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

by Michael Gillard

  ‘It seemed like a very good return for the money,’ thought Mahaffy. He signed a contract joining the Currency Club and wrote out a £5000 cheque from his Virgin account to Mark Joyce, which Pretty Boy then transferred to the CMC spread-betting account for Page to work his magic on the markets.

  The Currency Club had arrived at St James’s Palace. It was the sort of sub-plot the satirists at Spitting Image could have dreamed up as a eulogy for the Queen Mother. The TV puppet show had already cast her as a big drinking gambler with a northern accent and a copy of the Racing Post rolled up under the royal bingo wings. A select group of the Queen Mum’s Royal Protection officers secretly running a betting syndicate under the palace stairs was a perfect satirical compliment. Only it was true.9

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  Back at BP, preparations for the Queen’s golden jubilee were taking shape. Guitarist Brian May had agreed to open the Party in the Park in June with a solo version of ‘God Save the Queen’ performed on the palace roof with his long curly mullet billowing in the breeze.

  Purples One and Two were away on a tour of the UK for most of the first half of 2002. But on the few occasions they returned to BP, the Queen had a right to expect that her Royal Protection officers would have their minds on her safety not the Currency Club.

  Page didn’t care that he was neglecting his duty. He realized that watching the markets and watching out for the Queen were not compatible. It was intense work, because the foreign markets came online at different times of the day. Sometimes he would not sleep, become ‘transfixed’ on a particular market and lose money. Conscious of the guarantee he had given Currency Club members, it was all the more important that he recovered the position with more astute betting.

  If he was on duty when the US employment figures were about to be released, Page would get a trusted colleague to cover for him while he hid in the BP locker room with his laptop. If Alan Greenspan was presenting a report on interest rates, others could be counted on to step in while Page watched Teletext in the canteen. One particular Greenspan announcement at the time gave Page and other like-minded investors the economic encouragement to carry on. ‘It’s not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past,’ Greenspan told the world. ‘It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously.’

  If he couldn’t swap his shift to spread bet, Page would find out who was off duty, ring them up and offer £300 to work his shift. With his real job getting progressively in the way of his shadow career, Page said there were times on duty at BP when he didn’t care even if someone were to climb over the wall.

  After a while, he didn’t even bother to distinguish between making money for the Currency Club and police work. He was mildly bollocked a few times, he said, for using police radios to discuss financial market movements. The most memorable occasion was when the Queen was on her way into Buckingham Palace.

  ‘Purple One. Two minutes’ came the call over the radio system. It was her PPO alerting SO14 officers at BP to have the main gates open and barriers up as they were getting near. The call was followed by another pressing announcement over the royal airwaves. ‘Er, Gripper, Halifax is up five pence.’

  A senior BP officer quickly transmitted a message to all concerned to stop using the radio system for personal business. But it was too late. The PPO had heard it all in his earpiece and subsequently complained. Page was reprimanded.

  ‘At the end of the day we laughed about it, but it was not on,’ he said. ‘We didn’t grasp that we shouldn’t be doing it.’

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  Handing out brown envelopes of cash was now a regular part of Page’s rounds at BP and when he slipped over to St James’s Palace. Currency Club members were happy with the monthly cash return they were making and spread the word to SO14 officers in other palaces including Balmoral, the Queen’s Scottish retreat.

  Soon, non-police staff at BP had heard about the Currency Club. Page recalled being on night duty when a royal valet stopped him in the palace grounds.

  ‘Do you know Gripper?’ the valet enquired of Page.

  ‘I am Gripper!’ he replied with undisguised pride in his voice. It turned out that the valet, a footman and two chefs wanted to invest in the Currency Club. Page said they put in about £4000 in a new six-month deal he was now offering.

  ‘The Queen and Prince Philip will go ballistic,’ Page told Laura one night as they discussed how his betting syndicate was growing. He was starting to abandon an earlier policy of turning away officers he didn’t like, trust or know too well.

  Laura was now more involved in helping with Currency Club business while also running the house and hair salon. She monitored a computer terminal that was linked to various stock exchanges and had got used to having CNBC or Bloomberg on in the background. It was more background noise in a house of four young boys fighting over toys and video games. Page could call at any moment and demand to know the price of a water company share or she would be tasked to call him at BP the moment some financial figures were released. On a rare occasion, Page would ask her to give a brown envelope to an SO14 officer who would be passing by after finishing a shift at the palace.

  Police officers were not just cynical but tight with their money, Page believed. It made him feel good that they trusted him to gamble with large amounts of their cash. It also made him feel good to pay out returns. He felt he was at the centre of a group of officers who all wanted a better life for their families and he was the one who could make it happen, a ‘money God’, as some apparently called him.

  A similar leap of faith takes place every day in the City or Wall Street where young traders are entrusted to gamble other people’s money. Michael Lewis, who turned his back on Wall Street for a career chronicling its excesses, put it this way in his book The Big Short when describing how, as a clueless recent graduate, he somehow landed a job at Saloman Brothers Bank in the mid-eighties and was soon regarded as an expert:

  The willingness of a Wall St investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me to this day. I was twenty-four, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and fall … Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I’d stumbled into a job. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud.

