The hearsay mill went into overdrive when it emerged the Spectator’s writer was having a scandalous affair with David Blunkett. Now the reality in regards to the ‘FOURTH’ man in her romantic menage may be revealed

For a few heady weeks 20 years ago, its name was on everyone’s lips. Amid a frenzy of intrigue and infidelity the Spectator magazine, known for its high-minded political coverage, was squirming with an altogether racier reputation.

Stories of sexual shenanigans and casual adultery cascading from the weekly’s central London office became so frequent it was dubbed ‘The Sextator’.

Many of these gossipy tales featured some of its better-known columnists but the most lurid of them all concerned the tangled love life of the magazine’s married publisher Kimberly Quinn, who was revealed to have had an affair with the blind former Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett.

She was also involved with parliamentary sketch writer and broadcaster Simon Hoggart and, as obituaries confirmed yesterday, Sandy Leitch, the multi-millionaire Labour peer.

Lord Leitch, who died last month aged 76, was mocked as ‘the fourth man’ in this exotic romantic menage.

The bespectacled, softly spoken entrepreneur and personal finance tycoon was a most unlikely Romeo. Like his close friend, the former prime minister Gordon Brown, he was a model of Scottish rectitude. Or so it seemed.

But for a torrid few months after divorcing his first wife and before meeting his second, the coalminer’s son was a notch on the society hostess’s bedpost.

It was said that he was so embarrassed when the episode became public that he arranged to have it excised from his Wikipedia entry.

Happily for Lord Leitch, the mockery soon subsided, as his unmasking coincided with news that Mr Blunkett had been confirmed as the father of Mrs Quinn’s then two-year-old son following a legally binding DNA test.

He couldn’t entirely escape the saga, however, which by the time it had all blown over had provided enough material for a ribald farce – Who’s The Daddy? – penned by two of The Spectator’s own theatre critics.

The former insurance company chief is understood to have met Mrs Quinn – then married to her first husband, investment banker Michael Fortier – in 1996, the same year he was divorced from his first wife Valerie Hodson, mother of his three elder children. His company, Allied Dunbar, sponsored the Spectator’s annual political lecture.

Power and politics have always been a formidable aphrodisiac. And, at the time, the then plain Mr Leitch was a rising figure in the New Labour establishment and a friend of the then Prince Charles. The coquettish Mrs Quinn was entranced. Some time in 1999 the two are said to have begun a physical relationship.

When Allied Dunbar was taken over by Zurich Financial Services UK in 2001, Leitch, who was made chief executive, began to sponsor the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards. And it was at one such awards lunch that, ironically, the Scotsman introduced Blunkett – now Lord Blunkett – as guest of honour.

It was around this time that the former minister had replaced him as Mrs Quinn’s lover. She was reported to have mischievously remarked: ‘I have always wondered what it would be like to have sex with a blind man.’

Mr Blunkett later announced that Leitch was to become chairman of the Government’s New Deal Taskforce and he was elevated to the House of Lords by Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was even introduced into the Lords by Blair’s chief fundraiser, Lord Levy.

Not long afterwards, in 2002, Leitch met Noelle Dowd, a corporate strategist two decades his junior. They married the following year and had three children, the affair with Kimberly consigned to history – or so he hoped.

But in 2004 news of her relationship with Blunkett, which had ended acrimoniously, was sensationally disclosed by the now defunct News of the World. Soon after came news of her dalliance with Mr Hoggart, who was also employed at the Spectator.

Suddenly no secrets at the magazine were safe from exposure and it was just a matter of time before the then editor Boris Johnson’s affair with Petronella Wyatt, daughter of diarist and former Labour grandee Lord Wyatt of Weeford, emerged.

Johnson first became close to Petronella, then the magazine’s deputy editor, when he was made editor.

‘Petsy’, then 34, was a well-known figure in London in her own right: described perhaps unfairly as a ‘pouting socialite’. Her love life had been equally colourful. Known to admire older men, she once complained about being pursued by ‘a fat Arab who thinks he’s engaged to me’.

Another figure to find his love life in the cross-hairs of media speculation was the magazine’s brilliant columnist Rod Liddle. Mr Liddle left his then wife for an assistant on the magazine who was 21 years his junior and later became pregnant with his child. It is only fair to point out that the two have now been very happily married for many years.

Is it any wonder that someone would want to turn all this pulsating sexual tension into a play? Even so, it is not difficult to imagine how awkward Lord Leitch must have found it when his name was linked to the louche revelations.

He was, after all, no media playboy but a serious City figure who, despite his impoverished background – his father died when he was 18 months old and his mother was a cleaner – had made something of his life.

His involvement with Kimberly, whose second husband was respected Vogue magazine executive Stephen Quinn, was hardly a secret. She had attended parties at Leitch’s £2 million mansion block flat near the Royal Albert Hall and met one of his daughters, Jacqueline.

Speaking at the time his link to the femme fatale emerged, his first wife, who met her husband when she was 20, said: ‘All I know is that my daughter said she saw Kimberly at one of Sandy’s parties. Because Jacqueline didn’t know who she was, she said: ‘Who’s that?’ Someone at the party said something about the Spectator.

‘As soon as Jacqueline read about Kimberly Quinn and David Blunkett in the newspapers she rang me up to tell me about the party.

‘Sandy is a different man from the one I first knew. He’s now so powerful and wealthy. I don’t know whether he would be attracted to Kimberly.

‘When I first met him he was clever, but poor. My father even gave him financial help.

‘Sandy was a family man at first, but then he became a workaholic, that’s why I divorced him.’

After his walk-on part in the Spectator frolics, obscurity in the world of insurance beckoned for Lord Leitch. It was four years before he spoke in the House of Lords and in 2015 he was named as one of 29 peers who failed to speak in the Lords during the entirety of the 2010 to 2015 Parliament.

Not once, however, did he speak publicly about his Kimberly episode.