A sultry former Miss India turned London party girl dates prominent newspaper editors, several Members of Parliament and a junior government minister. Using her high-level connections, she lands a research job, complete with security clearance, in the House of Commons. In her spare time she may have befriended an alleged Libyan intelligence officer, a cousin of Colonel Gaddafi's. As Professor Henry Higgins exclaimed in My Fair Lady, "How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!"
Ever since the infamous 1963 Profumo affair, when the revelation that the mistress of War Minister John Profumo was also carrying on with a Soviet naval attache helped bring about the downfall of Harold Macmillan's government, sex scandals have been as absorbing a British pastime as royal weddings. Six years ago, Trade Secretary Cecil Parkinson was forced to resign when it became public knowledge that his mistress was about to bear his illegitimate child. Sixteen years ago, Air Force Minister Lord Lambton lost his job when photographers caught him in bed with two prostitutes. As the tabloids breathlessly chronicled the latest ado, political circles in London fell into that giddy state that only a really juicy scandal can produce. Even a former Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Whitelaw, commented sarcastically: "Very interesting in many ways," he said of the Pamella Bordes affair, "and rather amusing."
Bordes burst into celebrity two weeks ago when a News of the World reporter posing as a businessman claimed he paid the luscious, high-living 27-year-old the equivalent of $850 to strip naked and spend the night. Rather than fulfill his part of the transaction, the newshound raced out to file his expose, under the headline (pounds)500 AND I'M VERY DISCREET. Some tabloids drooled over Bordes as a high-class call girl (the tonier papers left it at "socialite") and hunted down her many eminent admirers, including Sunday Times Editor Andrew Neil (quickly dubbed "Randy Andy") and Observer Editor Donald Trelford ("Dirty Don"), as well as Sports Minister Colin Moynihan, who escorted Bordes to the Conservative Winter Ball. Tory M.P. David Shaw, it turned out, had been so taken with her talents that, with the help of fellow Tory M.P. Henry Bellingham, he hired Bordes as a researcher in the House.
For her 15 minutes of fame, Bordes went into hiding in Paris. But when her businessman husband was tracked down there, he explained that theirs was a marriage of convenience to help Bordes escape arranged matrimony in India. However titillating, the tale had yet to live up to the epic proportions of the Profumo case. Bordes' liaisons didn't seem all that dangerous. One newspaper even labeled the Bordes affair a mere "storm in a B cup."