  Page had not hidden from those who invested in him that he was self-taught and unsupported. He was judged by his apparent wealth and the monthly flow of brown envelopes of cash returns. ‘There was no me going round with my begging bowl. They were queuing up at my fucking door [to join],’ he told me.

  However, strangely, Page was concerned that too much cash flying around at BP would attract the wrong attention. ‘I was telling people how to spend their money. Don’t start putting loads of cash in the bank, get some shopping, bit of petrol, get some new windows, boring stuff you can pay in cash, do up the house nice, get a new conservatory but don’t be silly.’

  The advice was odd because there was nothing illegal about the cash Page was paying out in brown envelopes. Yet his speech could as easily have come from a Martin Scorsese script where an armed robber tells his gang to spend their share discreetly so as not to attract the attention of the police. In this case, the Currency Club were the police.

  Chapter 7

  Throne games

  One night duty, not long after McGregor had joined SO14 and the Currency Club, he and Page walked gingerly through the dark corridors of Buckingham Palace like two naughty schoolboys with keys to the headmaster’s office.

  The pair were on a high-risk personal mission which would almost certainly have got them the sack had word of what they were up to reached the Queen. That said, her two Royal Protection officers felt the risk was manageable. It had all been done before. Many times, apparently. Be
sides, who was around to catch them, unless by the worst of luck an insomniac royal or member of the Royal Household happened to walk by at 2 am?

  As Page turned the lights on in the Throne Room the pair felt the weight of history on their shoulders but apparently had no fear of having their collars felt.

  Shades of pinks and reds dominate the Throne Room, from the patterned carpets and draped curtains to the centrepiece of this hallowed space, the two ‘chairs of state’ made in a seventeenth-century style for the Queen’s 1953 coronation.

  Purple One’s red throne sits on a raised pink stage, approachable by three lush carpeted steps. Behind it hangs long red curtains and above is a domed white and gold ceiling and proscenium arch supported by a pair of winged figures of 'victory' holding garlands.

  The Queen rarely sat on the throne, except for very special meetings and key speeches to the nation, such as her 2002 golden jubilee address. This symbol of Britain’s constitutional monarchy was more commonly used as a setting for official royal wedding photographs; a tradition that started with her own in 1947.

  But what would she make of a secret tradition among her Royal Protection officers of using the seat of royal power for goofy family album snaps?

  In The King’s Speech, the dramatization of her stammering father’s relationship with Australian-born speech therapist Lionel Logue, there is an imagined scene in Westminster Abbey during a rehearsal of George VI’s 1937 coronation.

  ‘Get up! You can’t sit there,’ said the King, when he saw Logue provocatively slumped on the throne.

  ‘Why not? It’s a chair.’

  ‘This is the chair on which every King and Queen …’

  Before his stammering patient could finish, Logue interrupts with the memorable line: ‘I don’t care how many royal arseholes have sat on it.’

  From the evidence that would emerge in Page’s trial, it appears of late that there may have been more Royal Protection arseholes than royal ones sitting on the throne.

  McGregor handed Page his camera and with little or no concern for the accession rights of Princes Charles, William or Harry he went to take his wrongful place as heir to the Throne of England. Before sitting down he straightened his uniform and weapon then struck an ignoble pose as if he was on Elvis’s toilet in Graceland.

  Snap! All done, back to work. Purple One none the wiser.

  ‘We all sat on the throne and had a laugh,’ said Page. ‘Fucking hell, mate! If you get a chance to sit on the Throne of England you aren’t going to pass it up.’

  Page recalled that officers joining BP were naturally keen to be shown around the palace and it was not uncommon for whoever was conducting the tour to allow one of the new boys, there and then, to sit on the throne.

  Page also took the photograph of another Currency Club member, this time near the Queen’s bedroom, albeit in very disturbing circumstances. The Royal Protection officer wanted a photo of himself holding Page’s 9 mm Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol. His own weapon had been taken away following a recent incident on night duty.

  The story goes that the depressed officer had been talking to a girlfriend while sitting in his post. He told her he was thinking of putting his gun in his mouth. She talked him out of it and then reported the matter.

  Page subsequently accompanied him to a meeting with senior management who decided not to bring in the Met’s anti-corruption squad. Instead, the officer had to surrender his weapon, was taken off firearms duty but allowed to work in the armoury booking out weapons to others.

  Months later he was told he was being moved off SO14. The officer approached Page when he was on night duty at the Garden Gate asking if he would lend him his gun and take a photo.

  Page agreed but it crossed his mind while handing over the weapon that his friend might just go on the rampage or blow his brains out near the Queen’s bedroom.

  By telling this story Page was trying to convey two points. First, there was a tendency at SO14 for senior management to handle things internally because of the unique nature of where its officers worked and the possible fall-out beyond red faces at Scotland Yard. ‘[There was] an agreed understanding that what happened at Royalty stayed at Royalty,’ he said.

