Marian June Akin (born 11 August 1952), known professionally for years as Lindi St Clair or Lindi St Claire, is a British author, former leader of the Corrective Party, and campaigner for prostitutes’ rights. She worked as a prostitute and high-profile madam and dominatrix, later retired and was confirmed as a Christian. In 1993 she accused the Inland Revenue in the High Court of England of being “Her Majesty’s pimps” and living off immoral earnings after the tax authority classified prostitution as a trade. She stood for election to Parliament eleven times and once for the European Parliament.
Biography
Born in Hackney, London, she grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire. At fourteen she moved through beatnik, mod, rocker, and biker identities, then ran away to London and mixed with rockers and Hells Angels. After menial jobs she worked street prostitution. Not drinking, smoking, or taking drugs, she saved enough to buy a large freehold Victorian end-of-terrace house in Earls Court and ran a lavish brothel frequented by British and international politicians and aristocrats as a madam and professional dominatrix.
From the mid-1970s until her bankruptcy in 1992—after the Inland Revenue pursued her for tax evasion—she offered sexual services from a four-storey house at Eardley Crescent in Earls Court. Success brought a yellow Rolls-Royce and a yacht kept at Bray in Berkshire. In 1991 it emerged she was renting Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont’s basement flat in Notting Hill. She claimed at one time that 252 Members of Parliament had been her clients. She appeared on television and radio, including The Ruby Wax Show and The James Whale Show.
Despite being taxed on her earnings, company-name applications for “Prostitutes Ltd,” “Hookers Ltd,” and “Lindi St Clair (French Lessons) Ltd” were rejected by the Registrar of Companies; “Lindi St Clair (Personal Services) Ltd” was blocked by the Attorney General. Between 1974 and 1985 she spelled the surname “St Claire.” Other working names included Miss Whiplash, Carla Davis, and Lily Lavender.
Corrective Party
Described as the fastest-growing fringe party in 1993, the Corrective Party campaigned for social justice, civil liberties, animal rights, and sexual freedom. St Clair fought eleven parliamentary by-elections, once threatening to expose the private lives of hundreds of MPs. The party shared an election agent with the Monster Raving Loony Party—comic-fringe machinery with a serious sex-work politics edge.
In June 1991 she was pulled into controversy when Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was investigated for using taxpayers’ money to handle press fallout about a “Miss Whiplash” tenant (not St Clair herself) in a flat he owned. The Treasury contributed £4,700 of a £23,000 bill that had been formally approved by the Head of the Civil Service and the Prime Minister. The episode cemented the tabloid link between high finance, rented basements, and the Miss Whiplash brand St Clair also used.
Inland Revenue Case
When the Revenue demanded £112,779.92 in back income tax on the grounds that prostitution was a trade, St Clair accused the state of living off immoral earnings—calling the tax man and the government pimps. Tax inspector S. J. Pinkney handled the pursuit; her accountant said the case drove two suicide attempts. She lost. The fight remains a sharp anecdote in British sex-work history: the same state that taxed her labor refused to let her incorporate under honest names and still framed her work as moral contamination.
Religious Conversion
On 27 February 2009 it was reported that she had been rescued from her car and flown to hospital after the vehicle left a Herefordshire road near Risbury and landed upside down in a stream, trapping her for up to twenty-four hours. The crash experience led her to embrace Christianity. On 15 November 2009, having legally reverted to her birth name, she was confirmed by the Bishop of Hereford at Stoke Lacy church in Herefordshire.
Bibliography
- Lindi St. Clair and Pamela Winfield, It’s Only a Game: The Autobiography of Miss Whiplash, Piatkus, 1992. ISBN 0-7499-1171-9.
- Lindi St. Clair and Pamela Winfield, Miss Whiplash: My Sensational Life Story, Pan Books, 1993. ISBN 0-330-33080-2.
For readers of professional domination and British sex-work politics, St Clair sits at a noisy intersection: Earls Court dungeon-and-brothel entrepreneurship, tabloid Miss Whiplash mythology, fringe electoral theater, and a courtroom clash over whether the Treasury could tax prostitution while treating the worker as permanently illicit. The later Christian turn does not erase the earlier career; it simply closes one of the stranger public arcs in modern English commercial femdom history.
