The rise of the online bodyguard
The former detective who protected MPS from threats is now seeing growing demand from CEOS. Cara Mcgoogan reports
As Bernard Looney readied himself for his first day in office as the new chief executive of BP earlier this month, about 100 environmental activists were preparing a special welcome of their own. A group of Greenpeace protesters blocked the central London headquarters of the multinational oil and gas company with solar panels and oil barrels, in a demonstration timed to coincide with Looney’s arrival in the role.
It’s the kind of targeting that chief executives and company directors are going to grow ever more accustomed to. Such, at any rate, is the view of Philip Grindell, a former Metropolitan Police detective inspector who now runs a company offering threat investigation, security advice and consulting services to high-profile individuals who want to feel safer in public.
“Eco-terrorism is going to be an increasing threat,” he tells The Daily
Telegraph, in his first national newspaper interview. “We’ve had environmentalists outside BP offices when the new chief executive started, people digging up lawns at [Cambridge] university, and boards of directors being targeted because their companies aren’t considered to be ecologically friendly enough.”
In short, the number of cases of businesses being targeted “because of their environmental standards or positions” has been steadily growing.
“I think this is going to be increasingly a problem where climate change and other issues are becoming more and more important and relevant to business strategy and where [companies] are not seen by the eco groups to be [sufficiently] forward thinking; certainly they’ll be targeting the chief executives or directors, and one of the tactics we’ve seen in other areas is them targeting their homes and families.”
His own firm, Defuse Global, has already represented one prominent business person who was under threat. He cannot divulge details, but what he will say is the business person in question hired him to “assist with the online abuse they received and to support their security team in assessing which might pose a threat”.
Grindell, 53, came to personal security after a career with the Met spanning almost three decades, which lasted until November. In 2016, after Jo Cox, the Labour MP, was killed by Thomas Mair, a constituent who held far-right views, he launched the parliamentary liaison and investigations team (PLAIT) – a protection unit for MPS.
“I was the person brought in to stop it happening again,” he says. “I was tasked with going into Parliament and setting up a team to protect politicians and looked at all their online abuse.”
Last year, threats to politicians increased by 150 per cent, with MPS from across the political spectrum reporting death threats, physical and verbal abuse, anti-semitic hate speech, Islamophobia, and sexism. “It was a horrendous year,” says Grindell. “We saw politicians breaking down, questioning how they voted and what they should say on TV and in
Parliament. There was a real degree of hyper-vigilance and fear.”
Grindell’s team foiled a plot by far-right supporter Jack Renshaw to kill MP Rosie Cooper, and helped Anna Soubry, then an MP, when her partner and 83-yearold mother received threats. He had to turn down requests to help people outside Westminster, including crime commissioners and journalists, but did work with Laura Kuenssberg and Kay Burley, the BBC and Sky News journalists. Then, within a fortnight of retiring from the Met, he received a call: a “global icon” was scared for their life. “It was a very famous person who was getting death threats,” says Grindell.
With nascent plans to take his experience of celebrity safety into the private sector, he agreed to help. He discovered the death threats were coming from someone in the UK who had mental health issues. Given they were based in another part of the country, Grindell deemed the intent “not credible” and passed the intelligence back to the person’s own security team. “What we’re able to do is monitor that person’s movements and see if they are moving, and in this case they weren’t.”
Grindell’s inbox has since been flooded with requests from athletes, chief executives and personalities.
When we meet at a busy London café, Grindell is happy to speak more openly about his work in Parliament. In his view, PLAIT should have been established sooner, following attacks against Nigel Jones, then a Liberal
Democrat MP, whose assistant was killed when a constituent slashed at them with a sword in 2000, and Stephen Timms, who was stabbed by an Islamist over the Iraq war in 2010. “No one joined the dots,” he reflects. “Politicians get abuse from lots of people, but attacks are always local [to their constituencies].”
His focus is now on business people and celebrities, such as Caroline Flack, the Love Island presenter who took her own life on February 15 – a tragedy which has, in part, been blamed on claims of online harassment.
“Anyone who is out there like that now,” he says, tapping Flack’s picture in a newspaper, “I wish they would give me a call, because I genuinely think we can make a difference.”
Grindell’s team would have monitored Flack’s messages and filtered out actual threats, as well as offered psychological support and physical security. “I say to [clients], ‘Carry on doing what you’re doing and we’ll do the worrying for you,’” says Grindell, whose consultancy fees start at £2,500. “[Abuse] gets in your mind and starts playing tricks on you.
“People assume that getting a protection team or bodyguard is going to solve the problem, but when they lock the door after the security team goes home and you start looking at their phones, it’s all there still. The psychological harm is the most dramatic.”
His investigators assess clients’ vulnerabilities, what information about them is in the public domain, and examine the kind of material they’re receiving to see if it’s criminal or not. If a client doesn’t want to go to the police – and often they don’t – Defuse Global analyses the threat to see how serious it is.
“I do look at some reality shows and think, ‘You have no idea what you’re dealing with,’” says Grindell. “Understanding threats to public figures is niche and complex.”
High-profile women are disproportionately targeted with extremely personal and sexually violent abuse, he says, criticising the lack of action against those responsible. “The internet is an easy place to do it with very few consequences, and we don’t really seem to be challenging it properly and dealing with it,” he says. “I think women are increasingly vulnerable.”
As for the Government’s White Paper on online harms, cracking down on social media companies is not necessarily the answer, he argues. “My personal view is, we need to work more with mobile and internet providers [on] how they manage their customers. If you have misused the internet, there should be repercussions.”
Meanwhile, the increasing threat to those in the public eye, coupled with police cuts, will create an environment where private security firms will thrive, he predicts. “We often lost the very best people to anti-corruption teams in big charities; money laundering and security teams at banks,” he says. “Private organisations can offer more money.” And he, in turn, has access to the best software and security tech: “We didn’t have that in the police.”
‘I say, carry on doing what you’re doing and we’ll do the worrying for you’