Marian June Akin was born on 11 August 1952 in Hackney, London, and grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire. As a girl she moved through beatnik, mod, rocker, and biker identities, then ran to London and mixed with rockers and Hells Angels. After menial jobs she worked street prostitution. She did not drink, smoke, or take drugs. She saved enough to buy a large freehold Victorian end-of-terrace house in Earls Court and ran a lavish brothel there. Clients included British and international politicians and aristocrats. She was the madam, and she was a professional dominatrix.
The Earls Court years
From the mid-1970s until her bankruptcy in 1992, she offered sexual services from a four-storey house at Eardley Crescent in Earls Court. She had a yellow Rolls-Royce and a yacht kept at Bray in Berkshire. In 1991 it came out that she was renting a basement flat in Notting Hill belonging to Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. She claimed 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.
The income was taxed. The Registrar of Companies still rejected the names Prostitutes Ltd, Hookers Ltd, and Lindi St Clair (French Lessons) Ltd. The Attorney General blocked Lindi St Clair (Personal Services) Ltd. From 1974 to 1985 she spelled the surname St Claire. Other working names included Miss Whiplash, Carla Davis, and Lily Lavender. In June 1991 Lamont was investigated over whether taxpayers’ money had been used to handle press fallout about a Miss Whiplash tenant in a flat he owned. That tenant was not St Clair. The tabloids still tied high finance and rented basements to a name she also used.
The tax case and the Corrective Party
In 1993 the High Court of England heard her tax case. Inspector S. J. Pinkney pursued a demand for £112,779.92 in back income tax, on the grounds that prostitution was a trade. She called the Inland Revenue “Her Majesty’s pimps,” living off immoral earnings. Her accountant said the case drove two suicide attempts. She lost. The same state taxed the work and still treated it as moral contamination. That same year the Corrective Party, which she led, was called the fastest-growing fringe party. It campaigned for social justice, civil liberties, animal rights, and sexual freedom. It shared an election agent with the Monster Raving Loony Party. The machine looked like comic fringe politics. The sex-work politics were serious. She fought eleven parliamentary by-elections, stood once for the European Parliament, and threatened to expose the private lives of hundreds of MPs.
The crash, and confirmation
On 27 February 2009 her car left a road near Risbury in Herefordshire, landed upside down in a stream, and trapped her for about twenty-four hours. She was rescued and taken to hospital. The crash turned her toward Christianity. On 15 November 2009 she was confirmed by the Bishop of Hereford at Stoke Lacy church in Herefordshire, after she had legally gone back to her birth name, Marian June Akin. With Pamela Winfield she published It’s Only a Game: The Autobiography of Miss Whiplash (1992) and Miss Whiplash: My Sensational Life Story (1993). The Christian confirmation did not erase the years she worked as a prostitute, madam, and dominatrix.
