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Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

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Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

Chris (00:37):
On today’s podcast, I’m joined by author and journalist Stephen Bates, and we discuss his book, THE MAN WHO SOLD HONOURS, which is all about the extraordinary life of a man named Maundy Gregory, who was an actor, fixer, and sometime MI5 asset, who was at the heart of Britain’s original cash-for-honours scandal. So he was quite the character. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I had a really interesting chat with Stephen.

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Chris (01:58):
Stephen, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you on.

Stephen (02:01):
Thank you very much, Chris, for inviting me.

Chris (02:03):
You’ve got this really fascinating book called THE MAN WHO SOLD HONOURS. Before we go into any of the details about what it’s about, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write this book in particular.

Stephen (02:16):
Yes. Well, my name’s Stephen Bates. I’ve been a journalist virtually all my working life. I started off on local newspapers, then graduated to the BBC, then went to the Daily Telegraph, the bête noire of the BBC at the moment, and on from there to the Daily Mail and 22 years at The Guardian, where in most of those jobs I covered politics. I spent probably about eight or 10 years as a political correspondent at Westminster. So this sort of story obviously was something I had to cover at the time, but it also interested me when I heard about this character, Maundy Gregory, who was pretty blatant about selling honours. These days, people are pretty discreet about doing all this, and it’s regarded as a little bit shamefaced and underhand. He was doing it wholesale just after the First World War and making a pretty penny from it.

Chris (03:20):
Yeah, he was charging quite a lot of money, wasn’t he? I mean, it was something like 40,000 pounds or something, and that’s quite a lot of money in those days too.

Stephen (03:28):
Well, absolutely, yes. You could get a knighthood for about 10,000 pounds, which in modern parlance would be about half a million. A peerage was a bit more, maybe 50,000, which was several million really. I suppose that probably equates to what some people are alleged to have been doing more recently. But anyway, it was a lot of money and he was doing it pretty openly. He had a big office just opposite Downing Street on Whitehall, and people would visit him there and have a chat, and he would explain the terms of engagement to them. He never gave them a cast-iron guarantee. It was always going to be in the next honours list: “We’ll make sure you get your name in the next honours list.” And mostly he managed to do it.

Chris (04:20):
Well, who was he? What motivated him? Obviously money was a big factor. Was it just money? Was there something else at play here?

Stephen (04:28):
I suspect it was largely money. He was a secretive character. There isn’t very much information left by him, or about him. He was a scoundrel. He was a chancer. He was a narcissist, and he saw himself as a great sort of behind-the-scenes fixer and someone who could deliver honours fairly ad lib for people who wanted them. And if you wanted them, you paid him a visit.

Chris (05:03):
And he was an interesting character because he was an actor, journalist, an informant for the police at one point, a spymaster allegedly. What kind of personality thrived in that secretive, opportunistic world?

Stephen (05:19):
Well, I guess he’s a fairly recognizable character as a fixer. He clearly was a bit of a narcissist. He was a very natty dresser. He was a bit obsequious, certainly to people above him, and he was secretive. So although he was doing it openly, he was also doing it fairly discreetly, and that was part of his selling point to people. He would take them to lunch or take them to dinner, and he would drop lots of names intended to show how influential he was and how he had his finger on the pulse. Altogether he was quite an impressive guy as far as they were concerned.

Chris (06:05):
So how did the honours racket actually work? What did a deal look like?

Stephen (06:08):
Well, he would say to someone who came to him and said, “You understand, I don’t want a knighthood for myself, but the little lady would appreciate it,” and he would say, “Well, we have to grease the wheels a little bit, and it does take a little bit of organizing. So there is a scale of charges.” He would tell them that it might be as much as 10,000 pounds, and he would undertake to get their name on the next honours list. Now, the honours list of course didn’t come from him, but he would make a discreet contact with the chief whip of whichever party he was dealing with. He was an equal-opportunities type in that he sold honours for the Conservatives and also for the Lloyd George faction of the Liberals after the First World War. A discreet word with the chief whip, and these names would be slipped onto the honours list, which would go ultimately to the King, and the King would, as King Charles does now, sign off on them, and then they would be listed in the Gazette.

