Few political sex scandals have provided as much fodder for entertainment as the Monica-gate scandal. Sordid, explicit and graphic in nature, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair proved to be a sensational hit from start to end. From the first words that were so famously recalled: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”, to the final admission of “an inappropriate relationship”, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky remained the stars of the show with Kenneth Starr, the Independent Counsel Prosecutor deliberating procedures.

An intoxicating spectacle, the Presidential office never looked so naked, stripped of much of its dignity as legal teams were sent to the bench to discuss the finer technicalities of sexual relations. Splashed across the headlines and broadcast live across global networks, few will have predicted the Impeachment episode and the dramatic political twists that ensued, yet many would have delighted in it. The opium of the masses, the sex was all that seemed to matter while the real issue at stake was loosely said to lie in the allegations that the President had committed perjury and deliberately sought to obstruct the course of justice, though then again I could have missed the point. The truth after all was a lot more mundane – yes he did lie – though once sexed up and dumbed down its significance was lost in the public imagination.

The truth behind any political sex scandal is rarely as fascinating as it is stripped down to be and were it not for the stories of racy sexual happenings in the Oval Office the Clinton-Lewinsky affair might have invariably fallen on deaf ears. Sex scandals are ultimately more about entertainment than anything else which is why Christine Keeler’s sensational autobiography The Truth at Last is uniquely exhilarating as she exposes the sinister world of British politics, high powered fetishes and Cold war espionage.

The sex bomb of the swinging 1960s Christine Keeler’s name is as synonymous with the sexual revolution as with the Pill after she exploded onto the scene to ignite one of the hottest political scandals of the 20th century. Tried for perjury and briefly imprisoned in 1963, her shocking affair with the British Minister of War, Jack Profumo and her entanglements with a Communist network of spies at the height of the Cold War was political dynamite that led to the collapse of Harold Macmillan’s government. Retelling her story with maturity and personal insight that does not betray her flirtatious past, her autobiography is sure to thrill as she uncovers the disturbing truth behind the “Profumo affair” that until recently has been largely confined to the sexual arena. “History,” she writes, “says my story is about sex. It is, of course, but that is just moments of it. Over all the years the sex has taken the searchlight off the spies but however I dress it up the truth is I betrayed my country.”

Recruited by a smart and charismatic man on her arrival in bustling London as a teenager in the summer of 1959, Keeler portrays Stephen Ward as a dangerous and deviant spymaster who even after his death “fooled the Intelligence services of the west”. Portrayed in court, in government files and Lord Denning’s Report published in 1963 after he committed suicide, as no more than a common pimp and a Communist sympathiser, she elevates him from the dead to the position of one of Britain’s number one public enemies. “I don’t know if he should be called the fourth or the fifth or the sixth man but he was in the Top 10,” she contends.

It was Stephen who betrayed her love and ensnared her into sleeping with the Minister of War and a spy from Moscow in the same week. It was Stephen who befriended hosts of influential and powerful people in the British government, the aristocracy including members of the royal family. That he was brandished by the courts and press as a “somewhat silly vain man” is according to Keeler the true source of scandal. “It was far better that the Establishment be caught with its pants down than involved in stealing secrets at the height of the Cold war. Far better for the public to be titillated by aristocratic misdemeanours and laugh at supposedly esteemed public figures begging to be dominated as sex slaves or demanding to be whipped for being naughty.”

Christine’s intriguing conspiracy theories do make for a sensational read. Her allegations cut deep into the heart of the British Intelligence particularly in the person of Roger Hollis, the head of MI5 whom she claims was also a KGB informant and conspired with Stephen to get her into bed with Jack Profumo. “Their plan was simple,” she says, “I was to find out, through pillow talk when nuclear warheads were being moved to Germany.” Living alongside such infamous figures as Anthony Blunt, allegedly the Fourth man of the notorious 1950s Cambridge spy ring that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, there is much source for stimulating speculation. Echoes of Lord Hutton’s whitewashed report that earlier this year cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair and his government of deliberately sexing up the Iraqi dossier can be felt in Lord Denning’s report which Keeler claims was clothed in lies and deception so that Britain’s security never looked under threat.

Hounded by the press, investigated by the FBI and perceived by the public to be little more than a “common tart”, Keeler’s story adds depth to a woman who has grown in years. A silly, stupid girl is the way in which she seeks to quantify her behaviour back in the 1960s, naïve and all but innocent of her actions. Inconsistencies and omissions do well exist and perhaps even a sense of nostalgia and delusion of grandeur as she places herself at the centre of the Cold War with Stephen, Hollis and Blunt “working on tilting the world’s balance of power in Russia’s favour”. Her association with Marilyn Monroe whom she frequently quotes at the start of chapters also alludes to the way in which she would like to be remembered though her empathy for the plight of the young starlet who created a media frenzy and world obsession is duly felt. “Everybody wants the scandal she writes and not the person. To many people you remain a pariah so that after the threshold between nonentity and notoriety has been crossed, you can never be you again.”

Of course the difference here is that Keeler survived where Monroe did not and her tenacity and courage in the face of overwhelming circumstances comes through in her compelling story that proves that the truth is never as elusive as when it is clouded behind a smokescreen of steamy windows.