Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley is now also embroiled in the controversy after striking a deal with Palantir.

The deal was sealed behind closed doors and without political scrutiny despite international condemnation of Palantir’s lucrative partnership with the genocidal Israeli war machine operating in Palestine.

Late last month, the Met revealed it was trailing Palantir software in the hunt for bent cops and claimed the results were already looking good.

The Upsetter has learned that the Palantir contract followed a secret meeting between Rowley and Palantir executives in early January.

The contract price was kept under a financial threshold which meant it avoided any scrutiny by the elected representatives of Londoners, who go to the polls tomorrow in local elections.

This newsletter ran its own data analytics to find out who did what and for whom.

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The case pitted the “very well-known public figure” against two other notorious billionaires - the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, owner of X, and Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times newspaper.

You, the British public, were also involved in the legal challenge through the publicly-owned broadcaster, the BBC.

The newspaper, broadcaster and social media platform came together to challenge an anonymity order that a judge had given the billionaire in April 2024.

The order prevented his identification while he defended a civil claim of historic sexual abuse of a minor.

The judge described the case as “highly unusual” and involving “exceptional facts.”

The claim involved an “alleged victim of historic sexual abuse who asserts that she has suffered psychiatric harm (i.e. a condition more significant than an adverse emotional impact) as a consequence.”

The parties were subsequently “known to each other publicly and professionally” which made jigsaw identification more likely if the billionaire was named, the judge ruled.

Master Stevens gave the businessman the cipher JZX and his accuser was to be referred to as JWS.

The billionaire denied the under-age sexual assault and challenged his accuser’s evidence. In support of anonymity, he also produced medical evidence of “the likely health impact of a loss of privacy” and the effect on his “highly lucrative financial interests” which involved employing many people.

The judge found all this was sufficiently evidenced to merit interference with the usual principles of open justice. Consequently, the order remained unchallenged until this year when JWS discontinued her claim after coming to a secret arrangement with the billionaire.

The media challenge to the 2024 order was not that anonymity had been unfairly granted to the billionaire because the judge had erred in the balancing act between his individual privacy rights and the public interest.

After all, the judge left it open for the media to challenge the order at any time if it felt new evidence had emerged that shifted the balance in favour of the public interest.

The judgment also accepted that:

“The reporting restrictions may be revised further as the claim proceeds and any new material evidence is brought before the Court. In the final determination, in any event, the Defendant has accepted that if he is unsuccessful in his Defence, his anonymity should be waived by the Court, and at that point (if not earlier) the public will have the full benefit of the facts with which to satisfy any legitimate interest in his conduct.”

The problem was that the order was so tightly drawn in 2024 it prevented public interest journalism about similar allegations from other women against the billionaire and the reporting of on-going official investigations into those very allegations.

A hearing on this important issue was therefore scheduled for yesterday in front of a new judge, Mrs Justice Steyn.

But it didn’t take place because the billionaire backed down and agreed that the order could be changed - varied in legal speak - so that reporting about him could take place in certain circumstances.

Specifically, the new order dated 27 April, allows reporting of:

“(i) any allegation of wrongdoing by the Defendant; and
(ii) any investigation into, or other proceedings against, the Defendant.”

For more on this inside story see below.

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ITV was expected to film the gala evening on 1 May as part of Pickston’s starring role in the new series of The Real Housewives of Cheshire, which airs later this month.

On social media, Maggie Oliver enthusiastically endorsed the £150 ticket event for victims of sexual abuse, which Pickston announced in the first week of April. The former detective was billed as a headline speaker along with “two survivors”.

However, last Thursday all the publicity linking the Foundation to the fundraising event came down.

Oliver is now distancing herself from 44 year-old Pickston, known for posting semi-naked pictures on social media, and her controversial 77-year-old fiancé, once dubbed ‘The Sultan of Sleaze’.

The embarrassing U-turn followed a complaint to the Charity Commission by a woman who the Foundation had previously counselled. The woman, who asked for anonymity, accused the trustees of failing in their due diligence.

The Upsetter posed questions to Pickston and Oliver last Wednesday. The following day, the Foundation announced it had withdrawn from the event.

It says the trustees voted unanimously to take the action after considering Pickston’s involvement with care homes for vulnerable teenage girls, which Sullivan had bankrolled.

He is under pressure from West Ham fans to resign over his record as chairman of the struggling Premiership team and also concerns about his past.

Criticism began after Sullivan bought the Hammers in 2010 with fellow pornographer, David Gold, who published titles such as ‘Teenage Hardcore.’

Essex-based Sullivan made his own fortune in the adult business since the 1980s and has a conviction from that time for pimping.

He has bragged about the perks of being a porn baron with the pick of attractive models, but it has led to criminal allegations of sexual offences, none of which have stuck.

Sullivan and Gold, who died in 2023, saw themselves as freedom fighters in the debate over pornography and sexual violence towards women and girls.

For more revelations on what promises to be a tumultuous month, step inside The Upsetter’s peep show - close ups guaranteed.

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Its record is hardly a good one when it comes to the bullshit artist formerly known as Prince Andrew and the allegations that continue to dog him of sex with a barely legal teenager who Epstein had trafficked from New York to London.

After years of finding reasons not to do anything, the Met is now asking Andrew’s former royal protection officers to come forward.

But why would they speak out when the only one who did was told to keep his trap shut by the top cop in charge of the Protection Command, as revealed by The Upsetter not so long ago here.

Hopefully the call for officers to speak up extends to senior ones and will therefore encourage former Commander Peter Loughborough to now give a public account of what he knew about Andrew’s alibi for that night in March 2001 when 17-year-old Virginia Roberts claims they had sex at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home.

Loughborough, who is a hereditary peer, was in charge of Royalty Protection from 2003 until 2014, when he left policing to work at the side of King Charles, where he remains.

This newsletter first posed questions to the nobleman four years ago, which he ducked, as detailed here.