(07:25):
And that’s how it worked. It didn’t always work quickly. He would say, “Well, if we can’t get you on this honours list, we’ll get you on the next honours list, or maybe the one after that.” And so people were kept hanging on a little bit. But by and large, he managed to get them what they wanted. And it was noticed. I mean, the King, for instance, King George V in those days, grew very aggravated that these strange names, some of them quite disreputable, were appearing for his approval. Because of the constitutional settlement, the King doesn’t have much opportunity to veto these things. But he was saying, “These are an awful lot of bad hats I’m being asked to approve.” And the politicians would sort of say, “Well, he does deserve it.” It would be “for services rendered”: services rendered to the state, not to the political party or the prime minister. That’s how it went. But a lot of these guys were involved in Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent episodes. He eventually went too far and was signing up people who, in the King’s view—and actually in the view of quite a lot of people—certainly didn’t deserve any honours. But eventually they, by and large, tended to go through.

Chris (09:03):
Now, how did he actually get started with all this? Because credibility must have been a big factor in presenting a certain air. I noticed he had an office quite near Downing Street, is that right?

Stephen (09:16):
Yeah, it was exactly opposite. I don’t know how well you know Whitehall, but there’s a pub on the opposite side of the road, I think called the Red Lion, and his office was directly next door to that. So it was pretty close to the centre of power. In fact, the building where it was is now parliamentary offices. So it really was in the heart of Whitehall. It’s very difficult to know exactly how he got started. But in the run-up to the First World War, as you said, he started as an actor, and then he tried his hand at being something of a theatrical impresario. That didn’t work out, and he drifted into the sort of magazine or newspaper that sold itself not on its commercial value but on the way it promoted people: they would have a figure of the week, a man of the year, that sort of thing.

(10:26):
But instead of picking them on their own merits, he would sell them the space. He would say, “You look like a very influential person. Let me write you up; by the way, it’ll only cost you 500 quid,” or something like that. So he had his finger on a lot of quite influential people, a lot of businessmen, some politicians. During the First World War—in fact, at the start of the First World War—he’d been running in this newspaper a weekly series. It sounds incredibly dull, but it was a sort of court and social page, which said who was checking into the hotels of London: “His Grace the Duke and Princess so-and-so are now at the Ritz,” that sort of thing. And he built up a chain of contacts in the hotels of central London who would drop him a line and tell him who was staying there.

(11:32):
This was fairly bland stuff, but of course, amongst the details he was being given were not always people who were entirely straight. It would be “so-and-so staying with Miss so-and-so,” and the dirty weekend would help, I suspect, with a little bit of blackmail going on. Anyway, the First World War came along, and he told Scotland Yard, which was trying to set up a sort of spying agency, that he could help them out because he had this chain of people. There would be the possibility of exposing the odd German traitor amongst the waitering class in these hotels and restaurants. There was a great fear at the start of the First World War about spies infiltrating the country. And indeed there were one or two, but not as many as rumour had it. Most of those were rounded up pretty quickly and fairly easily by the police. But he was selling himself as a contact and as being in charge of a vast London spy ring, which was an exaggeration at the best of times.

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And organisations like MI5 were very vestigial at that stage. The internal spy operation, I think, had a total of 10 employees, one of whom was a cleaner. So it was a very, very small operation, and they needed all the help and assistance they could get, and he offered that to them. Whether he offered them anything that was of great value in the anti-espionage league was pretty doubtful. But the police, who did most of the arresting of spies and in fact needed very little help to round most of them up because they were fairly obvious, thought he might be useful, and they delayed his call-up for the military. He played along with this and suggested he was in charge of this vast underground operation. I think that, together with what he’d been doing journalistically with these puff pieces in his magazine, brought him to the attention of politicians. After the war, when Lloyd George in particular and his colleagues were desperate to raise money for their future electoral purposes, I think his name came up, and they thought with his contacts he’d probably be quite a useful person. He wasn’t the only honours tout, as they were called, but he was probably the most effective.

Chris (14:39):
So was he acting alone, or was he effectively working for Lloyd George’s political fund?

Stephen (14:45):
He was largely working for Lloyd George’s political fund. In the middle of the First World War, at the end of 1916, Lloyd George mounted an internal coup to get rid of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, who had been his closest colleague, because he probably rightly thought that Asquith was not pursuing the war vigorously enough. Not surprisingly, because Asquith had been in power for the best part of a decade and was getting tired in office. He was drinking too heavily, he was not really terribly clued into what was happening in the war, and he’d just lost his eldest son on the front of the Somme. So Lloyd George formed a coalition administration with the Conservatives, who formed the bulk of the administration—the government of Lloyd George. After the war, the Liberal Party, which Lloyd George had been a leading member of, was terribly badly split.

