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

by Michael Gillard

  For example, on one eventful night duty, an African man was in the cells for a public order offence involving drink and possibly drugs. Such was his level of consumption that the prisoner was put on a round-the-clock watch to ensure he didn’t choke on his own vomit.

  Around the same time, a junior officer marched a high-class prostitute into the police station for drink-driving. After she was processed, Page recalled that two more experienced officers gave her an escort home. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. While they were away, the intoxicated African prisoner was found unconscious in his cell.

  Efforts to revive him failed and his death in custody had to be immediately reported to the anti-corruption squad. They arrived shortly thereafter only to discover that the dead man’s custody record – a timed log of all police contact – had gone missing. However, a search of the confidential waste bin did lead to the discovery of the prostitute’s charge sheet – it had been ripped up.

  The canteen talk over the following days was that the dead man’s custody record had been ‘lost’ because checks weren’t done at regular intervals. Page and his colleagues were interviewed, but no one said anything to the anti-corruption squad. Indeed, the whole matter eventually blew over.

  Irrespective of the accuracy of Page’s account, it was not the only time a custody record had disappeared at Marylebone.

  On 31 January 1997, 24-year-old Mark McLoughlin died in his cell. The Irish man had been arrested in Oxford Street for being drunk. At the inquest, the police claimed his custody record was lost. The jury heard conflicting evidence from the officer responsible for checking on McLoughlin and his cellmate about the frequency of those checks. A verdict was returned that McLoughlin had died of a methadone overdose, but that police neglect played a part.

  £ £ £

  The presence of a Black Maria, or any other police van for that matter, tearing around the inner city full of charged-up coppers can twitch the bottle of even the most game.

  The Met has been in and out of court for decades trying to defend the actions of officers accused of beating up the arrested in the van and then, sometimes to cover their tracks, having them additionally arrested for assault on the police.

  Very rarely do serving police officers talk about what really goes on inside the Black Maria. Rarer still does the same officer admit his own role in kidnap, false imprisonment and assault. However, Page’s explanation for his actions won’t offend everyone:

  It doesn’t take long for you to become very cynical. You see things the general public never will – murder victims, elderly muggings, rape victims, a child sexually abused, or facing death. Anyone who says joining the police doesn’t change the way you see society is a liar.

  You take on a role. It is a tough life if you are lower down the social scale. There are people out there who don’t care what they have to do to get money and they don’t care about the police and will shoot them if they have to. Officers get disgruntled over different things. Mainly that nothing’s going to be done, that [the criminal] will be out soon and they didn’t respect us.

  At Marylebone there was a (small) hard core of ‘reliable officers’. There was the surface of policing and then another surface and those officers weren’t prepared to stand by and watch the real, hardened criminals who were daily causing misery to people get away with it and there was a concerted effort to target them and make their life a misery.

  The ‘mobile classroom’ was a police van we’d take out and violent criminals with no respect for the law and us as police officers was targeted and put in the van, driven around for ten minutes and ‘taught a lesson’, then kicked out.

  None of them complained. They knew they were violent and got away with a lot of things. And in their eyes, I imagine it was, ‘Well it’s better than getting nicked’.

  Page liked to administer a headlock. He knew about pressure points. One behind the ears was particularly effective.

  In one case, a local violent street robber had killed a man in a fight. His reputation grew and his criminality increased. A group of us reliable officers not afraid to confront these people were tasked to do plain clothes surveillance of him and, if the opportunity arose, deal with him.

  From the briefing we knew what that meant. Couldn’t have been misunderstood. The kingpin was arrested, cuffed and taken to a police cell at Marylebone where he was told, ‘Now you are going to feel what a victim of robbery feels like.’ He was then kicked out. He made no complaint.

  Page had no concern about any internal investigation. The situation on the streets he likened to a ‘war’ and in combat an officer needs to be assured that others have his back not only on the streets, but also at court and when the internal affairs lot start sniffing around. ‘We trusted each other,’ he simply explains.

  Marylebone was a naughty nick and [I] made it naughtier … You’d have to be naïve to believe it doesn’t go on in other stations. These ‘values’ were shared across the police stations. There is only so much the police can take before they have to look at other ways of dealing with hardcore criminals.

  I did fit people up. Yeah I did, but I fit up people who was cunts. The culture was there and I fitted into it … If people think what I’ve said ‘this is an isolated incident’, then they are being naïve.

  Chapter 3

  Road to royalty

  As a valued member of the Met’s karate team, Page was soon developing friendships with those from other police divisions and specialist squads. Among them were royal and diplomatic protection officers charged with looking after the Royal Family, visiting dignitaries and palaces, including Westminster and the House of Commons.

  By summer 1997, Page had been at Marylebone for two years. He was starting to feel he’d had enough of street policing and wanted a new challenge to go with his new responsibilities at home.

  ‘It’s a good little number, Paul,’ one protection officer told him while offering a day’s attachment to Buckingham Palace to see if his face fit.

  Page told Laura of the opportunity to move to a new posting. ‘I’m tired of dealing with the same old shit every day, love. I don’t want to get in a rut and before I know it I’ve done twenty years dealing with the dross.’

