FOR QUEEN & CURRENCY
Fraud, Pervs & Cover Up At Buckingham Palace
The bill for the collapse of the Western banking system in 2008 was not paid for by the bankers and politicians who caused it.
An already put upon public picked up the tab through a period of austerity from which emerged the corrupt Boris Johnson years in 2016 and a country ill-prepared for the covid pandemic in 2020.
It was during this period of austerity from 2008 to 2015 that I wrote and published my second book, For Queen & Currency about a scandal inside the Metropolitan police’s Royal Protection Squad.
The story was set in Buckingham Palace and bookended by the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the beginning of the global financial crisis ten years later.
Royal Protection officer Paul Page had run a successful hedge fund for fellow cops across the palaces by spread betting on foreign exchanges until he incurred massive losses.
Page’s betting syndicate, the Currency Club, became a massive fraud that was initially covered up to avoid embarrassment to the Palace and Scotland Yard. Internal checks had failed, greedy investors made no checks and senior officers turned a blind eye.
It struck me that Page’s story was a dynamic way of looking at the wider ills affecting the British public, who by then were paying in cuts to the social fabric to prop up a corrupt banking system, none of whose bosses went to jail.
My original reporting of the Page scandal in The Sunday Times and Times newspapers between 2008 and 2009 incurred push back from the Met, prosecutors and the Palace.
Page was not going to trial quietly. He was willing to use insider knowledge of the conduct of Prince Andrew, who after his divorce from Sarah Ferguson was living with mummy at Buckingham Palace.
The sex scandal involving Andrew’s friends Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier, and Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the crooked British media mogul, was about to blow up.
And this reporter was there when it did with new revelations in the Mail on Sunday.
The article asked why it was, with all the power and loyalty that royalty commands, not one royal protection officer came forward to back up Andrew’s alibi for the time he was said to have bedded Virginia Roberts, a part of Epstein’s sex-trafficked teenage harem procured by Maxwell for the prince and other notables.
Andrew’s alibi for the day in question was later examined in full by this newsletter here.
After Page served his prison sentence for fraud, he became sought after by a mainstream media playing catch up on the Andrew story.
The disgraced royal protection officer appeared on various international documentaries as one of the only former royal protection officers willing to talk about what really went on behind palace doors.
Memorably, he was asked by an Australian broadcaster what Andrew’s nickname was among royal protection officers. Quick as a flash, Page responded, “the cunt”, which was broadcast without a bleep!
In this offering from The Upsetter, subscribers have access to the preface from my 2015 book For Queen & Currency and the pilot drama script commissioned by the BBC.
They serve as a taster for a forthcoming punk podcast of this reporter talking last year to Paul Page and his wife, Laura, about the Currency Club scandal after the Queen had died and her favourite son was cast out.
This is a love story wrapped around a massive fraud at Buckingham Palace, where the carry on was not just the cops but also the royals they were supposedly protecting.
As Page said on our first call:
No Old Bill ’ave ever admitted to what we’ve done … The Queen is going to be mightily pissed off.
