John North: Bye bye bedazzling Bindy

The classified death notice in The Northern Echo described her as a deep sea diver but still barely broke the surface of her improbability.

The sumptuous obituary in the Telegraph - if you have to leave, you'd want a send-off as lyrical as Bindy Lambton's - told of her regal entertaining, of friends from Jackie Kennedy to Mick Jagger, of the Easter Day service at Durham Cathedral when, wheelchair headlights blazing, she followed the Bishop down the aisle loudly proclaiming (as doubtless did the Bishop) that Christ was risen indeed.

It even revealed that her father had size 24 feet and that the artist Lucian Freud painted his friend Bindy while they watched the racing on a flickering black and white television.

What the Daily Telegraph barely mentioned, and for a reason shortly to be explained, was the call girl scandal which in 1973 rocked the Heath government and compelled her husband's resignation as a junior defence minister.

The high class prostitute at the centre was Norma Levy, daughter of Harry and Catherine Russell, good Catholics from Stockton.

He was a plumber's mate, his wife a waitress at the Metropole Hotel. Their daughter, said Mrs Russell at the time, was "adventurous but kind" - few others might have thought Norma Levy a tart with a heart - and Viscount Lambton, who had relinquished the title of 6th Earl of Durham, seemed no less disingenuous.

"I can't think what all the fuss is about," he said, "surely all men patronise whores?"

Bindy Lambton was born Belinda Blew-Jones in December 1921, married when she was 20, had six children when warned not to have more than one and, though long separated, never divorced their father.

Her burial takes place this afternoon from St Barnabas's church in Burnmoor - near the stately family home at Biddick Hall, Chester-le-Street - following a London service yesterday.

The young Bindy, as always she was known, was brought up by an aunt who had a secret romance with the then Prince of Wales. "It was conducted with the utmost discretion," said the Telegraph, "a lesson Bindy never forgot."

Her obituary, unsigned, was written by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, 79-year-old former Sunday Telegraph editor and columnist who 12 years ago married the best known of the Lambton offspring, the enthusiastic architecturalist Lucinda.

Bindy was possessed, says her son-in-law, of "extraordinary individuality, handsome good looks, high spirits and original wit." Despite long infirmity and near blindness, her cheerfulness never deserted her.

Expelled from 11 different schools for "various wildnesses" - including, it is gravely reported, placing a bell-shaped impediment beneath the headmistress's piano pedal - she had had no formal education before catching the eye of the Hon Antony Lambton, heir to the Earl of Durham and to vast family estates.

Bindy joined happily in his parliamentary windmill tilting - he unsuccessfully fought both Chester-le-Street and Bishop Auckland after the war - before in 1951 he was elected Conservative member for Berwick-upon-Tweed.

When almost 25 years later he admitted taking drugs, he claimed to have picked up the habit in Singapore. "Taking opium in Singapore is a bit different from taking it in Berwick-upon-Tweed," he added.

There were five daughters before the arrival in 1961 of Ned, a son and heir. A bonfire burned atop Penshaw Hill, around which the worm had legendarily and languidly wrapped itself, a 1,200lb ox was roasted for villagers, the Bishop of Durham conducted the baptism.

Ned became lead singer with the Frozen Turkeys.

Bindy was determined that her children should enjoy what Worsthorne calls the "perfect idyll", taking them off on holiday in a 50ft caravan and encouraging them to fight and be naughty so that other tourists might be kept away.

Sometimes they'd be guests at stately homes; annually at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

She also entertained lavishly in London ("a fairyland of joyousness which few could resist") and after their separation held expensive court at Biddick Hall, once home to the Lambton Castle agent.

"Biddick," the society magazine Harpers and Queen once observed, "was a kind of Lourdes to the American super-rich."

In the 1960s she'd been seriously hurt in three accidents - go-karting in Greece, falling down hotel stairs and, in 1965, suffering multiple injuries in a car crash in Huntingdonshire - and never wholly recovered.

After her husband's spectacularly sordid infidelity and dopey drug taking, she promised steadfastly to stand by him. "I think," said the Viscount, "that my wife looks upon it as an isolated incident of no great importance."

Soon, however, Lambton was off to live with former deb Claire Ward and to write fiction in Siena where, at 80, he still lives in style. Bindy commuted between Biddick and London, often by coach - her chauffeur driving behind - because she preferred somewhere with a toilet.