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Half were sticking with Asquith; half were going with Lloyd George, and it was a coalition government. The Tories were there as well. Lloyd George knew that this was not terribly sustainable as a long-term political option because the Conservatives frankly didn’t trust or like Lloyd George at all. So he needed to raise money. He didn’t have access to a political organisation apart from himself, really. The imperative for him and for his chief whip and for his cronies in government was to raise money so that they could fight elections, and that’s where the honours touts came in.

Chris (16:38):
And how did a promise to build a land fit for heroes turn into a marketplace for knighthoods?

Stephen (16:44):
Well, it did because a lot of these men had made a very good living during the war selling armaments, selling equipment, selling raw materials, selling food to the war effort. Stanley Baldwin memorably described them as “hard-faced men who’d done very well out of the war,” and it was these people who craved some sort of social respectability. The best way, and the quickest way, of doing that was by buying an honour so that they could be recognized theoretically by the state and honoured by the government.

Chris (17:29):
And, sorry, tell us a little bit about who these buyers were. Were they social climbers, opportunists, or true believers in public service?

Stephen (17:38):
Yes. A lot of them were businessmen, and they had the money. They had access to excess money. Obviously they weren’t people who were already national heroes. They were people, many of whom were famous not far beyond their own factory gates. They were people who thought that an honour would either buy them political power or prestige or local or national influence. Those were the sort of men who didn’t want to just be Mr. so-and-so; they wanted to be Sir so-and-so, and they thought that would stand them in good stead and put them in a better position to take advantage of whatever economic opportunities there were.

Chris (18:36):
And to what extent did institutions like the press or police enable or ignore this trade?

Stephen (18:42):
It was ignored for quite a long time actually. In the aftermath of the war, of course, a lot of military heroes were being given honours, but gradually it became pretty obvious what was happening. Some of the Conservative peers, even before the First World War, had been getting agitated that these ne’er-do-wells and these social parvenus were getting into places like the House of Lords. They thought that the Lords was being opened up to a lot of unsuitable people, by whom they meant people who didn’t have a great ancestry or access to large estates, and they were suspicious of how they were being recognized. One or two of the Conservative peers grew increasingly agitated at this, and so did some of the Conservative backbenchers in the Houses of Parliament. Eventually, so did the Conservative chief whip, who wrote to his boss that their people were being stolen by Lloyd George because instead of giving their money to the Conservative Party, which was their natural party, they were giving it to Lloyd George’s fund instead, and the Tories were missing out. That was the genesis of the complaints about honours touting.

Chris (20:24):
Yeah, fantastic. Now, we’ve touched upon this a little bit already because Gregory called himself a spymaster, which was a bit more myth-making with some truth, and he fed information to Scotland Yard and potentially kept some files on powerful people. So was he an early political intelligence broker?

Stephen (20:43):
I guess he probably was. He was obviously outside the immediate social circle of politics, and he wasn’t elected in any sense. I think he probably saw himself as a backroom influencer, someone who could wield immense power behind the scenes, with sort of spidery tentacles reaching out. But he, I think, was regarded as a useful man rather than someone you would want to mix with socially. That hurt him quite a lot because he wanted social acceptability. But yes, he was very keen to be of service because he thought it would bring him commercial returns and viability.

Chris (21:42):
And after the British trade ended, he started selling papal foreign honours. Did this at all edge into any real espionage or influence work?

Stephen (21:52):
It’s very difficult to know. Like a lot of people, immediately after the First World War, the Russian Revolution had an immense effect. You remember in 1924, one of the general elections hinged on this forged Zinoviev letter, and there was a lot of sort of spy fever, not about the Germans anymore but about the Bolsheviks. And Gregory was absolutely anti-Bolshevik. He thought they might assassinate him, which is why he drove around London in his own taxi cab with his own chauffeur, which had a hole drilled in the back of the taxi so that he could see if the car was being followed. I’m sure it wasn’t, but it was that sort of hysteria, really, that he thought Britain was ripe for revolution, and he wasn’t alone in that. There were strikes after the First World War, there were upheavals up to and beyond the general strike, which seemed to presage some sort of uprising. People could remember what had happened in Russia, and they thought the Bolsheviks were powerful enough to want to either invade or, more likely, undermine and foment revolution in British society as well.