  James, their son, was now two and the family had their first home, a three-bedroom property in Badgers Dean, Essex. Laura was looking after James and Thomas whilst child minding for other parents. But it was Page’s police salary that secured the mortgage. She welcomed the idea of her man being more out of harm’s way.

  ‘I have friends on Royalty through karate who said it was a good place to be. Well paid, no paperwork, no grief, no stress, one or two hours on, and the same off in the canteen or gym,’ he continued.

  Although looking for a change, the Royalty Protection Department, or SO14 (short for Specialist Operation 14), was not a posting that came immediately to mind. One night duty at Marylebone, he had driven past Buckingham Palace and looked at the SO14 officers on post. ‘What a fucking boring job,’ he thought to himself. He didn’t know until he got there that they were looking back at him thinking, ‘What a stupid idiot running round, risking his life for a lot less than we take home.’

  Once again, karate would count in Page’s favour as the senior management at SO14 considered his application. Having a good reference was important. Page sold well his potential as a self-defence instructor of Royal Protection officers.

  Typically confident, he believed it made him a hard-to-turn-down asset. First, though, there was the formality of an interview. But Page wasn’t nervous. He told his wife he’d been given a heads-up on some of the key questions.

  Part of the interview involved asking candidates to identify a photograph of a royal. A colleague had apparently clued him in about which royal mug shot he’d be shown. He was also told the right response to various scenarios. If, for example, he was on duty and heard someone screaming outside the palace, do not abandon your post. And, no, it was never acceptable to read on night duty.
/>
  Page passed selection for SO14. But his transfer from Marylebone was delayed until 1998, after he had completed a firearms course.

  While he waited, the death of Princess Diana on 31 August 1997 was an intense reminder to him and others who were not natural royalists just how much the monarchy still meant to many British citizens. It was also a reminder of how out of touch the Queen and older royals had become in misreading the public mood towards the death of ‘the people’s princess’. Those who questioned whether Diana really was a candle in the wind did so at their own peril in the run-up to her funeral.

  Tony Blair, the recently elected modernizing New Labour prime minister, read the mood right. But he looked too controlling as he jockeyed for the right seat in Westminster Abbey, where Diana’s brother gave a speech that took a swing at her in-laws and the media.

  For Page, Diana’s death was an opportunity to get in on the televised funeral procession. On 6 September, Laura was painting the front door of their new house. The television was on in the background when Page called.

  ‘Hello, love. Are you watching the funeral?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘Look for a police car in the right-hand corner of your screen.’ He waited for her to study the TV. ‘Do you see it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, still unsure what her man was getting at.

  ‘It’s me!’ shouted Page, as he hung his head outside the driver’s window and waved.

  Laura had other things on her mind. She was getting married in six days. It wasn’t that there was the usual mass of things to do. If only. Her husband-to-be had proposed in a brutally unromantic fashion that could only have pleased a heartless accountant.

  Two months earlier, Page had been talking to one of his colleagues at Marylebone at the beginning of their morning shift. The officer was in a bad mood. He’d just had a row with his wife over who was going to clean up the dog shit in the garden.

  ‘So I said to her,’ he told Page. ‘I only married you for the tax code, you bitch.’

  When the laughter subsided, the officer explained how married couples got tax breaks not offered to singletons and those living together. Page was intrigued by the chance to make money and have one over the taxman.

  After his shift, he thought about how he was going to broach the subject with Laura. In the end, he just came out with it.

  ‘Love, we are going to have to get married so my tax code will go down. Do you want to get that arranged?’

  The proposal of marriage was not exactly how Laura had imagined. She wanted the special day, meringue dress and high-rise cake. The volatile couple had been together three years now with a fine collection of broken ornaments following silly arguments, mostly driven by jealousy. So slightly heavy hearted, Laura booked a registry office in Thurrock, Essex, which for added romance was next door to a police station.

  The wedding was a catalogue affair. Laura’s ring, a gold band, cost £29 from Argos. Her dress, from Littlewoods, only arrived on the day of the wedding, while she was having her hair done.

  No family member attended the registry office, which also lacked any personal touches. Page had asked his childhood friend Fahim Baree to be his best man. When the registrar announced he could kiss the bride, Laura unexpectedly pulled away from Page’s puckered lips.

  ‘I was embarrassed,’ she told him later during the reception at TGI Friday’s in Lakeside. ‘I haven’t exactly been led up a romantic path.’

  ‘I know love, but we agreed we’d do it properly when we’re flush.’

  A few months later, Page bumped into the colleague who had first planted the idea of marriage as a tax benefit. ‘Alright?’ asked Page.

  ‘No. Not really,’ came the reply. ‘My wife’s leaving me and she’s taking the dog.’2

  £ £ £

  Page was not going to Buckingham Palace without any experience of the royal world beyond taking the tabloids. While at Marylebone he attended an incident over the New Year that gave him a telling insight into how royal sexual indiscretions are dealt with by the police and loved by the press.