Even if the Met was able to act without fear or favour, protection officers coming forward will get no comfort from how Lindsay Hoyle MP, the speaker of the House of Commons, was treated.

The Met recently apologised to him for “inadvertently revealing” that he was the source behind the decision to arrest Lord Peter Mandelson two months ago and days after Thames Valley police did the same to Andrew.

Both men are suspected of passing documents to Epstein which they had access to while batting for UK plc. But enough of the background, now for the new stuff.

The Police Federation, which looks after rank and file cops, do not believe that former protection officers will be treated fairly if they answer the Met’s call to come forward and tell what they saw at the palaces and elsewhere.

A senior source explained the Fed is preparing for a “witch hunt” against protection officers for “failing to act”.

To combat the anticipated cover up, The Upsetter has been told about a secret reporting system operating within the Met’s Special Branch, which supplied protection officers for VIPs.

Under this system, sensitive matters that protection officers witnessed were written down and kept in a green folder marked ‘SECRET’ that was shared, where necessary, with MI5.

The story of these ‘Secret Greens’, as protection officers called them, is explored in this latest dispatch about a scandal the royal family think should now go away having tossed their moron public the head of one of their own.

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Private investigator Gavin Burrows was beamed into the High Court in London from a secret location somewhere in the Far East wanting to “set the record straight” about why he had “switched sides.”

At the centre of that story is Graham Johnson, a corrupt former tabloid reporter who had approached Burrows with a large pot of money to buy up anyone he thought could bring down The Mail.

Inside courtroom 76, Johnson, the claimants’ lead investigator, listened stoically as Burrows branded him the “conman” in chief working hand in glove with a team of lawyers who had persuaded Elton John, Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost to join the super claim.

It remains to be seen whether the claimants were aware that Burrows had spectacularly fallen out with Johnson before the claim was launched.

And that just a few months later their star witness switched sides accusing the lead investigator of fabricating admissions that he had hacked them.

For reasons best known to themselves, the lawyers for the claimants had left Johnson and Burrows to their own devices. And now they were paying the price.

Burrows was giving evidence “voluntarily”, he reminded the court. Then he dropped another bombshell - In the course of his long career as a private investigator, he had spied for British intelligence and pretended to be crooked during an undercover operation.

This was going to be hard to disprove, unless the spooks came to court, which was highly unlikely, however much his handlers at MI5 or MI6 - Burrows never said which - loved Elton’s songbook.

The private investigator dared the claimants to call his bluff and go into a secret session with the judge where his barrister would detail the undercover operation. “The whole thing was a sting,” Burrows told the court. No one called his bluff.

Next week, when closing speeches end, the judge will retire to consider whether the super claim was another kind of sting, and if so, who was conning who?

Eyes down for the inside story of a remarkable morning in the High Court.

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There’s the CCRC (a supposed miscarriage of justice watchdog), the IPCC (its police equivalent), the SRA and BSB (monitoring bent lawyers) and the FCA (for City suits).

To this alphabet soup can now be added the Charity Commission (CC) which polices sexual and financial crimes done in the name of doing good.

The Commission regulates around 170,000 charities that raise and spend more than £90 billion annually.

Over a quarter of these registered charities are dedicated to the God business, whose history of using ‘moral authority’ and Establishment enablers to cover up sexual abuse should make any watchdog extra vigilant and extra keen to avoid the merest hint of bias.

Instead, the Commission’s board is an Establishment affair, as well-gonged as it is connected to the Church, the Tories, the City and royal family such as to make a mockery of its claimed independence.

The institutional arrogance of the charity regulator was recently on display at the High Court in London, where a progressive judge kicked the Commission’s well-cushioned arse.

The judgment this month roundly rejected the charity watchdog’s efforts to restrict parliamentary scrutiny of its decision making over two separate complaints of sexual abuse by religious leaders.

The complainants are a British man groomed by Catholic priests when he was a schoolboy and an Australian woman used as a sex doll by a Christian leader with connections to the Tories.

Damian Murray and Lara Hall waived their anonymity at the hearing, where The Upsetter was present to finish off its long and lone reporting of this important scandal.

37-year-old Hall had flown from Australia for her court date only to feel “slut shamed” once more by the Charity Commission. Along with 67-year-old Murray, they have called for the resignation of its bosses.

MPs are also on the warpath as The Upsetter wraps up this sordid saga, first exposed here and here, now that the mainstream media has finally caught up.

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Sir Elton John, his husband David Furnish, the model Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost are also pinning hopes on the dirty cop, as Mail journalists face cross-examination in London’s High Court over their use of private investigators (PI).

The new witness emerged shortly after a PI central to the super claim dramatically changed sides having originally admitted to extensive bugging and hacking of the celebrities for the newspaper.

Gavin Burrows now says those statements were confected and his signature forged. He is expected to give evidence alleging “blackmail” and misconduct by members of the claimants’ legal team.

Consequently, much now rests on the former cop, who told the court he fears repercussions from Burrows and other PIs unless his identity is kept secret and the media excluded from hearing his evidence.

During a news blackout over the last three months, the witness has been referred to as ‘Berlin’ while the trial judge considered his anonymity and secret justice application.

The bid has failed and today The Upsetter won a separate battle with the claimants’ legal team to release documents that reveal their disturbing efforts to keep Berlin behind a wall of secrecy.

It’s Glasnost time.

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Is it significant that the connection emerged when drug addicted Stunt was going through a messy divorce from the heiress daughter of billionaire Formula One boss, Bernie Ecclestone?

Or that Stunt’s gold bullion business was under investigation for helping launder £266m for organised crime, making it an exceptionally bad time to be cavorting with a gangster convicted of that very offence.

In any event, how did Adams come to be Stunt’s godfather? Was it through his parents, or did the playboy enlist the help of London’s godfather for protection?

