Departures of note

Maundy Gregory, a theatre producer turned political fixer, became the only person ever convicted under Britain's Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 after he was caught in 1932 trying to sell a peerage to Lieutenant Commander E. W. Billyard Leake for £12,000. Leake feigned interest, alerted the police, and Gregory was arrested. He pleaded guilty, possibly to avoid naming embarrassed buyers in court, and was fined £50 and jailed for two months in 1933. The identities of those who had purchased honours through him were never revealed.

Gregory had been brokering honours since around 1918, when he approached the Liberal Party to arrange payments in exchange for peerages. He later worked for Prime Minister David Lloyd George, gathering funds for a new party. At the time, prices ranged from £10,000 for a knighthood to £40,000 for a baronetcy, and Gregory was estimated to have transferred £1–2 million to the Liberal and Conservative parties. He used his earnings to buy the Whitehall Gazette newspaper, the Ambassador Club in Soho, and the Deepdene Hotel in Dorking, which gained a reputation as a brothel. He reportedly gathered gossip about celebrities' sex lives and used it for blackmail, though these claims are not verified.

Gregory's activities extended beyond British honours. After the Conservative government blocked his scheme in 1927, he sold non-British titles, including Serbian and Ukrainian noble titles and papal honours, and continued accepting money for British peerages he could no longer deliver. He also claimed to have worked for MI5 and MI6, though official records only confirm his service as a private in the Irish Guards. He was linked to the disappearance of politician Victor Grayson in 1920, who had reportedly discovered Gregory's honours-selling and suspected him of forging Roger Casement's diaries, but Grayson's biographer suggested the disappearance may have been unrelated.

In 1932, shortly before his arrest, Gregory inherited £18,000 from his platonic companion Edith Rosse, who died days after changing her will at his request. Scotland Yard later exhumed her body to investigate possible poisoning, but pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury found no evidence. Gregory declared bankruptcy in 1933 and moved to Paris under an assumed name, living on a £2,000 annual pension from sources close to the Conservative Party. He died on 28 September 1941, either at an internment camp or at the Hospital de Val-de-Grâce in Paris, after being captured during the German occupation of France.