“Possibly the most unusual requirement was for a prostitute suffering from diarrhoea, apparently there was a German trade delegate with an excrement fetish visiting London who liked nothing better than taking women up the backside just as they were letting go,” says Hubert Fromage, as he herds several Piccadilly Circus rent boys into the back of a Ministerial car. “After wasting the better part of two days scouring Soho for a slapper with the trots, we ended up feeding some girl from King’s Cross with half a dozen tins of past their sell-by date sardines. That seemed to do the trick.” Civil servant Fromage is head of a highly secretive government department, whose existence was only revealed earlier this year, when previously classified official documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act. He is the official Procurer Executive, charged with obtaining pornography, rent-boys, prostitutes or anything else which might be required to satisfy the bizarre fetishes and perversions of visiting foreign dignitaries and businessmen at the taxpayer’s expense. “You’d be surprised how many multi-billion pound arms deals have been sealed over the still-glowing, freshly spanked, buttocks of a school-uniform clad prostitute,” reveals Fromage. “I know that most people think that complex foreign policy treaties are thrashed out in wood-panelled conference rooms in Whitehall, but the truth is that bondage dungeons are a far more productive venue from a diplomatic perspective.” Established in the late 1950s with the aim of boosting the post-war economy by satisfying the basest desires of visiting statesmen and financiers, the department has also been frequently called upon to meet Britain’s own sex crazed politicians’ apparently insatiable appetite for prostitutes and sleaze. “The first ‘Procurer Executive’ was Tory peer Lord Boothby, appointed by Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1959,” explains Fromage. “Bisexual Boothby was considered ideal for the job, with contacts, including the notorious Kray twins, throughout the London sex trade.” One of Boothby’s earliest assignments was to procure young rent-boys for a visiting Arab trade delegation. The peer proved adept at devising unusual recruitment methods – on one occasion he drove an Austin Cambridge through Piccadilly Circus with his naked arse hanging out of the window. In another celebrated incident, whilst scouting for talent for a forthcoming visit by Moroccan officials, Boothby stripped naked, sprayed himself all over with metallic paint, and lay on top of a plinth in the St Martin’s Brass Rubbing Centre whilst a party of Boy Scouts was visiting.
As the 1960s progressed the government found the peer’s encyclopaedic knowledge of porn and smut to be invaluable in meeting the increasing demands of British officials for bizarre erotic experiences. Indeed, by 1962 he was increasingly involved in procuring for establishment figures rather than visiting foreign dignitaries. In one celebrated incident, Boothby spent three days scouring Soho brothels for six black prostitutes willing to dress in grass skirts and pretend to be African natives for one of War Minister Lord Carlisle’s notorious ‘Zulu Parties’. At these parties Lord Carlisle would strip naked and have black boot polish rubbed all over his body by a footman, before putting war paint on his face, donning a loin-cloth and dancing around his garden brandishing a spear pretending to be a Zulu chief. He would often climax his performance by buggering every male under the age of 25 present, before having frenzied sex with the ‘native women’, as he liked to call the prostitutes. One night the minister became so drunk that he ran out of his Hampstead house (still dressed as a Zulu warrior) and, pursued by the police, managed to reach the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Awoken by the noise, Prince Philip fired a shotgun at Lord Carlisle from an upstairs window, shouting: “Get my elephant gun Liz, the bloody natives are revolting again!”. Before His Highness could reload, the police captured Lord Carlisle. A D-Notice was swiftly issued and the incident kept out of the newspapers. With the election of a Labour government in 1964, speculation was rife that the position of Procurer Executive would be abolished. “It turned out they were just as bad, particularly the Foreign Secretary, George Brown, who was notorious for his drunken orgies – on one occasion the fire brigade had to be called to Number Ten after he got his knob stuck in an empty beer bottle and turned up to a Cabinet meeting with it stuffed down his trousers,” says Fromage. “The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, obviously wanted to appoint someone to the post who was more consistent with the image of Britain he was trying to project.” Whilst Wilson originally sought to appoint Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein to the post, he eventually turned to millionaire casino owner John Aspinall to replace Lord Boothby as Procurer Executive. “Like Boothby, he had plenty of shady contacts, and through his casino he was already supplying ‘hospitality’ to the rich and famous,” Fromage explains. “Of course, Wilson wanted the work of the Executive to reflect his government’s new emphasis upon modernity and the ‘white heat of technology’.” Consequently, visiting politicians and businessmen were offered the chance to sample various experimental British-built mechanical sex devices, sometimes with unfortunate consequences. “Henry Kissinger’s near castration by a mechanized masturbation device powered by a two-stroke petrol engine in 1969, came close to causing a serious diplomatic incident,” recalls Fromage.
However, most of the visitors’ bizarre requests during this period involved pop stars, models and other ‘swinging sixties’ icons such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Twiggy. “Most of the unpatriotic hippie bastards wouldn’t play ball, so Aspinall often had to resort to extreme measures, plying them with drink and drugs to wear down their resistance” says Fromage. “But it all got out of hand after he drugged Tiny Tim for that Albanian trade delegation in 1970.” The diminutive singer wasn’t amused when he awoke to find himself covered in tulips and sharing a bed with two geese and a Shetland pony. “What really upset him was where they’d stuck his ukulele,” reflects the civil servant. “He made such a fuss about it, there were questions in the House and a Parliamentary enquiry. The upshot was that the incoming Conservative government under Ted Heath decreed that the post should, in future, be filled by a civil servant, in the hope that this would make the office more accountable and less prone to creating scandals, which, after all was the original point of the department.” Indeed, since the department was put under the control of sober, grey suited, civil servants, rather than flamboyant millionaires, it has operated without a hint of scandal. “Discretion is the key,” says Fromage. “Unlike our predecessors, we don’t go around kidnapping people off of the street, and everyone we employ is handsomely rewarded for their participation. Although, personally, I would have thought that the knowledge they had performed their patriotic duty to advance the interests of this great country would be reward enough!” The civil servant believes the work of his department is vital, rejecting allegations that it contributes to the sense of sleaze and corruption surrounding British politics. “Do people honestly think that these deals and treaties sign themselves?” he asks. “We’re merely greasing the wheels of commerce and diplomacy. Would people rather we do, bribe these people with massive backhanders of public cash? That would just be sordid!”
