Gregory targeted wealthy but unscrupulous individuals who were hoping to buy themselves class. For example with Political parties' needed funding for the May 2005 general election campaign. The two largest parties were heavily dependent on undeclared loan funding to get themselves through an expensive campaign. The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 ("the 2000 Act"), embodied the most extensive reforms of British political finance since the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. Under the 2000 Act there was no legal requirement for parties to declare loans taken out on "commercial" terms. The Electoral Commission failed to give an advisory opinion before the general election of 2005 on the meaning of a loan on "commercial terms". The distinction between the rate of interest paid by banks to depositors and demanded from borrowers was not the only ambiguity about the meaning of "commercial terms". It is alleged that Michael Fawcett, a former valet to the prince and an indispensable aide, helped to co-ordinate Mahfouz’s application for British citizenship and even helped to “upgrade” the proposed honour from OBE to CBE.

Stanley Baldwin appointed John C. Davidson as chairman of the Conservative Party organization. Davidson had a major problem raising money for the Conservative Party to fight future elections. One of the problems was Gregory who had for several years been successfully working for David Lloyd George in raising funds for the Liberal Party. As Robert Rhodes James has pointed out: "Davidson's strategy had a brilliant simplicity. He introduced what was in effect a spy into the Gregory organization, whose task it was to obtain the list of Gregory's clients. Davidson then saw to it that no one on that list obtained any honour or award of any kind. Gregory's position depending upon his ability to deliver the goods for which his clients had paid him. By ensuring that none of his clients received any award, Davidson devastatingly undermined Gregory's entire scheme of operations." In the 1993 novel Closed Circle by Robert Goddard, the main character, Guy Horton, meets Gregory, who employs him to encourage wealthy businessmen to use his services to obtain peerages. Although Rosse in fact died in her new home on Hyde Park Terrace, her connection to Gregory is forever associated with the Abbey Road building, and reports that her ghost stalks its corridors have cropped up over the years. The 1982 book Abbey Road by Brian Southall, Peter Vince and Allan Rouse says: “There are those who have claimed that Abbey Road is haunted by an elegant lady ghost; if this is the case then it’s likely to be Edith Rosse, although she did not die there.”

More Queer Goings-On at Porter’s Georgian House

Shortly after being demobbed, The Bioscope cinema journal reports Reid’s appointment as manager of the Royal Cinema in Belfast (11 September 1919 – The Bioscope – London, London, England, p.95) From here he finds employment as Regional Manager with Ideal Films Ltd in Dublin (The Bioscope 27 May 1920, p.9). Interestingly, the company’s founders, Simon and Harry Rowson (born Rosenbaum to Russian immigrant parents in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill) played a key role in a legendary biopic of David Lloyd George, shelved rather unceremoniously in 1918. The film’s screenwriter was journalist and historian, Sir Sidney Low and its director, Maurice Elvey. Low’s niece incidentally, was Ivy Low Litvinov, wife of the Bolshevik minister Maxim Litvinov. Rowland, Peter (1975). "The Man Who Won the War, 1916–1918". Lloyd George. London: Barrie & Jenkins Ltd. p.448. ISBN 0214200493. Vernon Kell and Sir Basil Thomson the head of Special Branch, were also convinced that the Zinoviev Letter was genuine. Kell showed the letter to Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister. It was agreed that the letter should be kept secret but someone leaked news of the letter to the Times and the Daily Mail. The letter was published in these newspapers four days before the 1924 General Election and contributed to the defeat of MacDonald and the Labour Party. Grayson & Mann’s’s friend, E.J.B Allen (Ernest John Bartlett Allen) sub-editor of The Syndicalist emigrated to New Zealand in 1913 to become editor of The Maoriland Worker, a newspaper that played a crucial role in Grayson’s wartime development and pro-war campaigning. In the summer of 1921 Hilda Porter and the Georgian House were drawn into an altogether different kind of drama. This one took place in the divorce courts and featured Ethel Jane Blyth MBE, daughter of Sir John Brunner and widow of the late James Audley Blyth, heir to the Brunner-Mond fortune (the company later merged with several other chemical firms to form ICI). According to the divorce hearings, a Liverpool merchant by the name of Colin Woollham Anderson had rented a Georgian House suite and was conducting an affair with Mrs Blyth. The couple had met in Cannes the previous year. According to his wife, Anderson was also renting rooms at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool during this same period (Illustrated Police News 21 July 1921, p.2). The story became national headlines.