The Upsetter turns genealogist in the search of what binds the south London Stunts to the north London Adams crime family.

Blood, brotherhood, bullion or blarney?

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Community organisations looking into police corruption have long been a target of the police and intelligence services. The actions of the Metropolitan police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) are currently being examined by a public inquiry.

The Upsetter returns to Stoke Newington, a byword for police corruption in the 80s and 90s, to examine the activities of police spy Mark Jenner against the Hackney Community Defence Association.

In so doing, this newsletter begins the first of several dispatches about a corrupt service one Stoke Newington cop was said to be marketing to criminals: the disappearance of criminal records and fingerprint files.

From there we go to a great scoop last week by fellow Substack newsletter Democracy for Sale. It concerns the spying on journalists by Labour Together, the think tank that took Kier Starmer into Downing Street.

The Upsetter provides the essential background to the former Sunday Times journalist who became a corporate spook and worked with the Labour think tank to investigate his former colleagues on the newspaper.

Finally, we return to the super claim by Doreen Lawrence, who the Met spied on, and who now accuses The Daily Mail of doing the same using notorious private investigator Jonathan Rees to bug and hack her.

Lawrence’s claim relies heavily on Derek Haslam, a former cop who was spying on Rees for the Met’s anti-corruption squad when he claims Rees was spying on Lawrence!

The Upsetter reveals the stunning absence of evidence in Haslam’s account when he went into the witness box on Tuesday and asks some awkward questions about Lawrence’s legal team.

It’s a spytastic edition of The Usual Suspects and nowhere else to be found.

Eyes down.

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Monday saw the end of a gruelling three day cross-examination of Evan Harris, a member of the legal team behind the super claim brought by Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Prince Harry, Sir Elton John and four others against The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

The newspaper’s barrister took Harris through his emails, including one which allowed a revealing peak inside the workings of Hacked Off, actor Hugh Grant’s lobbying group for a more ethical press.

Harris was executive director when in March 2016 he updated Grant on the progress getting celebs to “sue the arse off the Mail”.

Hacked Off’s lead investigator, Graham Johnson, a corrupt former tabloid reporter, was working with a private investigator also convicted of phone hacking.

The pair were trawling through the sleuth’s old files for victims of a certain type and alighted on “a potential Gary Lineker angle,” Harris told Grant, whose help he wanted in alerting The Match of The Day presenter that he may have a claim against The Mail on Sunday.

From the witness box, Harris explained how Hacked Off approached the search for potential claimants.

The gist of which was: After the 2012 Leveson public inquiry into phone hacking and the lucrative legal cases that followed against The News of The World and The Mirror, it dawned on campaigners and lawyers that the public’s appetite for whiny celebrities was waning.

A “national treasure” was needed to re-galvanise public sympathy and front future claims. Gary Lineker, the BBC face of Match of the Day, fell into that group and the email to Grant was a Eureka moment.

But Harris could not resist quipping in the email that sadly for Hacked Off and lawyers looking to make a claim against The Mail, the former England striker and BBC presenter had “no dead children” with which to rinse public sympathy.

Harris was likely referring to the phone hacking of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler, which did for The News of The World in 2011 and led then prime minister David Cameron to set up the Leveson inquiry.

The Hacked Off executive explained that re-stoking public outrage by publicising claims of egregious unlawful activity by Mail journalists was part of Hacked Off’s strategy to force a second Leveson inquiry.

Although excited by Lineker as a potential claimant, Harris expressed his concern in the email that the national treasure’s lawyers were “expensive wimps” and the presenter would need “a more aggressive firm”.

In the end, Lineker did not join the Hacked Off party, but The Upsetter publishes the own goal email in full inside this dispatch, which goes on to unpack further revelations on Monday from Baroness Doreen Lawrence, who talked movingly about her dead son when she followed Harris into the witness box.

As readers of this newsletter know, there are three private investigators central to the Lawrence claim against The Mail newspapers. Two have changed their position and last night the third made an incredible U-turn leaving none.

All of which is exclusively set out below just hours before Graham Johnson, national treasure Doreen Lawrence’s lead investigator, goes into the witness box promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

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The case started last week at London’s High Court and is set to hear hotly contested claims that Mail journalists commissioned private investigators to bug, burgle, blag, bribe, tap and hack private information.

The spectre of police corruption will also be examined at Court 76, as the cop witnesses were once signifiant players in a series of covert operations run by Scotland Yard’s anti-corruption squad, also known as the Untouchables.

From 1994-2012, this secret unit looked into crooked relationships between cops, criminals and reporters, choosing to bury what didn’t suit their purpose.

The Untouchables era was defined by two unsolved murders in south London. They are of course the killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan, who was axed to death in 1987, and the stabbing of black student Stephen Lawrence in 1993.

Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, is one of the seven claimants suing The Mail after a 25-year alliance with the right-wing tabloid.

The close relationship blew up in January 2022 when Prince Harry, another super claimant, suggested The Mail may have played her for a fool. Lawrence was subsequently led to believe there was credible evidence that the newspaper had bugged her.

The allegation is damaging to more than The Mail’s bank balance, were it to be proved true.

Ever since running a front page in February 1997 naming five men as Stephen’s ‘MURDERERS’ and daring them to sue, the newspaper has used its Lawrence campaign to shield criticism of its fire-stoking coverage of race, immigration and other issues that make it the bete noire of liberals.

But that shield has now gone and a loss in court could also affect owner Lord Rothermere’s £500m bid to buy the rival right-wing Telegraph titles.

It was Labour after all who launched a public inquiry into the Lawrence murder, made Jamaican-born Doreen a baroness and now appears minded to refer the Telegraph bid for investigation on plurality and public interest grounds.

Baroness Lawrence OBE has maintained her criticism of Scotland Yard even after the Macpherson public inquiry into her son’s murder concluded in 1999 that the force was “institutionally corrupt”.

