was now all the rage in the Royal Stock Exchange in London. The quick profits to be earned from buying and selling tech stocks made ordinary investors like the royal police officer from Chafford Hundred believe he too could be a big City trader.