There was indeed a shadowy world of late-night parties where middle-class English roses would do all sorts of things for the right price, as anyone who experienced the heady days of petrodollar fever will remember.
It began with Opec’s quadrupling of crude oil prices in 1973, continued by virtue of arms sales to the Middle East in the 1980s and petered out only in the early 1990s, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. During that time Arab money flooded into Britain and with it insanely rich Arab party givers.
The word party means different things to different people. To some it denotes canapés and gossip, for others it means beer and barbecues, but for this particular group of men “party” meant just one thing: sex and lots of it.
From the rococo salons of Park Lane to the Royal Crescent hotel in Bath, where some of the parties took place, a steady flow of available British girls was required.
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Lady Agatha Turnbull, now long dead, used her Jacobean farmhouse near Marlborough for this purpose. The swimming pool and pool house lent themselves well to discreet weekend parties. Turnbull knew that for a party to be a proper success, sex had to be on the menu, and so she, like others, began recruiting girls she knew socially.
At one memorable party she produced a well-bred country girl from an army background who went down a treat. Then there was the daughter of the younger son of a duke’s second cousin. Why did they do it? Cycling to cleaning jobs in Putney from bedsits in Camden just did not pay enough. They had, as Lady Bracknell might have said, position but no money to keep it up.
It is not difficult to see how a girl might have fallen into the seemingly harmless and easy life of a part-time hooker back then, when opportunities were more limited for ambitious young women. For the pushy or shameless today there is always lap-dancing, with the comfort of knowing that any post-show contact with customers is strictly forbidden. But back then, posh or not, feisty young girls who wanted it all and wanted it now fell into the trap of prostitution.
One night in 1988, for example, Emma, a deb whose parents’ divorce had left her in financial woe, got a telephone call from an older woman demanding that she appear at the Berkeley Square ball. A wealthy middle-aged man awaited, whisking her first to the Palm Beach Casino in Berkeley Street and then to his hotel in Marble Arch. When he proffered £500 the next morning, more than she earned in a month, she rushed off to pay her phone bill and bought a second-hand Mini for £200.
Against her better judgment she returned the next night and accompanied her new client on a business trip to Dublin. The pattern was set. Soon other friends joined her. If only she had known how she was being short-changed.
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Many girls really did make £10,000 per night, particularly those who worked for “Madame Claude” in Paris, where sums of up to £20,000 for a weekend in 1991 were quoted. One Arab prince apparently paid $1m to sleep with a film star.
How could you spot them? There were always telltale signs: girls without family money or good jobs living in smart flats they could not possibly afford, along with designer dresses, shoes and handbags, taking weekend trips abroad to unspecified locations.
A case in point was a budding actress with a BMW complete with car phone (a hot 1980s accessory), Chanel-suited and Hermès-bagged, simpering about her “boyfriend”, a foppish actor who was in reality gay. It was the perfect cover for her cosy financial arrangement with a Sudanese oil trader who financed her expensive mews house in north London.
Some of these girls have married well, spectacularly one might say in certain cases, and most still live in constant fear of exposure. Anne-Marie, former wife of Matthew Barrett, the Barclays bank chairman, was outed as a former topless model and companion of the Saudi millionaire Adnan Khashoggi during their divorce. God alone knows what a family division judge would make of a serious lapse.
As yet almost nobody has been caught. There were one or two close shaves, such as when the French police broke up a notorious ring operating in Paris in 1992. Only draconian French reporting restrictions and libel laws prevented clients’ names being revealed, but the guilty knew who they were — and were shaken again last week. The glitzy 1980s are a time many well-heeled ladies would prefer to forget.