Share via Email Lord Lambton, one of two Tory ministers who resigned from Ted Heath's government as a result of call girl scandals, told MI5 that he had thrown himself into a "frenzied" round of vigorous "gardening and debauchery" to get over losing a lengthy battle to use his father's aristocratic title. The second minister, Lord Jellicoe, who was a cabinet minister and whose father had commanded the fleet at the battle of Jutland, told a secret security inquiry that he had started using call girls because of the "exceptionally heavy burden of work" he faced, including preparing for the arrival of the Ugandan Asians.
Anthony Lambton, like Alan Clark, was also a Tory defence minister but has probably lived an even more colourful life than his lustful successor.
He was exposed when the security services learned that Colin Levy, the husband of the call girl Norma Levy, had photographs and a four- minute film showing him naked in bed with two women and "smoking something which was alleged to be cannabis". It has been long rumoured that Ms Levy, one of a strong "international vice ring", had named a "third minister" and even possibly a "fourth minister" when she was interviewed by the police, but the officially "sanitised" cabinet files released today at the National Archives in Kew blank out all references to possible names.
A separate Downing Street file shows the lengths that the authorities went to when Peter Hain, now a Labour cabinet minister, claimed in a small Liberal magazine, Liberator which he edited at the time that Geoffrey Ripon, then also a Tory cabinet minister, was the third man involved. The only hint in the files released today is a reference to a third minister by Ms Levy, when she was interviewed by the police. She told them she had not met him, but that one of her other girls may have done so.
The Tory sex scandals of may seem tame by some more recent examples, but the Profumo affair which had almost toppled the previous Conservative government in was a recent memory and there was an immediate Security Commission inquiry into whether national security had been breached in either case. Lord Lambton had famously been asked in a television interview by Robin Day: "Why should a man of your social position and charm and personality have to go to whores for sex?