This weighty label is defined as an organisation that puts its own reputation and that of its bosses before the public interest and a duty of candour to those it had failed.

Currently, a public inquiry into undercover policing is examining the circumstances in which two police officers spied on the Lawrence family in the 1990s - which Scotland Yard kept from the Macpherson inquiry, when one of the spies, Peter Francis, thought it should know.

That infiltration took place at the same time Baroness Lawrence is now alleging The Mail was bugging her using the notorious private investigator Jonathan Rees - who readers of this newsletter will know was the prime suspect for the murder of Morgan, his business partner.

Rees was acquitted in 2011 due to prosecutorial misconduct, police corruption and subsequently awarded damages for malicious prosecution.

In 2021 the O’Loan inquiry, which had sat for eight years examining the incompetent and duplicitous police response to the Morgan murder and family, concluded that Scotland Yard was still institutionally corrupt.

The Untouchables ran the Morgan and Lawrence murder investigations. Scotland Yard hoped a line had been drawn under both scandals. But both sides of the super claim have coaxed coppers who were involved in the Morgan and Lawrence scandals out of retirement.

The courtroom showdown presents an opportunity for some of these police witnesses to settle old scores with Scotland Yard or to defend the organisation from accusations of cover up.

The inner workings of the Untouchables around both murders will be exposed in the coming weeks along with the considerable baggage of the police witnesses.

In the red corner supporting Lawrence is former detective chief superintendent David Cook, whose hubris, hypocrisy and corruption played a significant part in the collapse of the Morgan murder trial.

Former assistant commissioner Bob Quick is also lending his integrity to the Lawrence camp. He was previously criticised by the Morgan family for lacking in the candour department.

The Lawrence claim relies mostly on former detective constable Derek Haslam, who spied on the Morgan family while working undercover for the Untouchables inside Rees’ office.

The Mail needed a senior officer who could undermine Haslam’s claim that Rees was “obsessed” with the Lawrence case and targeted the family on the newspaper’s instructions.

Eventually, the call went out to ‘Get Wood!’ And he came.

Retired deputy assistant commissioner David Wood was the Untouchables’ head of intelligence and Haslam’s controller during his undercover deployment in Rees’ office. He knows where the bodies are buried.

The Upsetter unpacks the stakes for Scotland Yard in the forthcoming High Court clash between the spy and the spymaster.

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Seasoned custody sergeants at the notorious nick in central London were variously involved in assaults on detainees, undermining a rape complainant and perving over another woman arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

Meanwhile, young constables on the response teams boasted to the undercover reporter over pints about excessive use of force and hatred of Muslims.

The BBC Panorama documentary was commissioned to explore how much had changed at Charing Cross since an excoriating January 2022 police watchdog report that found ineffectual management of misogynist officers who’d sexually harassed female colleagues, assaulted a spouse, enjoyed hookers, bonked or slept on duty, deleted evidence and hated anyone who dared grass them up.

Charing Cross has long been a feature of this newsletter, which exclusively highlighted corruption involving a beat officer and a West end nightclub security boss, an internal investigation into alleged international drug trafficking and a leak inquiry into who was pissing in the locker room iron used to press police uniforms.

In a letter to the home secretary on 1 October 2025, the day the BBC documentary was aired, Rowley said:

“Officers behaving in such appalling, criminal ways, let down our communities and will cause some to question if their sons and daughters are safe in our cells, and whether they would be believed and respected as victims of crime. For that, I am truly sorry.”

The rest of his statement showcased how since taking over in October 2022 an “unprecedented blitz” on the “toxic legacy” ignored by past senior management - of which he was one - had started to turn the tanker.

Then came the numbers. Almost 1500 cops and civilian staff have been sacked or forced out by an enhanced anti-corruption squad, Rowley claimed. And the weeding out of wrong’uns through better vetting had doubled.

Significantly, the commissioner acknowledged that his approach had driven the toxic culture “underground”. But he claimed his 40,000 staff were now more willing to call out bad behaviour. Really?

The Upsetter has been monitoring the Met’s underground culture and examining claims that a disturbing feature of it now involves male officers ‘getting in first’ by making complaints against female colleagues who’ve turned down their sexual advances.

This dispatch tells the story of what happened when a rookie raised allegations about a “predatory, sex-pesty culture” on the response teams and misogyny towards female colleagues and women who report domestic and sexual violence.

When Maria, an eastern European graduate, challenged the male “cliques” she was banned from working with them.

And after turning down a cop wanting to tie her up in a hotel room and hear her scream, she suddenly faced gross misconduct charges based on anonymised male colleagues claiming she was a man-eater hungry for ‘black and Irish cock’.

Maria challenged the fairness and evidential basis of the complaints. But the more she pointed out that the only lip service taking place was to the notion of reform, the more her management and the anti-corruption squad doubled down.

“The Thin Blue Line is closing ranks on those who speak out,” she told her bosses in the hope they’d support her. The new Met, however, is determined to crush this whistleblower, knowing a finding of gross misconduct will end her chances of employment in law enforcement.

Female recruits and others thinking of joining the police will do well to keep an eye on this stinky case, which is heading to an employment tribunal.

None of this carry on took place in Charing Cross. It is occurring in another large police station in London where rookies raising awkward questions about Rowley’s reforms are equally not well-received.

The Upsetter goes underground to report on the rude health of the Met.

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The Prince vs The Paper: Harry, Hacking & The Mail included an interview with notorious private investigator, Jonathan Rees, whose allegations had been vital to Lawrence’s decision in 2022 to sue the newspaper after 25 years thinking it was on her side.

Rees had previously admitted hiring a team of ex-special forces to bug a cafe Lawrence used to campaign against the Metropolitan police over its failure to solve the racist murder of her teenage son in 1993.

The private investigator had also admitted accessing the Lawrence family’s home phone billing for The Mail and claimed the newspaper shared the fruits of its bugging and surveillance with the Met.

