One revelation too far for Kimberly

The well-spring of support that Kimberly Quinn has managed to sustain throughout the Blunkett affair ebbed to a trickle today as even those who have been among her staunchest friends predicted she has no future in London. The circle that rallied round her for the sake of her husband, Stephen, reacted with horror to the latest revelation that she had a sexual relationship with journalist Simon Hoggart even as she was conducting an affair with David Blunkett and living as wife with Mr Quinn. Now there are suggestions that yet another lover will soon be revealed.

Hoggart, 58, a married man with two children, was forced to issue a statement admitting an affair, after first describing the allegations as "bull***t". As a Guardian parliamentary sketch writer and BBC radio quizmaster, he has based his career on poking fun at politicians and their peccadilloes. It seems his hasty denial was followed by consultations with colleagues who advised him that honesty was the best policy.

He stressed there was "no possibility" he could be the father of either her son William, or the child she is expecting in several weeks. Stephen Quinn is unlikely to draw much comfort from that.

His position was already delicate; now it is surreal. He has amazed even their friends by defending his wife unstintingly, despite the fact that while he believed they were trying to have a child together using fertility treatment, she was, at the very same time, having a passionate affair with Mr Blunkett, who apparently made her pregnant at least once.

Now Mr Quinn must contend with the fact that yet another man was sleeping with his wife while all this was going on.

It is, his friends say, more than he can bear.

Last week, when Mr Blunkett tendered his lachrymose resignation, Mr Quinn's friends warned him that the hour of greatest danger was at hand. They have stood loyally by him and, for his sake, have extended their support to his wife.

The Quinn camp has fought hard in recent weeks to match the PR operation mounted by Mr Blunkett's supporters. Leaks about how Mrs Quinn believed Mr Blunkett was going to fix her child's nanny's visa wounded him well before the discovery of the evidence that led to his resignation.

It had been a hard battle, fought mostly by the Quinns' magazine and PR friends. Despite the torrid revelations about Mrs Quinn, they were prepared to go to the wire for her. Not now.

THE revelation about Hoggart - and a persistent undercurrent of gossip suggesting that his name will not be the last to attach to this scandal - have created a new mood. One newspaper, quoting suggestions that yet another lover would soon be revealed, today carried the headline: Who is the third man?

"She can't survive here any more," one of Mr Quinn's friends said. "Her credibility is shot to pieces."

According to a source close to the Quinns, Mr Quinn will continue to remain with his wife, at least until she has recovered from the birth of her second child.

"She is on maternity leave until the summer," the source said. "Then everyone expects her to move back to the United States with the children. She knows life here would be intolerable, not just in the short term but for as long as people remember what has happened."

Mr Blunkett's legal action to gain access to William, whom he believes is his son, and the probability of tests to

assess whether the unborn child is his, may complicate any plan Mrs Quinn has to move to America with the children.

Publicly at least, those who have been most vocal in defending her are unlikely to change their stance overnight. Nicholas Coleridge, who is Mr Quinn's long-standing friend and boss at Condé ast, said at the weekend: "The only downside of all this is that now Old Beardy is out of a job, he's going to be working full-time on the legal case."

This is Mrs Quinn's worst nightmare. The notion of fighting a resourceful and vengeful Mr Blunkett through the courts is chilling enough, without it becoming his overriding preoccupation.

He was obsessed with her, and she became his nemesis. But what was her obsession?

When Kimberly Fortier first appeared in London about 15 years ago, she did what a lot of bright young women do and got a job on a men's magazine. It brought her into contact with publishing high flier Stephen Quinn, who was married at the time.

Colleagues from the period remember her as outrageously flirtatious. One maintains she started an affair with Mr Quinn within two weeks of meeting him.

Michael Fortier, her first husband, told me he thought it took a little longer than that, but he credits her with carrying it on under his nose while he counted Mr Quinn and his wife Jane among their dearest friends.

Jane Quinn was similarly deceived.

When Kimberly Fortier - who kept her first husband's-name even after divorcing him until she finally adopted her second husband's name a few weeks after the Blunkett scandal broke - was appointed to a role at Condé Nast which Mr Quinn helped create, there were suspicions within the organisation that she was attempting to sleep her way to the top.

Her ambition seemed like a contagion and "Bimberly", as she was known then, was networking assiduously. It is a measure of how much the latest revelations of her duplicity have sabotaged her support that negative stories from this period are beginning to circulate again in magazine publishing circles.

Bad news about her has been hushed up recently, for Mr Quinn's sake. But this anecdote was being retold last night: in the mid-Nineties, and without Mr Quinn's knowledge, she told Terry Mansfield, then managing director of National Magazines, Condé Nast's rival, that Jamie Bill, publisher of Harper's and Queen, was doing a poor job and that she could do much better.

She urged Mansfield to appoint her. He declined. It would be a grubby tale as it stands, but Jamie Bill was one of Mr Quinn's oldest and closest friends.

She was appointed publisher of the Spectator in 1996, telling Campaign magazine: "There is nothing I can't do if I work hard at it." The journalist who interviewed her slipped some rather hard-hitting descriptions into the piece, including this: "She knows how to flick her hair and pose seductively - is there a ruthless bitch prowling beneath Fortier's charm?"

THAT charm came into its own when she sold space in the magazines for which she worked. Weaving her feminine magic on advertisers became her stock in trade, although it is hard to see how even that would work now. Her techniques were similar to the ones she employed during her encounters with powerful men.

Witness her Spectator colleague Petronella Wyatt's description of that first fateful dinner with David Blunkett: "Then Mrs Quinn/Fortier arrived, arrayed in a diaphanous tunic with trousers. We ordered our food. Mr Blunkett and I ate Dover sole. Ms Fortier ate David Blunkett. She began to engage him in some extraordinarily flirtatious banter (a characteristic of hers which is part of her undoubted charm). She said she had always wondered what it was like to sleep with a blind man."

Mr Blunkett, as we now know, was to provide the answer soon enough. It is possible that Mrs Quinn's yearnings are driven by simple curiosity, rather than lust, as one Sunday newspaper maintained.

For all we know, she may have wondered what it was like to sleep with a radio quizmaster, like Hoggart. Or a celebrated broadcaster, like the one upon whom she was lavishing her charm earlier this year. Or a property tycoon, who has told friends he had difficulty escaping her attentions.

Whatever her motives, she has sabotaged the career and social status she strived so hard to create. She was once known as the most ambitious woman in London; now she will be remembered as the woman who, in destroying Mr Blunkett, destroyed herself.