Bates The Man Who Sold Honours

The First Modern Cash for Honours Scandal
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83773-207-4
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Paying for a peerage - an illegal practice - feels like a very modern form of corruption, one that both the Labour and Conservative parties have been happy to indulge in at times during the early twenty-first century. Except, of course, it was happening almost a century ago. Meet Maundy Gregory, actor, journalist, publishing proprietor, conman, embezzler, MI5 spy - and the man you went to see if you had the money to pay for a peerage in the post-First World War years. Cutting a dash across high society of the 1920s - he was in attendance at the wedding of the future George VI - the immaculately oiled and overdressed Gregory would happily pockets thousands for playing Mr Fixit for wannabe knights and lords, and swell the coffers of Lloyd George's Liberal Party to millions of pounds. Business was brisk, and business was brazen. Visitors to his lavish office on Parliament Street, with a direct line to 'Number 10', would be wined and dined and, after paying up, leave satisfied that they would be next on the list for a knighthood or barony. Nothing could be guaranteed, of course, and it was a strictly no refunds business. But Gregory was also suspected of being something else, to add to his impressive list of accomplishments: a murderer. As the political winds changed, the debts mounted up and the walls closed in around him, he somehow managed to inherit his mistress's not inconsiderable savings when she scribbled a new will on the back of a menu and was suddenly taken ill ... In The Man Who Sold Honours, Stephen Bates lifts the lid on the truth about this long-forgotten character who remains the only person ever to be successfully prosecuted under the sale of honours act of 1925. A powerful preview of the scandals to come in Britain in recent years, this is the story of the original honours tout - a riches-to-rags tale of greed, corruption and murder in the interwar years.

Stephen Bates read Modern History at New College, Oxford before working as a journalist for the BBC, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and, for 22 years, The Guardian, successively there as a political correspondent, European Affairs Editor in Brussels and religious and royal correspondent. A regular broadcaster, he has also written for The Spectator, New Statesman, Time magazine, Literary Review, Tablet and BBC History Magazine, Le Monde and Berliner Zeitung. He is married with three adult children and lives in Kent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bates, Stephen

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION: THE MAN IN THE BROWN AND YELLOW TAXI

One of the most noted figures in the distinguished pageant of Whitehall.

DAILY EXPRESS, 22 FEBRUARY 1933

Arthur John Peter Michael Maundy Gregory was many things in his life: an actor, teacher, a theatre manager, a newspaper editor, blackmailer, a police informant, a self-proclaimed spy master, a club owner, a hotelier, a prisoner, a bankrupt and an exile, and some of the claims made by and about him were even true. It was lucky he had so many Christian names to cover his multiple identities. But what he was chiefly, memorably and most profitably was an honours tout.

He sold knighthoods and baronetcies for money, and he was rather successful at it. Maundy Gregory indeed may well have sold more honours over a longer period than anyone else has ever done, before or since. Moreover, he was an equal opportunities tout: selling for both the Liberal and Tory parties until the law caught up with him – and only him in the hundred years since the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925 has been on the statute book. After that he sold papal and other foreign honours instead.

In the years immediately after the First World War, those wealthy and vain enough to wish to add a knighthood to their name could pay a visit to a discreet townhouse at 38 Parliament Street, almost directly opposite the entrance to Downing Street and only a few paces down Whitehall from Parliament itself. They would enter through glass panelled double doors with the words The Whitehall Gazette – Gregory’s paper – picked out in gold lettering. There they would be met by a uniformed usher wearing a livery so very similar to that worn at the time by House of Commons messengers, right down to the brass buttons, that they could be mistaken for their counterparts. They would be escorted upstairs to a waiting room, whose sepulchral calm was enhanced by stained glass windows, before a buzzer would sound and they would be summoned into the presence in the next room of the man who could make their wishes come true.

Maundy Gregory would be sitting on a large red leather upholstered armchair, behind an enormous desk upon which were several telephones and telephone consoles with switches – this at a period when many companies still had no telephones at all – and bell pushes, an array of small coloured electric lights, a Morse tapper key to summon his secretary and a series of red dispatch boxes looking exactly like those government ministries used. On the walls around the room were portraits of the crowned heads – and recently deposed heads – of Europe, all of whom he claimed to know personally. On a side table were signed photographs in silver frames, among them the Duke of York – the future George VI – at whose marriage to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923 Gregory had been an usher. Next to it was another picture of a famous figure, the Tory politician and former Lord Chancellor Lord Birkenhead – F.E. Smith as he was – who quietly borrowed money from the man he called the Cheerful Giver to subsidise his drinking and gambling debts and underwrite his young mistress, Miss Mona Dunn.

Gregory himself would rise graciously to greet the supplicant. He was slightly below medium height, a little on the portly side, his hair neatly pomaded and parted in the middle. His dress was immaculate – likely a three-piece, purple-shaded suit and a wing-collar to his shirt – and his shoes were highly polished. Around his neck hung a ribbon to which a monocle was attached.