However, during his interview with Dispatches, broadcast on 11 December, Rees now claims he was never personally involved with any surveillance on Lawrence and didn’t think The Mail had ordered it.

Rees is the second private investigator to undermine the claim against the newspaper group just before the trial starts in London’s High Court next month.

The other is Gavin Burrows who, unlike Rees, did make a witness statement admitting to bugging, hacking, blagging and tapping phones for The Mail - or so it seemed. As rather sensationally, Burrows is now claiming that statement is a fake and his signature was forged.

If that’s not enough, Burrows and Rees are also alleging there is something rotten in how the super claim against The Mail has been prepared, and point the finger at the corrupt former tabloid reporter who recruited them.

Graham Johnson has the air of someone who can’t quite believe he has pulled off a transformation from professional liar and convicted phone hacker to evangelical truth teller and lead investigator for the group of lawyers suing The Mail

The repackaging of Johnson owes a lot to Hacked Off, the lobby group founded by his friend Hugh Grant, who along with other luvvies have championed Johnson as the right knight to wield their sword of truth.

As chief evidence gatherer against The Mail, Johnson put Burrows on a monthly retainer of five grand plus expenses to deliver witnesses. Burrows in turn recruited Rees and out of this convergence of three dark arts specialists emerged the sensational story of the bugging and hacking of Doreen Lawrence.

The story was then relayed to Prince Harry, who persuaded Lawrence to join him in a super claim against The Mail, alongside Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, former Lib Dem justice minister Sir Simon Hughes, Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost.

But for some months now, Johnson has been under pressure from the trial judge to disclose documents about his secretive operation to bring down The Mail codenamed Bluebird.

The documents disclosed so far paint an alarming picture of what Johnson, Hacked Off and lawyers representing the claimants have been up to.

The sudden and unexplained departure this month of a senior lawyer connecting Lawrence, Johnson, Burrows and Rees has fuelled these concerns.

All of which has led The Upsetter to pull festively on both ends of this Christmas cracker to see just how much of Operation Bluebird is a turkey.

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The Met’s no doubt thorough search for evidence started last October when The Mail on Sunday published an email from February 2011 in which the then Prince Andrew suggested he had passed Virginia Guiffre’s date of birth and social security number to his bodyguard for an ‘investigation.’

The email exchange with a senior royal press officer took place just hours before the newspaper published the infamous photo of Andrew with his arm around Guiffre’s teenage waist at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell, the now convicted pimp for Jeffrey Epstein, who died awaiting trial.

The Met’s statement on Saturday saying its “assessment has not revealed any additional evidence of criminal acts or misconduct” landed badly with the family of Guiffre, who took her life earlier this year. They say a Met detective was only asking them on Friday for any evidence and gave no indication Andrew would not face an investigation in the UK.

US-based lawyers for Epstein’s victims have condemned the Met’s decision as “cowardly” and a further example of bending the knee to the royal family - the biggest firm in London.

Readers of this newsletter are no stranger to the weird and wonderful world of Royalty Protection, a Met unit with deep masonic links and an observance to doing whatever the Firm wants, including turning blind eyes to the tantrums and tiaras of its members and hangers-on, even if they verged on the downright criminal.

One Royal cop who found it impossible to do that of course was Paul Page, who described policing Buckingham Palace when Andrew lived there in the late nineties to early noughties as akin to a gun-toting bouncer letting in off the books crumpet.

The Met, palace and prosecutors had tried to stop this reporter and Page from airing what we knew about the Andrew-Maxwell axis back in 2008-9. The royal cop was on trial for running a multi-million pound fraud at Buckingham Palace.

Page emerged from prison as punchy as ever. Only by this time, the Epstein scandal had enveloped Andrew and Maxwell, and the disgraced royal cop found himself in demand as the only one with the chops to continue to speak out about policing the royal family.

The Upsetter recently retold Page’s fall from grace in a podcast, For Queen & Currency based on this reporter’s 2015 book.

It seems the podcast and other comments by Page have touched a “raw nerve” with the Met - who now are trying to gag him, while claiming to have the necessary integrity and independence to investigate the Firm without fear or favour.

For the full story behind this latest development in the Epstein saga, non-subscribers are cordially invited to bend the knee here.

Subscribe now

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Questions about the veracity of the claimants’ witnesses - among them corrupt cops, corrupt private investigators and corrupt journalists - which this newsletter first exposed in 2022 have now been aired in pre-trial hearings last week.

The court disclosures have whet the appetite of newspapers at the prospect of claimant blood in the water as we head towards trial in January.

The pro-claimant lobby had their say in September with an unbearably smug and poorly received ITV drama The Hack, about The Guardian’s difficult investigation which brought down The News of The World.

ITV followed up this month with piss poor propaganda posing as factual documentary about how The Guardian, BBC and lobby group Hacked Off came together to cut out the cancer of bent journalism elsewhere.

The question that the judge is grappling with at the moment is whether the same unethical and possibly criminal methods alleged against the Mail were used to bring this highly lucrative super claim?

But before the trial there is the small matter of Christmas, which is an opportunity for The Upsetter to look at crime books of interest that may find their way into Santa’s sack.

The first is about gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse that empowers the abuser while making the victim question their sanity.

Among the real life examples in Jennifer Fraser’s new book The Gaslit Brain is the conduct of the current Metropolitan police commissioner towards one of his senior officers in the counter terrorism command, a story first revealed by this newsletter.

The second book is by Mick Randall, a former Met detective, which draws on his experience chasing villains, including a chapter on the unsolved double murder in Epping Forrest 36 years ago next month, which he jointly probed in retirement alongside The Upsetter.

Randall’s Twilight Creepers also contains an interesting aside about freemasonry, which the Met has now decided might be a problem after decades of corrupting influence.