  Page was also pointing out that in the four years he had been at BP, by 2002 the culture at SO14 was starting to change. Through recruiting younger or more seasoned officers the balance of power in Page’s relief was becoming more daring and less reverential. The new recruits, he said, were coming from public order units or special firearms units. Some were ex-detectives disgruntled with ‘working for a living’ and had joined SO14 because word got out that it was ‘a good platform’ for other things.10

  Page too was changing. With the shift of power among his relief, he no longer felt a need to suppress his cop instincts when coming across public order incidents outside the palace gates.

  His experience as one of the instructors in SO14 had also shaped his attitude to work and the rules. All officers carrying a firearm had to have up-to-date blue cards proving they have passed periodic eyesight, firearms and fitness tests. In these early years of the Currency Club, Page was not a heavy drinker. He preferred to go home and be with his family.

  However, he described how drinking was a big part of the ‘culture’ at SO14. He recalled being ordered to pass a protection officer who was still drunk and how an officer with knee damage forged his blue card knowing he would otherwise have failed his fitness test.

  ‘Had he shot someone he would have been unlawfully carrying the firearm. He got caught and it was covered up. He was transferred to another force anyway and although disciplined it was hushed up.’

  There were also claims that some SO14 officers were not loading their guns due to religious beliefs or because they didn’t want to be put in the frame for shooting anyone. A new policy was introduced of spot checks and anyone with an unloaded weapon was disciplined, Page recalled.

  It was not unusual for officers still drunk from the night before to book out a weapon the next day, he said. Others would be told to sleep off their hangover somewhere in the palace or buy some ‘mints and Lucozade’. Any depletion of armed officers on duty had to be avoided.

  He further recalled one incident when a senior member of the Royal Household was coming through the security gates of BP. Instead of lifting the barrier, a hung-over SO14 officer accidentally pressed the underground ramp button sending the woman’s car into the air. Luckily, only the car was damaged.11

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  The Currency Club was not the only risky financial scheme involving Royal Protection officers in 2002. Details about a controversial ‘pyramid’-style scheme called Hearts only emerged seven years later during Page’s trial.

  According to witness statements of those involved with Hearts, it purported to be about empowering women by inviting them to invest £3000 to get a place on a list. An investor moved up the list by bringing in new people. And when a certain position was reached, it supposedly triggered a cash return of over ten times the original investment.

  Schemes likes Hearts are ultimately unsustainable because new investors eventually dry up causing it to collapse, sometimes in recrimination. Those who came in last and are at the lower end of the list find themselves out of pocket while those at the top can make money.

  Constable Jamie Ross was one of the young but experienced new BP officers. He recruited for Hearts among business people in Hertfordshire, where he lived, and also among colleagues in SO14, which he had joined from the Met’s specialist firearms unit.

  Page refused to recommend Hearts to Currency Club members. But Adam McGregor, his mother and other BP colleagues got to hear about it and put around £3000 each into the scheme. Hearts also attracted Royal Protection officers from other palaces too.

  Soon, Ross was offering them another more traditional investment opportunity: to buy Kevlar, the synthetic fibre used in body armour.

  It was a joint venture with Terry Belton, a salesman also from Hertfordshire.
The pair had met and become friends when Ross was responsible for buying the Met’s riot equipment. In no time, Ross’s wife and Belton formed a company to market a Kevlar airbag restraint to assist emergency services attending crash scenes.

  Money for Kevlar from investors poured in. On one occasion, almost £100,000 in cash was handed to Belton in a car park. £15,000 came from McGregor. Another £30,000 came from Watford businesswoman Christine O’Brien, who had taken out a bank loan. She had met Ross though Hearts and said in her witness statement that the Kevlar investment seemed safe because he was a police officer.

  However, Ross’s SO14 colleagues started to get suspicious when Belton suddenly disappeared to Dubai. At the same time, the Hearts scheme was also failing to pay out the promised returns.

  Page and other SO14 officers, who he refuses to name, met to discuss how they were going to deal with Ross. It was decided he would get ‘a kicking’ in the locker room. Page had also suggested crashing a scrap car through the living room of Belton’s Hertfordshire home.

  Somehow, however, SO14 managers at Buckingham Palace got wind of the plan and called Page and others to a meeting.

  ‘Do you know anything about a plan to beat up PC Ross tomorrow?’ a senior officer enquired. Page and his colleagues shook their heads.

  In the end, the attack could not be carried out because Ross was quickly moved to Windsor Castle. An official source with knowledge of these events confirmed there was intelligence of a plot against Ross and said he had been moved for ‘welfare reasons’.

  McGregor and his mother said in witness statements that they were ‘victims’ of the Hearts and Kevlar schemes. McGregor also said in the same statement that he never made a formal complaint against Ross but felt his SO14 colleague probably knew more than he had let on.12

  A senior member of the Royal Household who lost £20,000 in the Kevlar deal asked to remain anonymous because of her position at the palace. She recalled meeting the ‘charming’ Ross at BP who promised her great returns. However, it was her own ‘greed and naivety’, she accepts, that led her to pay the £20,000 directly to Belton.