Psst: wanna buy a new year's honour? Once it was simple. And now? Well, don’t rule it out | Stephen Bates

And so the new year honours list is out. The people – some of them at least – have spoken: here comes a fresh tranche of the great and good.

Many questions remain about this process of elevation, but it’s worth saying that in the past, there were many more. As we think about the probity of politics now, from PPE procurement scandals to a one-time MEP bribed by the Russians, one might frown – but things have been degrees worse.

A hundred years ago, if you wanted a knighthood, say, a baronetcy or even a peerage and, worthy or not, were prepared to pay for it, you called on a man named Arthur Maundy Gregory, who had set up in a large office almost directly opposite Downing Street.

Liveried servants, their uniforms so closely modelled on those of House of Commons messengers that you could not tell the difference, would usher you into Gregory’s office, where the man himself, immaculately dressed and usually wearing a monocle, would greet you and point out the framed photographs of the crowned heads of Europe on his walls. They included the future King George VI, at whose wedding to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later the queen mother) he had been an usher.

Despite his respectable appearance and ingratiating manner, Gregory was a scoundrel and a chancer. He had had various careers, as an actor, impresario, editor of vanity publishing magazines, club owner, self-proclaimed spy master and police informant and would maybe eventually even become a murderer. As he chatted, the telephone on his desk would ring and he would explain that No 10 was calling, without mentioning that he himself lived in an apartment at number 10, though Hyde Park Terrace, not Downing Street.

Gregory would explain to you the scale of fees to help grease the wheels to the next birthday honours release: £10,000 for a knighthood, £40,000 for a baronetcy and £50,000 for a peerage – huge sums; multiply by 47 to get an idea of the modern equivalents. His commission probably totalled £30,000 a year and the rest went to party funds, mainly the prime minister, David Lloyd George’s. The hard-faced men who had done rather well out of the first world war might not have liked the “Welsh wizard”, but they were prepared to pay an honours tout like Gregory for their titles. Some of them, shovelled towards honours, were out-and-out crooks – Gregory either didn’t know, or didn’t care.

Lloyd George himself did not look too closely where the money was coming from. As he told a Tory politician later: “You and I know perfectly well it is a far cleaner method of filling the party chest than the methods used in the US or the Socialist party … Here a man gives … to the party and gets a baronetcy. If he comes to the leader of the party … and says you must do this or that, we can tell him to go to the devil … The worst of it is that you cannot defend it in public.”

Eventually, the awards got so disreputable that King George V complained about the rogues he was expected to confer honours on. “Disagreeable and distasteful” he said, privately of course. And the Tories also objected to their own potential donors being stolen by Lloyd George’s fixers. After they got into power in 1924, the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act was finally passed, but the only person who has ever been tried under the legislation was Gregory himself; he went to prison for two months (freed after seven weeks for good behaviour) and was fined £50 with 50 guineas costs. On release from Wormwood Scrubs, he was met by a taxi and taken immediately into exile in Paris, where he received a monthly pension (in brown envelopes) for keeping his mouth shut about who he’d sold to. In those days, baronetcies (scarcely awarded these days) and peerages were hereditary and one or two third-generation descendants of Gregory’s honorands are still knocking about.

Couldn’t happen now, could it? No, but let’s not be complacent. The other day, a friend of mine, a highly respectable professional, happened to be reading my book on Gregory when an unexpected and startling email popped into their mail box. “Have you ever considered independent recognition for (your) career impact, through attaining a royal honour such as an MBE, OBE, CBE or even a knighthood or damehood? Your leadership … feels very aligned with what these honours and awards look to recognise.”

The company which sent the email says its clients are 6.5 times more likely to attain a royal honour and that it has an 80% success rate for king’s awards for enterprise. Its fees, it says, are based on the length of an honours nomination that it prepares for clients. I’m not sure Maundy Gregory could have put it better himself.