The third book comes from media and criminal defence lawyer Louis Charalambous, who represented this reporter against crime boss David Hunt and others.

Better Call Louis also contains an insider’s account of the libel cases brought by Johnny Depp against The Sun and those the lawyer brought against newspapers on behalf of two men wrongly fingered for involvement in the Madeleine McCann abduction and murder of Joanna Yeates.

Talking of rough justice, The Upsetter returns to the troubling new face of miscarriage of justice journalism as conducted by The New Yorker during its examination of Jeremy Bamber’s murder conviction in 1986, which he continues to protest.

Be prepared to be amazed, reviled even, at what the venerable magazine is doing to market its podcast on the case.

And finally, it’s snowing in the UK. Don’t worry, this newsletter has not gone into weather reporting to keep you interested. It’s the other white stuff - the yeyo, the lemo, the nose candy kind.

Word reaches this reporter of a massive cocaine importation that the authorities let through, leading some to ask if the war on drugs is officially over.

Eyes (not noses) down.

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It’s an open secret among gangsters and cops who killed him and why. But despite the murder taking place in a busy pub, no one would make a witness statement against the notorious crime family member responsible.

Now, underworld and police sources closely involved with the investigation have spoken exclusively to The Upsetter about the gangsterism behind the unsolved murder.

Brooks was only a boy when he lost his father in 1991 and vowed to honour his name as someone in the pub and club game who stood his ground.

He got his chance fifteen years later coming up against organised crime while running an Essex bar popular with premiership footballers and the Towie crowd.

When violence in the Essex club scene got too much, Brooks got out to run two local family pubs.

Most of his time is spent building a grassroots right wing political base using his more than 400,000 followers on social media to beat up the government, mainstream media and lefties over immigration, welfare and wokery.

Concerned Essex residents have been joined by hooligans and far right activists in showing support for the loquacious and likeable 45-year-old.

Adam Brooks was the face of summer protests over the housing of unprocessed male asylum seekers at The Bell Hotel in Epping.

The accidental early release of an Ethiopian asylum seeker who had been jailed for sexual offences against a local teenage girl while staying at the hotel heaped ridicule on Keir Starmer’s government last month.

Further unrest is likely across England after the High Court ruled last week against Epping Forest District Council’s attempt to stop The Bell from housing asylum seekers.

Brooks denies he is far right. He’s just a dad concerned for the safety of girls and women and for the future of England.

The Essex businessman is a now prominent voice on the right-wing tv station GB News, co-owned by the pro-Brexit, hedge funder and christian Sir Paul Marshall, whose tweets did not get in the way of a successful bid for The Spectator.

There’s even talk that Brooks is a potential parliamentary candidate for Nigel Farage’s Reform party or even the Tories, if they can win him back.

Here’s what The Upsetter has learned about the violent past that has made Adam Brooks the sort after man he is today.

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For it is Sarah Ferguson who is at the heart of this exclusive on how far a notorious private investigator claims she was prepared to go to save her prince, and therefore herself, after that mendacious interview Andrew gave the BBC in 2019.

The then prince had hoped to scotch allegations rooted in US court papers that in 2001 he had sex with Virginia Guiffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficked teenage girls.

Fergie stood by her man and lobbied the media in support of his denials, all the while hiding the extent of her own relationship with the convicted paedophile.

The couple were already known for their questionable relationships with the monied - Andrew when he was UK trade envoy and Fergie as an entrepreneur and child philanthropist.

Who can forget that GOTCHA! moment when she was caught selling access to Prince Andrew for a cool £500,000.

The Duchess of York soon apologised for her “serious lapse of judgment” when the scoop hit the news stands in May 2010.

Now, The Upsetter brings staggering new claims from the private investigator who worked with the undercover reporter behind the cash-for-access sting.

The sleuth, a well-known figure on Fleet Street, says Fergie personally approached him in 2020, at the height of the Guiffre crisis, to find out about the case US law enforcement was building against Andrew.

“There was a million and one reasons why they should not have come anywhere near me,” he told The Upsetter.

One of them being that for many years he was the prime suspect for the murder of his business partner.

The full story of this latest twist in a royal sex scandal to end all others is available to new subscribers below at the press of a button, where you can also access an 8-part podcast about the only royal cop to speak out about Andrew.

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The Met’s internal investigation follows the release of emails from And…

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That’s all in this penultimate episode of For Queen & Currency, which drops as leaked emails show Andrew has been talking noncesense about his dealings with the American billionaire.

The ten years Paul Page served as a royal protection officer at Buckingham Palace between 1998 and 2008 coincided with Andrew cosying up to Epstein.

The rotten pair were introduced in 1999 by Maxwell, who was also the American billionaire’s beard and groomer in chief.

The trio partied together at various royal palaces and Epstein’s homes in New York, Palm Beach and on a Caribbean island where underage girls were groomed as masseurs and expected to have sex with his guests from the world of finance, politics and Hollywood.

In this episode, Paul reveals that Andrew regularly ordered royal cops to break security protocols and not write down details of visits he received from Maxwell and separately from random young women who were let into Buckingham Palace at all hours of the day.

Any failure to comply with the royal command was met with abuse down the phone or in person, including on one occasion Paul says he witnessed when Andrew called a cop colleague a “cunt” for daring to check details of a night time female caller.

According to Paul, royal cops were sometimes made to drive Andrew’s “bits of fluff” home after their visits to Buckingham Palace, where the royal was living following a divorce from Sarah Ferguson, with whom he had two teenage daughters.

It was in March 2001 that 17-year-old Virginia Guiffre claimed she had a sweaty dance with Andrew at Tramp nightclub in central London before having sex at Maxwell’s nearby home - where that infamous photo of the trio was taken.

Royal protection squad managers ignored officers’ complaints about Andrew’s behaviour and security breaches, says Paul.

These are the same senior management who never came forward to support Andrew’s claim that Guiffre was lying.