Chris (23:20):
Yeah, because as you were saying, those strikes were seen as a kind of precursor to a revolution, weren’t they? So there was a lot of fear of that.

Stephen (23:29):
Well, that’s right. I mean, that was how things had got underway in Russia. And there were serious strikes immediately after the First World War. The police in some areas went on strike because their pay was pretty diabolical at that stage. They were earning less than street cleaners, the bobbies on the beat, and the government had to act pretty quickly to head off strikes. There were ex-servicemen’s organisations too, which were quite political in their demands, and they were successfully subsumed into the entirely non-political British Legion, as opposed to ex-servicemen’s trade unions. So it wasn’t entirely fanciful that society might be destabilised, but it was, as it turns out, and as we know now, a greatly exaggerated fear.

Chris (24:30):
And did Gregory ever gain any real, actual insights into any Bolshevik activity in Britain at that time?

Stephen (24:37):
Not really. I don’t think so. I think it was all a sort of fear and a sort of atmosphere of dread and anxiety. He went through his entire career well into the 1930s thinking that there might be some sort of uprising or some Bolshevik threat. And in the mid-thirties, when he actually came to grief, he was on the verge of saying what great men there were in Germany, and he was rather keen on Mussolini in Italy as well. So that was the way he was veering. And of course, we know now that a lot of society people in Britain were also edging towards fascism as a way of countering the so-called threat of Bolshevism.

Chris (25:37):
Yeah, that’s a very interesting topic in itself, but sadly we won’t be able to get too much into that today. But what finally brought Gregory down, and was it a sort of moral outrage, political necessity, or self-preservation by those whom he served?

Stephen (25:52):
Well, I think a combination of all of that. His career started to crumble in the mid-1920s, when the Conservatives, having supplanted Lloyd George and come into power themselves, finally found there was sufficient head of steam and sufficient annoyance from the King about who was being given honours that they passed legislation to prevent the abuse of honours. It wasn’t terribly effective, but it did, for the first time, open the possibility that people who were selling honours like Gregory could be prosecuted and go to prison and be fined fairly heavily. Now, that passed in 1925. Interestingly, Gregory is the only person in a hundred years who’s ever been prosecuted under that legislation. But as the political honours system was closed to him, he branched out and continued selling honours, but for other organisations such as the Vatican. There were a lot of papal honours that were available, some of them fairly obscure and fairly exotic, and he converted to Catholicism, usefully, just in time to be able to flaunt those honours as well.

(27:22):
But he did try and keep his hand in. And in the early 1930s, he was getting into quite a lot of debt because his other business ventures weren’t going terribly well. So he started seeing whether he could flog a few knighthoods again. Unfortunately, the person he chose was the First World War hero called Commander Billyard-Leake, who was not only a war hero—he’d been in the First World War in the Royal Navy—but was extremely wealthy already and well connected. He had really no need to solicit an honour from anyone if he wanted to get it. He was a godparent to various influential people. He was a friend of the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII-to-be. So he really didn’t need to be approached, but he was, and he smelled a rat. And he was the first person to actually finger Gregory as one of these guys trying to sell honours.

(28:29):
And the government was slightly shamed into prosecuting Gregory. He went to prison very briefly, seven weeks at Wormwood Scrubs, and was fined 50 pounds, which, if you think of how much money he had made in the past, was a fairly minimal sum of money. When he came out of Wormwood Scrubs, there was a car waiting for him at the gates, and it whisked him off to the Channel ports to catch a ferry to France. In return for not spilling the beans about whom he’d sold honours to, he was given a pension so long as he stayed in Paris, and that’s what he did. So that was really the end of his career, but it took quite a long time to nail him, really. And it was largely, in the end, because his moneymaking schemes were actually falling apart.

Chris (29:29):
Let’s take a break and be right back with more.

(29:31):
Now, you touched upon this a little bit earlier, but the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act only ended up punishing him. Why was he in particular the fall guy?

Stephen (29:59):
Well, it was, as I say, it took about 10 years for them to get round to prosecuting him. One of the fallible points, the inadequacies, of the legislation was that someone who bought an honour was regarded as equally culpable as someone who sold an honour. So there was no incentive for people who were either approached to buy honours or had bought honours to actually peach on the people who were selling them, because they’d face the same penalties. Billyard-Leake was different to this because he didn’t need to get an honour. He didn’t want an honour, but he was approached by Gregory and Gregory’s colleagues, and he owned up to it and admitted it, and was quite prepared to stand up and to give evidence against Gregory. So that was really the circumstance of what happened.