His manner was confiding and softly spoken, almost obsequious, and, as the conversation continued, it was likely that he would, apparently absent-mindedly, pull a large heart-shaped, rose-coloured diamond that was allegedly once the possession of Catherine the Great from his waistcoat pocket and fondle it between his fingers.

The conversation would be desultory, but names would be dropped. Occasionally, the telephone might ring, and he would excuse himself to answer it, confiding that it was ‘Number Ten’ on the line, without admitting that he himself lived at Number Ten, though Hyde Park Terrace, not Downing Street. Ben Pengelly, Gregory’s accountant, suggested that the address had been chosen specifically for that reason.

An anonymous Daily Express correspondent wrote admiringly of Gregory: ‘One met him at Ascot and at the first nights of West End plays whose stars were frequently his intimate friends. One saw him again in Whitehall entering his palatial offices between Scotland Yard and the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street. His distinguished presence would catch the eye at once. The diamond watch chain displayed on a suit of subtle purple was in keeping with his aristocratic features … those who were privileged to visit these offices were always struck by the grave atmosphere of decorum.’1

Getting down to business, Gregory was sure he could help his visitor. The man would likely explain that of course he did not want an honour for himself, but it would please his wife. Gregory would probably intimate that he had heard very good things about the man’s patriotism and sterling business achievements and how he would be only too pleased to be of service. Of course, these things did not come cheap, unfortunately. Wheels needed to be greased to ensure that the name would make it onto the next honours list in a few months’ time, or at the very least the one after that. The normal tariff for a knighthood was £10,000, a baronetcy would be somewhat more: £40,000 because the title could be passed on to one’s heirs and successors.2 Neither gave a right to sit in the House of Lords – peerages were more expensive again at £50,000 – but putting ‘Sir’ in front of one’s name and ‘Lady’ for the wife back at home was not to be sneezed at. The purpose of the sale of titles was to raise money, particularly for the Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s political fund: perhaps those willing to buy a title were not too choosy where their money went. If they were, they could always go to a Conservative honours tout like Harry Shaw.

And, of course, part of the consideration went to Maundy Gregory himself. In the early 1920s, it has been estimated that he was making £30,000 a year in commission,3 six times the salary of a senior cabinet minister of the period. It enabled a comfortable lifestyle, a large apartment in St. John’s Wood (later to become the Abbey Road studios) before moving to the property overlooking the north side of Hyde Park, and, not least, a distinctive brown and yellow taxi and its driver, Tom Bramley. Gregory claimed that the cab was his own, though this seems doubtful since it could not be a licensed taxi and yet employed solely for his personal use, but Bramley did receive a salary. It was useful, he said, for zipping through the London traffic and for escaping from would-be Bolshevik assassins: it even had a peephole cut in the back so he could see if they were being followed. It was not clear why he thought such a taxi would not stand out or be easily spotted in the bustle of London’s black cabs by any terrorist who wanted to bump him off. Probably none did.

Maundy Gregory’s self-image as someone who knew everyone and had easy access to the rich and influential while still operating discreetly in the shadows was one that he obviously liked. He could call up anyone he wanted: dukes and duchesses, exiled kings, the Lord Chancellor himself, government ministers and MPs, the Dean of Westminster Abbey or West End stage stars, and they would take his call. It all fed his ego, and it was no wonder his staff called him the Chief to his face: just the same as the newspaper tycoon, Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail and The Times, was known to his employees at the same time. Naturally, Gregory called his office the Chancellery. It was, said Colin Coote, then a young Liberal MP who wrote articles for Gregory’s newspaper, but much later became editor of The Daily Telegraph, like ‘a cross between Downing Street and MI5’.

Coote left a recollection of his first meeting with Gregory and his modus operandi in his memoirs. It came about probably in 1919 or ’20: ‘I received one day a letter on imposing notepaper headed The Whitehall Gazette asking me to call on the editor and signed “J. Maundy Gregory” … The word “editor” had an irresistible attraction. I called … and was ushered into the presence of an impeccably dressed personage who could not by any possibility live up to his trousers, but who possessed a kind of ingratiating flamboyance. He laid it on with a trowel. “It was always useful for brilliant young politicians to get publicity … if I paid him fifty guineas he would produce a cartoon of me which would be the sensation of Westminster!”

‘I did not need to be told the answer to that one. I said that I had not got fifty guineas but if he would pay me that sum I would write him an article which would be the sensation of the periodicals. This tickled him; to my astonishment he agreed; and to my even greater astonishment he paid. I soon saw that the magazine was a cover for something. Nobody could flaunt so many appurtenances of wealth, including a fountain pen with a twenty-two-carat nib half an inch broad, a taxi perpetually engaged and an infinite capacity for champagne on the profits of a rag like that.’4 A £50 fee then would have been immensely generous for a freelance article – as would its equivalent of...