Her close friends also included the musician Jools Holland, whom she sat alongside, in her wheelchair, during a concert at Newcastle City Hall.

The deep sea diving, posthumously acknowledged, was generally off the Barbary Coast. "I have never met a braver man acting as bait for sharks," wrote the American William F Buckley.

She died last week in a London hospital, family and housekeeper around her. Just before being given a morphine injection she amazed medical staff by breaking into a favourite 1940s song:

Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue

Strolling down the avenue two by two

O honey,

Won't you have a little sniff on me

Have a sniff on me.

They were her last words. In death as in life, it was an extraordinary way to go.

Famous last words...

BINDY Lambton's last words deserve to become famous, though not perhaps as well remembered as those of King George V.

Assured that he was getting better and could enjoy a nice convalescence in Bognor Regis, the monarch proclaimed "Bugger Bognor" and expired. The late, late show, we offer ten more parting breaths:

"Either that wallpaper goes, or I do" - Oscar Wilde.

"I could just eat one of Bellamy's veal pies" - William Pitt the Younger.

"Don't let poor Nelly starve" - Charles II on Nell Gwynne.

"That was a great game of golf, fellers" - Bing Crosby.

"I've never felt better" - Douglas Fairbanks senior.

"God will pardon me, that's his line of work" - Heinrich Heine, poet.

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...." - General John Sedgwick, killed during the American Civil War.

"Go away, I'm all right" - H G Wells.

"Die my dear doctor, that's the last thing I'll do" - Lord Palmerston.

"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something" - Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary, 1923.

The lord and the lady of the night

Antony Claud Frederick Lambton was born not so much with a silver spoon in his mouth as with a canteen of cutlery; Hanora Mary Russell boasted no such rich family heritage.

Born in Limerick, she moved with her parents to Stockton, worked in a Middlesbrough nightclub and in Manchester before becoming part of a top people's vice ring from her elegant £30,000 flat in Maida Vale.

Her specialities, if the term may thus be applied, were sadomasochism and bondage. "I had the best equipment in London. Once they were trussed up they were at my mercy," she later boasted.

Norma, as she had become known, also claimed to vote Conservative. "They're my best customers," she added.

By 1972, the year of her marriage to small time crook Colin Levy, she - "and one or two of her friends," as Lamb ton later put it - were regularly entertaining the middle-aged man they first knew as Mr Lucas.

Soon he became careless, however, and one night paid by personal cheque. Colin Levy went to the News of the World who not only hid a photographer in a wardrobe but a microphone up a teddy bear's nose.

Lambton, whose political career had been steadily unspectacular but who now had £5,500 a year ministerial responsibility for the RAF, had hitherto best been known for his fight to retain the courtesy title "Viscount" while remaining in the Commons.

Now he was photographed cavorting with Levy and a young black lady in a state of undress whilst smoking something which appeared not to be Wills' Woodbines.

Ever since the "curse" of the Lambton worm, it was said that no Lord Lambton had died in his bed. This one was suffering in someone else's.

His "shock" resignation was announced "for health and personal reasons" on May 22, 1973. "The manner of it suggests that it might not primarily be linked with so trivial a matter as the refusal of parliamentary colleagues to allow him to have a courtesy title," said The Northern Echo.

His going was followed three days later by that of Earl Jellicoe, leader of the House of Lords. Police investigations had shown him to be another of Levy's Tory favourites.

"The way things are going it will soon be clear that Heath is the only member of the government who isn't doing it," observed Lambton, facetiously.

Lambton was also fined £300 for possessing cannabis and amphetamines, though he denied they were for personal use. Henry Harrod, one of the Lambtons' grandsons, was also convicted on drugs offences in the 1980s.

He told the court that he thought he was helping Peruvian peasants by buying their cocaine.

Though the Diplock Commission found that national security hadn't been risked by what Lambton himself called his "incredible stupidity", the chief victim retired from public life.

Norma Levy wrote her autobiography, however, and thereafter it seemed pretty much business as usual.

Four times between 1975-80 she was deported from America after taking too literally the visa condition that the visit was "for pleasure". In 1982 a Miami court jailed her for 18 months for illegal immigration; in 1988 police who raided her unkempt flat in Philadelphia found whips, chains, lingerie and "customer records".

"She looked like a bedraggled bat," said an officer. Norma Levy, the woman who caught the minister with his defences down, has not been publicly heard of since.