As any listener to this podcast will know, Paul Page is no angel. At the time of these events he was running a multi-million pound spread betting fraud from under the stairs at Buckingham Palace.

His Currency Club was well known to his bosses and the wider Met. The fraud began to collapse between 2004 and 2008 just as Epstein’s sex offending started to unravel in the US when the mother of a 14-year-old girl complained to the Florida police.

In June 2008, Epstein pled guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor and started a cosy 18-month prison sentence.

The deal was later criticised because Epstein evaded federal charges and struck a non-prosecution deal for conspirators and “potential conspirators” that was hidden from a growing list of victims.

Andrew, nevertheless, felt the heat over his friendship with Maxwell, who was fingered as Epstein’s pimp and entrée to British high society.

In January 2008, the Met sacked Paul and charged him over the £3m fraud that had conned over one hundred cops and civilian investors.

Just weeks after Epstein started his prison sentence, the Met received Paul’s defence case statement in September. It was an ‘Oh Fuck’ moment that caused panic at Buckingham Palace.

The Queen was briefed that the royal cop was going to out Andrew over his antics at the palace and the security breaches involving Maxwell and other women.

Her majesty was also told that Paul was intent on exposing a corrupt culture among royal cops in her London palaces.

His defence case statement said porn and steroids were traded, that royal cops let friends and family into her garden parties, sat on her throne and took brown envelopes of cash from a gambling operation that had spiralled out of control and led one investor to hire a hitman.

In the previous episode of this podcast, it was revealed that the Met offered Paul the chance to resign and go quietly. He refused and with a trial looming in 2009 something had to be done to stop it becoming a circus of further embarrassment for Andrew and his mum.

Especially as The Upsetter was by now talking to Paul and had published a front page article in The Sunday Times detailing the carry on inside the Queen’s royal protection squad.

That article pricked the Met’s attempt to pin it all on a rogue cop. The follow up article set out Page’s allegations about Andrew and Maxwell while their friend Epstein was doing nonce time.

The offending article on 5 December 2008 said:

A culture of gambling, moonlighting and drinking exists in the Metropolitan police squad responsible for protecting the Queen, according to court documents filed by a former royal protection officer.

Crown prosecutors are trying to strike out sensitive parts of the defence statement by Paul Page in which he claims widespread professional misconduct within the squad.

He also refers to alleged security breaches involving female guests of the Duke of York and an occasion when a senior member of the Royal Household left his briefcase at a lap-dance club.

Mr Page made the statement in response to fraud charges he faces after an internal investigation by the Met into a multimillion-pound spread-betting syndicate run from a locker room in Buckingham Palace.

The syndicate - known as the Currency Club - involved dozens of royal protection officers. It collapsed last year with losses of more than Pounds 1 million.

During a recent hearing the Crown Prosecution Service took the unusual step of asking a senior judge to rule that much of Mr Page‘s defence case statement relating to his ten years at Buckingham Palace was “totally irrelevant” to the criminal case against him.

However, his barrister countered that the activities of the spread-betting syndicate should be considered within the wider context of ill-discipline and management failure in the supposedly elite Royalty Protection Department (SO14).

If the application in front of Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, the Recorder of Westminster, is successful, then the Met will not have to disclose a large number of sensitive documents to Mr Page‘s legal team.

Andrew Mackinlay, Labour MP for Thurrock, said he was dismayed at the “arrogance” of the CPS. He said: “The Royal Family and Household are not above the law; neither are the inner workings of the Metropolitan Police. Nobody would entertain such an application if it were Joe Bloggs. My constituent is entitled to present his case in full.”

The judge could hear a full strike-out application at Southwark Crown Court before Christmas.

However, after studying Mr Page‘s defence case statement at the hearing on October 21, Judge Rivlin has ordered that all parties should be represented by Queen’s Counsel - an indication of the seriousness of the case.

Scotland Yard has also recognised the case as a high priority and convened a “Gold Command” team of senior officers to oversee its progress because of the potential embarrassment to its reputation and that of the Royal Family.

Mr Page, 37, a father of five, was sacked from the Met earlier this year and then charged with fraudulent trading, which he denies.

Documents seen by The Times show that the Currency Club flourished for six years, gambling on movements in foreign currencies and commodity prices.

It grew to involve more than 100 officers from the Met and at least three other forces. Armed SO14 officers are said to have used police cars to courier tens of thousands of pounds in cash between palaces while on duty.

It collapsed last year with heavy losses, leading to recriminations between police and civilian members and a corruption investigation codenamed Ascerio.

Mr Page‘s defence case statement refers to a series of alleged security breaches at Buckingham Palace during the period 1997 to 2003. The statement goes on to identify the Duke of York as the Royal Family member who allegedly most “abused” his position. It refers to a number of women the prince privately entertained at Buckingham Palace but names only one - Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late Robert Maxwell.

It alleges that women would visit the prince at all times of the day without going through proper security protocols. SO14 officers were then ordered to abandon their posts and drive some guests home. Those who dared to raise objections were verbally abused.

A spokesman for the Duke, Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment, declined to comment on what he said was “a security matter”.

The Times understands that the defence statement also refers to an incident when a senior member of the royal household returned to Buckingham Palace late one night complaining that he had been ejected from a nearby lap-dance club without his briefcase. Mr Page was sent to retrieve the case and take the man home.

Questions about the quality of the security provided by the Met to the royal family have dogged the force since an intruder gained access to the Queen’s bedroom in 1982. More recently, the competence of SO14 was at issue when a comic dressed as Osama bin Laden and fathers’ rights campaigners dressed as Batman and Robin penetrated security in broad daylight.

Sources with knowledge of the statement say it claims that protection officers would take it in turns to keep watch, allowing colleagues to sleep through their shifts. Others whiled away long hours on duty by watching TV and DVDs, with one officer nicknamed Barry Norman, after the television presenter and reviewer, because he saw so many films.

