For this week’s Lownie Report Podcast I was delighted to be joined by The Upsetter, Michael Gillard, for a wide-ranging discussion that includes the police investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Michael’s scoop in today’s Times about how the Serious Fraud Office were secretly monitoring Andrew while they were investigating the collapse of Icelandic bank Kaupthing in 2008.
Michael has been a top investigative journalist for over two decades and has broken a number of important stories over the years, including the Sunday Times story revealing the activities of crime boss David Hunt, a story that resulted in a famous libel case that the paper eventually won.
His book about the story, Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics, is an important and chilling read. Michael recently revealed that the now-disgraced porn baron and West Ham owner, David Sullivan, had lent Hunt £1m to pay the legal costs of the case.
We covered a lot of ground, including the use of ‘green sheets’. Protection officers were required to report anything they witnessed to Special Branch in documents known as “secret greens”; conversations at embassy functions, financial indiscretions, suspicious meetings. These intelligence reports were then passed on to MI5. What became of those documents when Special Branch was folded into the counter-terrorism command remains, as Michael put it, “another story.”
Michael revealed that Thames Valley Police, the force currently investigating Andrew following his arrest earlier this year, has been offered crucial context by the very SFO investigator who was monitoring him at the time. Mick Randall, thirty years at Scotland Yard, then SOCA, then the SFO, approached Thames Valley Police two weeks ago and offered to brief them on what the SFO knew and when they knew it. As we recorded this podcast, he had still not heard back from investigators.
Their lack of curiosity here is not encouraging, but does fit a pattern stretching back over a decade and a half, including no questions asked about the Selman Turk case and the decision not to question Andrew about Virginia Giuffre’s allegations or to allow American investigators to question him.
Randall had his own early encounter with Andrew. When Andrew visited the SOCA offices in Vauxhall in 2009 for a briefing from department heads, Randall was sitting opposite him around the table. What struck him most was not the former prince’s curiosity about the agency’s work, but his irritation that the sandwiches had not arrived.
When Randall’s turn came to present, covering fraud, Andrew looked straight through him. He simply was not interested. What was remarkable, Randall noted, was that it was never made clear what any of this had to do with Andrew’s role as UK trade envoy. Several months later, Randall found himself at the SFO investigating the same man.
There is also the question of who is protecting Andrew from scrutiny. Michael confirms what I’ve been told; that protection officers have been reluctant to come forward, and a source told him one reason why. To serve as a royal protection officer, you apparently had to be a Freemason and a member of the St James’s Lodge. That double layer of obligation, to the Crown and to the brotherhood, may have helped keep mouths firmly shut.
The Met, meanwhile, is hardly a reassuring alternative. Peter Loughborough, the Commander who oversaw the Royalty Protection Command during the period in question, subsequently became King Charles’s right-hand man. The man in charge for much of the period that Andrew’s worst excesses were in motion, and when visitors were being brought in by Andrew without any security checks, is still firmly within the royal firmament.
Then there is Sarah Ferguson. After the Newsnight interview in 2019, Michael reveals she was doing the rounds of Fleet Street within days, trying to place Andrew’s alibi using pages from her diary. When that failed, she is said by notorious private investigator Jonathan Rees to have approached him and during a meeting in Reigate asked whether he could use contacts in American law enforcement to find out how far Virginia Giuffre’s case had progressed. Fergie held his hands and looked into his eyes, using the manipulative guile that has seen her survive so many scandals; what she didn’t realise was that Rees couldn’t stand her or her husband. He turned her down.
As Michael and I agreed, what we are seeing looks increasingly performative. A high-profile arrest, a widening of the investigation to take in sexual misconduct allegations, and yet seemingly no deployment of the National Crime Agency.
Michael also spoke about the allegations against the late Greville Janner and how newspapers and the police were involved in a cover-up that is a textbook case of how those in power protect those at the top at the expense of victims.
Indeed our establishment has got secrecy and obfuscation down to a fine art, abusing the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act and the Official Secrets Act, and helps to ensure that embarrassing secrets rarely find their way into the public eye. Similarly, as Michael points out, the National Security Act seems designed to suppress whistleblowing in the police force and intelligence services.
Michael and I covered too the challenges in the modern era for investigative journalism, with circulation and budgets a fraction of what they used to be, and how some proprietors and editors spike stories if the subjects are ‘friends of the paper’. Such stories are now more likely to be found on Substack than in the newspapers so at least there is some hope that crowdfunded curiosity may allow the powerful to still be held to account.
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