That didn’t stop him, in later years, being elected London Mayor. Twice. Sex and expenses combined in a damaging way for Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary. Her husband, on her staff payroll, watched adult films and then claimed for them on parliamentary expenses. Even the famously grey John Major admitted he’d started a four-year fling with Edwina Currie in 1984 – although this was only discovered in 2002, when Currie serialised her diaries.

What made the sexual diversions of John Major’s ministers such big news in the early Nineties was the contradiction with his government’s proclamation that it was time to get “Back to Basics” – a drive to return to family values and to recognise the importance of stable marriage. Yet Heritage Minister David Mellor’s family values didn’t seem to be very important to him when news leaked of his affair with a 30-year-old actress, Antonia de Sancha.

The toe-sucking and the sex-in-a-Chelsea strip made for good copy but De Sancha later claimed that those details were made up by her publicist Max Clifford. “It was the first of many nails in John Major’s coffin,” says David Wooding, the associate political editor of The Sun, who worked for the paper in 1992 on what he calls the “bombshell” story of David Mellor.

“The affair was just the start of the shambles which eventually led to the fall of the Major government,” he says. “This was not just prurience on the part of the newspapers. These ministers were preaching morality through the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign while getting up to all sorts of shenanigans in their private lives.” David Mellor resigned in September 1992 – two months after his affair was first revealed. Sleaze had stuck to the Major administration and it was becoming corrosive.

“My view was that lawmakers cannot be lawbreakers,” said Michael Brown about his resignation from the same government in 1994. Brown was a government whip. The fact he was gay was an “open secret” among his colleagues and the Parliamentary press. He’d been on holiday to Barbados with a man who – at 20 – was still under the gay age of consent at the time (which was 21). Pictures found their way to the News Of The World and, says Brown, “John Major needed me like he needed a hole in the head. We’d had David Mellor 18 months before. I could not morally continue.”

A POLITICIAN’S LIFE

The Profumo Affair Revisited