Mr Page‘s lawyers declined to comment. A CPS spokeswoman denied that the strike-out application was unusual and defended the move by saying that it would save court time.

The prosecution and judge tried to bully Times Newspapers to take down the online article and imposed draconian future reporting restrictions. But the gag was overturned at the Court of Appeal leaving the judge and Queen very unamused.

The Crown also failed to strike out the allegations about Andrew and the Royal Protection Squad from Paul’s defence case statement.

The Upsetter and the royal cop never understood at the time the ferocity of the state’s defence of Andrew.

That only became clear when the depravity of Epstein and the ease with which he had drawn the rich and powerful into his perverted orbit became clear years later.

The full story is covered in Episode 7, which drops days after bombshell revelations that one day after The Mail on Sunday published the infamous photograph of Andrew with his arm around Guiffre’s teenage waist, the Prince emailed Epstein on 28 February 2011 in these creepy terms:

‘I’m just as concerned for you! Don’t worry about me! It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it. Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!’

The leaked emails, which are being considered by an on-going US congressional committee, show Prince Andrew had not cut off all contact with the convicted sex offender as he would later claim to BBC Newsnight during that interview in November 2019.

In other words, a leading royal had looked the British people in the eye and lied.

And so it goes.

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A plot was in motion to kidnap the corrupt royal cop to get back close to three quarters of a million pounds invested in his Currency Club.

One of the angry Asian investors had contracted a hitman and the Met’s kidnap unit told a Gold meeting of top brass that he was the real deal and Page should be informed of an imminent threat to his life. The anti-corruption squad were happy to do nothing.

On 15 November, three detectives arrived at the family home by Lakeside shopping centre to deliver the bad news. The royal cop was not there. He’d left for Heathrow Airport to meet a new sucker to con into giving him more money.

Things were so bad, Paul was using his wife’s wedding ring as collateral to lure the mark, a Heathrow baggage handler who’d already invested twenty grand.

Paul wanted the cash to continue his suicidal losing streak spread betting on financial markets. His Currency Club was collapsing around him with three million pounds of other people’s money already gambled and lost.

Paul’s wife Laura was at home with the couple’s five young sons when the plainclothes detectives walked up the drive. They asked to come inside to deliver an Osman Warning.

It’s named after a teenage schoolboy at the centre of a disturbing case in the late Eighties when the Met and education authorities in north London failed to sufficiently intervene and stop a male teacher who had become infatuated with Ahmet Osman.

The psychotic teacher eventually shot and wounded the boy, killed his father and the son of the deputy headmaster.

On his arrest, Paul Paget-Lewis, who had changed his name by deed poll to Osman, told the police: “Why didn’t you stop me before I did it, I gave you all the warning signs?”

The 1988 case imposed on the UK police a duty to warn members of the public when the force had intelligence - usually from informants, bugs and phone taps - of a threat to life and to take measures to neutralise that threat and make the target safe.

Figures since 2007 show the number of threat to life warnings issued by the Met go up and down from a low of 64 to a high of 352.

Osman warnings are overwhelmingly given to adult males, a mix of innocent civilian witnesses and those who tend to be players in the business of crime.

In the case of Paul Page and his family, the Met had intelligence that the person who had put up the contract was the same person driving him to Heathrow Airport.

On the way back, Paul took a call from a panicked Laura. He put her on the car speaker phone as she explained what had just happened. None of it felt right to Paul, so he called the main detective who had just delivered the Osman warning to his wife.

The Asian man in the car with Paul now knew the Met had intelligence of the contract. But didn’t know if the cops also knew he was behind it. Paul certainly didn’t.

When the pair arrived at Chafford Hundred, Paul ran in to his house to get a gun then told the man to drive around the estate while they looked for the hitman, oblivious that the person next to him was involved.

Paul saw nothing suspicious and the Asian man dropped him back home before leaving to consider calling off the contract on a police officer.

Paul stayed up all night keeping watch. The next morning, the detectives returned to give him his own Osman warning.

The Gold meeting of the top brass had authorised the detectives to tell Paul not only was his life in danger but he was now under investigation for fraud.

They were also authorised to make the royal cop an offer they hoped he would not refuse. Do the right thing for Queen and country and resign. If he did that, a lot of the shit he was now in would all go away.

That night, Paul got on the Stellas big time and once more stood guard until the morning, when he spotted a man appearing to do surveillance on his house.

Paul went outside to confront him and saw his name and address on a piece of paper. The man sped off with the royal cop clinging on to his van as long as he could.

Days later and still ‘high as a kite’, Paul spotted another vehicle outside his house and again went to confront the driver - this time with the gun.

The man appeared to have something long and metallic levelled on the roof of his car pointed at Paul. As soon as he saw the royal cop emerge from his house, the man waited seconds then sped off.

Paul chased in his car determined to catch the man he was now certain had been sent to kill him.

The high-speed chase on the road to Lakeside shopping centre caused chaos for other drivers and pedestrians as the royal cop tried to ram his ‘assassin’ off the road.

What happened next is all in this sixth episode of For Queen & Currency, a podcast based on my 2015 book of the same name, which followed a series of exclusives written for The Sunday Times and Times.

The gun-totting car chase at Lakeside marked the beginning of Paul’s free fall from financial folly, which ended in a major criminal trial where the royal cop refused to go quietly.

Instead, he started to reveal details about Prince Andrew’s relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell from his time as a royal cop at Buckingham Palace. The Royal Household, the Met and legal establishment did not like it.

The last two episodes of this podcast deal with Paul’s claims about the Prince while he was living at mummy’s house and the attempt to stop my newspaper publishing them.

Those claims had a bearing on the alibi Andrew gave during that interview on Newsnight six years ago about the day in March 2001 when a seventeen-year-old American girl claimed she had been sex trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for the Prince’s pleasure.

And so it goes.

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