  The incident taught him at least three principles of survival when dealing with the circle of royals, associated peers and their Sloaney hangers on: first, they do not consider themselves like the rest of society so don’t treat them as such; second, when senior officers say turn a blind eye, do it; and finally, always remember Upstairs Downstairs may well have been off the telly since the seventies but it’s alive and well in relations between the police and the Palace. Before going on duty on New Year’s Day, Page had a quick catch-up on the gossip from colleagues going home. Apparently there was some hand-wringing among senior officers over whether a suicide had been mishandled.

  It wasn’t any ordinary citizen who had taken their life overnight. Anne Hills was a 55-year-old freelance journalist from a posh family with a secret past that was the beyond the salivation of her tabloid colleagues.

  When Page got home that evening, though knackered, he regaled Laura with details of his bizarre day. One of the dead woman’s friends had called the police after getting no reply at Hills’s swanky top-floor flat near Baker Street. Through the window the friend had noticed empty wine bottles and blister packets of drugs spread across the table. Officers knocked down the door, but didn’t find a body or notice anything else that would indicate a suicide.

  When Anne’s father was informed he had good reason to suspect the worst having experienced the sad and desperate mood his daughter was in two days earlier. Elliot Philipp knew her flat well and soon found Anne wearing a black dress and stilettos curled up on the roof. She had been dead for some time but looked beautiful, he thought. Philipp called the police. The control room at Marylebone sent Page and another young officer to the flat in nearby Upper Montague Street. As they walked in, the two officers mistook Philipp for someone official, maybe the person who had come to take away the body.

  ‘What’s the scenario, chief?’ asked Page’s colleague, a pen in his mouth.

  ‘My daughter’s on the roof. She’s dead. Quite dead,’ Philipp replied. Outwardly, at least, the 81-year-old retired gynaecologist was calm. His delivery was very clinical and stiff upper lip. Privately, though, Philipp felt his daughter’s complicated personal life was a major factor in her suicide.

  Anne had taken him to see a production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire two days before. Arguably, the last play a woman in her state of mind should have sat through. The lead female character, Blanche DuBois, is a fallen southern belle. She worries about growing old alone and that her sister will discover the history of promiscuity, which followed a failed marriage to a gay husband who killed himself. Of course, like most secrets it does come out, and before the final curtain falls, Blanche is carted away by the men in white coats.

  Philipp gave nothing away as he chatted with Page in the kitchen. But it was obvious to the grieving father that the British press would soon sniff out his loss was no ordinary suicide.

  For the last twenty years, Hills had been the mistress of Lord Snowdon or Tony Armstrong-Jones, as he was known before the Queen ennobled him after his marriage in 1960 to her sister, Princess Margaret. When they divorced in 1978, Snowdon, a serial adulterer, met Hills. Legend has it the freelance journalist door-stepped him when pulling together a piece about disability, a subject close to the royal photographer’s heart. He had contracted polio as a boy. ‘I am a journalist and want to do a story about you. But I also want to have an affair with you,’ she is reputed to have said. The randy lord needed little encouragement and their affair spanned the duration of his second marriage to another society beauty.

  Hills resigned herself to being ‘the mistress’. She had other relationships, some just for sex, but had told her father and friends that she was fearful of being left alone over New Year’s Eve. A relationship with her live-in lover was falling apart and Snowdon had his own family commitments. To make matters worse, a national newspaper had just rejected her for a job.
<
br />   Page excused himself from talking to Philipp and looked for the stairway onto the flat roof to inspect the body. It was a vast space, too high up for someone with vertigo. The body was not immediately visible from the top rung of the stairs. However, behind what he thought was a water tower above an adjacent flat Page eventually located Hills’s body. She had drifted into unconsciousness and then death after washing down a cocktail of sleeping pills with alcohol. Page noticed her face was lying on a note. He retrieved it with care, avoiding the mucus that soiled the exposed part. Returning downstairs, Page wondered if the officers who had broken down the front door had actually searched the roof. He was even more surprised when he noticed several sealed white envelopes, which Hills had neatly laid on a piece of furniture. One letter was addressed to an organisation that conducted medical research on donated cadavers. Another was for Lord Snowdon.

  Page never read the note he found on the roof. However, it later emerged that she had written of the love for her children and father.

  By now, two others had joined Philipp in the flat. He announced that they were going for lunch in a nearby Pizza Hut.

  ‘I’ll be back by the time the mortuary people arrive. Don’t let them go without me,’ he told Page matter-of-factly.

  Alone in the flat, the two officers split up and looked around. As Page walked into the bedroom he was struck by the circular bed. After rummaging around, he found a box beside it. Inside were love letters from Snowdon and some black and white nude photographs of Hills. Nearby was a collection of dildos that made Page chuckle at the idea of a sword fight in the turret-shaped bedroom. Nothing in her video collection suggested anything else compromising enough to warrant seizing. Then the phone rang. Both officers agreed it was best all round not to answer. Hills had changed her message for the New Year. ‘Hello everyone,’ it said. ‘I hope you have a lovely 1997.’ After the beeps, a mature and very clipped male voice explained that he was unable to see her for some days but they would meet up soon. He ended the call: ‘I’m really concerned. Chin up.’ It was Snowdon.