Chris (31:09):
Can you talk to us about Gregory’s time in France, because some of the details were a bit sort of shadowy, but you mentioned he had a pension and he stayed in Paris, but he did end up in Dieppe and then had to escape when the Nazis invaded France. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit about his time there.

Stephen (31:26):
Yes. The exile in France was a quid pro quo for not revealing the names of people who’d bought honours from him or tried to buy honours from him. Living in the middle of Paris in the mid to late 1930s, he used to get a monthly brown envelope. Literally, he was the first of the brown envelopes that have subsequently come to be regarded as one of these subterfuges. So every month he’d get cash in a brown envelope as his sort of pension for keeping his mouth shut. He was not terribly happy. He’d lost all his influence, all his contacts. He was on his own, living on his own in a bedsit in Paris, drinking himself fairly steadily. He started spending time in Dieppe, which was a sort of resort that had quite a few British expats living there in the late 1930s. He spent more and more time there. When the Germans invaded in 1940, almost all of these people got on a boat and left for England. For some reason, he didn’t follow them. It’s possible that he thought he might be prosecuted, or prosecuted further, for his misdeeds. He stayed and stayed and stayed until the last ferries had gone. Then he fled in a rather ludicrous way, initially at least, on a bicycle with his pet dog in the pannier on the handlebars.

(33:16):
Anyway, he eventually met up with some French people who had a car and were fleeing westward, and he ended up in Finistère, which is right on the western shores of France, poking out from Brittany. He moved into a hotel there, and then the Germans arrived. So he initially stayed hidden in the hotel up in the attic. The owner of the hotel allowed him to stay there. Gradually, over the months, it all became a bit too much for him. He was getting stir crazy, essentially. He started wandering out at night to get some air, and he was spotted by the villagers, most of whom were quite happy that he was there. They realised he was English. He didn’t really speak French, but one shopkeeper shopped him to the local Germans. They arrested him more or less immediately and transferred him back to Paris, where he was put in a prison camp in the suburbs of Paris, which was holding other expatriates who’d not escaped, waiters, and even a few jockeys who’d worked for French trainers. He sickened there and was moved to a hospital for prisoners, and that’s where he died. So he died unknown. The British authorities knew nothing about him. He obviously hadn’t received his pension since the German invasion. This was a rather sad and sticky end for the guy. But after the war, what had happened to him was tracked down and people knew where he had been buried, and the government still didn’t want to say anything very much about him, certainly not in public.

Chris (35:23):
Yeah. Is there anything that could be drawn from his case that shows us a bit about how Britain deals with this type of scandal?

Stephen (35:32):
Yes. I think we’re always terribly discreet about these things. We try to brush things under the carpet. We don’t like admitting that our public life is a bit more spotty than we like to think. I always remember when I was on a local paper in Oxford many years ago, taking a veteran American journalist around Oxford to things like the police courts and the police station for the list of crimes and so on and so forth. He was a grizzled veteran American journalist of the sort you can well imagine. He made a scene in the police station because the police didn’t give him all the information that he thought they should do. I was rather embarrassed by this. This guy was saying, “Why aren’t you telling me what’s wrong? What are you keeping hidden? Why aren’t you telling me this?”

(36:37):
And this was some poor benighted police sergeant who was just trying to give a list of people who had their bicycles stolen and wasn’t expecting the sort of third degree from someone who’d been involved in the Watergate scandal a few years before. As we came out, I said, “Well, British public life is not very corrupt.” And he said one of the most significant things I ever heard as a journalist. He said, “How do you know?” And of course, it was all swept under the carpet. I’m not saying bicycle thefts were the source of some great scandal, but he was making the point that you have to be suspicious and sceptical about everything you are told. That was the lesson that taught me. And maybe that was why Gregory, by and large, got away with things for so long.

Chris (37:44):
And do you see a direct line from Gregory’s world to the later cash-for-honours scandal in British politics?

Stephen (37:50):
Yes. I mean, I think that this sort of behaviour still goes on because there are limited ways in which political parties can raise money, and they can do it legitimately and openly, but they’re still soliciting wealthy people to help subsidise them. We know that’s the case. It’s done slightly surreptitiously, sometimes a bit more openly than at others. Boris Johnson was a bit more open about these things. Political parties want the money; they need the cash. And if the odd honour helps grease the wheels, then I think they probably still do it, not just as blatantly as Gregory did.