After the election it was claimed that Arthur Maundy Gregory and Sidney Reilly, had forged the letter and that Major George Joseph Ball (1885-1961), a MI5 officer, leaked it to the press. In 1927 Ball went to work for the Conservative Central Office where he pioneered the idea of spin-doctoring. Later, Desmond Morton, who worked under Hugh Sinclair, at MI6 claimed that it was Stewart Menzies who sent the Zinoviev letter to the Daily Mail. Maundy Gregory worked as an honours broker under Conservative, Liberal and Coalition governments, securing funds for their parties and significant profits for himself. As Prime Minister, David Lloyd George established a general tariff for titles, which Gregory enforced and from which he took commission. In this period titles were given to ex-convicts, including one man convicted of trading with the enemy in the First World War, and un-discharged bankrupts. Even during this peak period, the sale of honours was found offensive by the public and the press. Larry Arnn (13 October 2015). Churchill's Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government. Thomas Nelson. pp.155–. ISBN 978-1-59555-531-1. In September 1924 MI5 intercepted a letter signed by Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern in the Soviet Union, and Arthur McManus, the British representative on the committee. In the letter British communists were urged to promote revolution through acts of sedition. Hugh Sinclair, head of MI6, provided "five very good reasons" why he believed the letter was genuine. However, one of these reasons, that the letter came "direct from an agent in Moscow for a long time in our service, and of proved reliability" was incorrect. Within months of the ICI chairman’s death in 1929, and with Mond at the head of the company, Saul Bron and ICI had cleared the path to sign a multi-million pound deal with Stalin’s Soviet Union (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 21 April 1930, p.5). Hilda Porter Sails to the Canaries

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Makgill’s Anti-German Union (later the British Empire Union) was based at 346 Strand, just around the corner from the Georgian House. Grayson had been a fierce campaigner on anti-German military build-up since his days in Parliament in 1907. The revelation threatens to reignite questions over Boris Johnson’s honours list, which was published last month but did not include at least one other MP who had expected to be given a peerage – leading that MP, Nigel Adams, to resign in protest.

Following a complaint about Gregory by Edith Marion Rosse's niece, who expected to be left money in her will, the police exhumed the body on 28th April 1933. The coffin was waterlogged. Bernard Spilsbury, the forensic scientist used by the police, had little doubt that the burial arrangements Gregory had made were intentional, since "the effect of water on decaying remains would make it impossible to detect the presence of certain poisons." Eric H Albury was born Henry Rothenburg in 1879. He had spent his early career working for the British Government’s Cape Colonial Services, attached to the High Commissioner of South Africa, Joubert Brunt. During the war Albury had served with the 3rd (Reserve) Wessex Field Ambulance R.A.M.C. under his family name Private Henry Rothenburg (2202). He served in Germany and suffered gassing. He was demobbed in August 1919 and was subsequently was taken on by Stoll Pictures. We see Clifford Reid for the first time in the 1911 census occupying a room at a modest lodging house run by Arthur Poulton and his wife Rose at Regina Road, New Street, Chelmsford. A kinematograph operator from Skipton and a vocalist with the Lyric Company are lodging with him. The census sheet lists him as ‘Clifford Stuart Reid’ born in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire in 1883. His occupation is recorded as ‘Theatre Manager Proprietor’. Names included a knighthood for Joseph Kagan, later convicted of false accounting, and businessman Eric Miller, who committed suicide while his firm was being investigated.Only one person has ever been convicted under the Act – Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George's "honours broker", in 1933 – whose same behaviour in 1918 was the main cause of the Act in the first place. Gregory's 1933 conviction was secured over his attempts to broker the selling of Vatican knighthoods in the UK. To this date, the Act has never been successfully used to convict anyone involved in the sale of UK honours. Despite the passage of time, interest in the story has never disappeared and now Lord David Clark, a former Colne Valley MP himself and a leading authority on Grayson, is to give a special talk on the case in Huddersfield.