Chris (38:45):
Yeah. And I suppose then, do you feel we’ve really learned from Gregory’s era, or does every generation just reinvent its own sort of version of the same bargain between money and power?

Stephen (38:56):
Yes, I think we do, really. I think organisations and political parties in particular are more discreet about it these days. A hundred years ago, when Gregory was operating, there were really no constraints or obligations to publish the sort of accounts that they have to do these days of the large-scale donations that they’re given. But, as we saw during the pandemic, people who pay money and make donations of sufficient size tend to get fast-tracked through a VIP lane, as happened with the supply of medical equipment at the start of COVID.

Chris (39:49):
Yeah, and it’s all kind of unravelling now, isn’t it? It never really works out in the long run, does it?

Stephen (39:55):
Well, hopefully not. I think you do need to be kept honest.

Chris (39:58):
Yes, totally. Totally. And Lloyd George argued that selling honours was cleaner than taking industrial money, which is quite interesting. Does that logic still echo in modern politics?

Stephen (40:09):
I suspect it probably does. And certainly the oxygen of publicity is, as someone said, a powerful disinfectant. Lloyd George said if some big manufacturer gives us money and then comes and wants some favour from us, we can tell him to go to hell because he’s got no other recourse to us. And Lloyd George, presciently, said, “Trouble is, you can’t defend it in public.” And I think that’s still the case. People are much more vigilant these days, I think. And if anything Gregory taught us, it was that there is a need for the oxygen of publicity.

Chris (41:01):
Yeah, indeed. And what does Gregory’s story tell us about Britain’s comfort with discreet forms of corruption?

Stephen (41:08):
Well, it tells us that human beings, and the human character, are pretty venal in many ways, and I don’t think it changes that much. I’m sure if someone set up an office in Whitehall these days, they would still get a trail of people making discreet inquiries about how to get a knighthood. Of course, the House of Lords has changed since his day, in that there are life peerages now, not hereditary peerages, which was one of the attractions for people who wanted to be made peers. They would be passing on the peerage to their sons and future generations. That doesn’t apply anymore. So that at least is one avenue which is partially closed down, because who knows what life peers sometimes have to pay to get consideration.

Chris (42:08):
Yeah, indeed, indeed. And if Gregory were around now, if there’s one question you could ask him, what would it be?

Stephen (42:19):
That’s a very good question. Well, one thing we haven’t touched on is the suspicions surrounding the death of his lady friend, Edith Ross, who died quite suddenly just when Gregory was in need of a lot of money quite quickly, and she had that sort of money. She fell sick and died fairly suspiciously. Whether he was actually responsible is an open question and can’t be proved anymore because he was in exile by the time the police got round to investigating it, and he was never charged with anything. I’d like to ask him whether he actually did murder Edith Ross.

Chris (43:09):
And it could explain why he stayed in France when the Nazis invaded, because there must be something serious that kept him from coming back.

Stephen (43:17):
Yes, I suspect that was certainly a part of it. He was worried about that. And there was a very senior Scotland Yard detective who was very anxious in those pre-days, when police authorities and extradition were not as easy or as common as they are now. There was a senior detective who seriously thought he was onto something.

Chris (43:47):
Yeah. What should listeners take away from this story, especially those interested in secrecy and power?

Stephen (43:55):
That it’s quite easy to subvert power and undermine it, particularly if you have receptive politicians. And I was a political correspondent during some of the cash-for-questions, cash-for-honours period, and that showed that human nature hasn’t changed very much.

Chris (44:23):
Yeah. Well, thank you. Well, Stephen, where can listeners find out more about you and this book and your other work?

Stephen (44:28):
Well, this is my 12th book, so there’s quite a back catalogue, really. My website is stephenbateswriter.com, and this book, which is coming out on the 20th of November, is called THE MAN WHO SOLD HONOURS, published by Icon Books. So that gives the full story in all its grisly detail. And if people want to look at my website, they’ll see details of my previous books, several true crime books of various ne’er-do-wells over the past 150 years.

Chris (45:05):
Yes. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been really great chatting with you.

Stephen (45:09):
Thank you very much, Chris. I’ve enjoyed it very much indeed.

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