Sandra: A prime first lady

It remains, to this day, one of the most embarrassing moments in Sandra Howard's life. It was 1960 and, with a host of other well-known models of the time, the then 19-year-old daughter of an RAF officer had left Southampton on a cruise-liner for a two-week modelling tour of the Mediterranean. One afternoon, having finished for the day, the group decided to take a swim in the ship's pool.

"We were sort of minicelebrities," says Tania Mallett, a close friend of Sandra's at the time, and also a model on the trip. They were, if you like, the Spice Girls of their day, attracting huge attention wherever they went.

So it was that, as the liner sailed towards the Greek islands, Sandra suddenly began thrashing in the pool, panic-stricken, in front of a large, impromptu audience. Fearing she was drowning, the other girls rushed to rescue her. Her distress, however, was caused by something else: "Bikinis had just become fashionable," Mallett explains, "and Sandra - she was so embarrassed, mortified - had pushed two 'falsies' down her bikini top. They'd popped out and there she was, desperately thrashing at the water, trying to catch these two foam things floating on the top. It was utterly excruciating for her."

It is an incident - and one which Sandra Howard laughs about now - which says an awful lot about this woman: a genuine English beauty, still striking at 63, who seems to have spent much of her life, and her four marriages, on public display. And one for whom, it seems, there is always a drama just around the corner: whether it be the collapse of her first marriage to a notorious playboy, a scandalous affair with the man who is now her husband, or the latest and most grandiose drama of them all - her husband's imminent elevation to the Tory leadership.

To her friends, her role as Britain's First Lady-in-Waiting (or so the Tories hope) is a position which, if she wasn't exactly born to it, she has spent much of her life practising for. As Mallett says: "Under this very, very soft exterior, there is a very determined person. Sandra is definitely no pushover."

It is a mix of charm and guile which, say friends, first established the then Sandra Paul as one of Britain's most famous models - long before the likes of Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss.

The fact that the camera loved her utterly transformed the life and ambitions of this girl from an anonymous middle-class background. Her father was director-general of the RAF's medical services, and she was educated in the Home Counties. "Sandra was incredibly shy then," says Paulene Stone, a friend and the former wife of seminal Sixties actor Laurence Harvey. "I met her mother and she was the same: very shy, perhaps a little unsure of herself."

Her transformation into one of the most famous faces of her day - alongside contemporaries such as Jean Shrimpton - began the day she walked into the Lucie Clayton modelling school aged just 18; within just a couple of years, she had become one of the most photographed women in the country.

Despite her success - and perhaps given her somewhat provincial background - Sandra Howard never quite managed to control her nerves. In particular, she had one pronounced blemish: she suffered from a very bad stutter. "She used to stutter a lot," says Stone. "Maybe that was why she was so shy."

The juxtaposition between her background and her new life was extraordinary. It was a champagne-and-limousine lifestyle which she had never experienced before.

She partied with Frank Sinatra and, still only 19, modelled for royal designer Norman Hartnell. She travelled to Paris for the Chanel and Paco Rabanne collections and, back in London, was a regular diner at Les Ambassadeurs in Mayfair, before going on to parties at the Milroy Club. "It was a very grand time," says Tania Mallett. "Remember, we were only teenagers. The men were in black tie and we were dressed up - you'd never wear trousers to go out. Sandra was very much part of that social scene."

One of her first modelling assignments abroad was to the Temple of Delphi in Greece, a hundred miles north of Athens, in 1960. Stone was with Sandra on the shoot: "This, of course, was when Greece was still largely unknown and here were two young English girls, posing in God knows what in the temple. Quite what the locals made of it, I don't know. "

It is also fair to say that from the many friends and colleagues from that time that I have spoken to, all of them attest to her professionalism. In the bitchy world of fashion, Sandra Howard certainly attracted envy, but perhaps less so than others. "She was quiet and remarkably unassuming," says Michael Rasser, founder of the top Mayfair hair salon Michaeljohn. "She was happy to help in any way that she could - agreeing to sit without a fee for 'test shots' I worked on, rather than accepting lucrative magazine work. She would do her own make-up and was a real member of the team."

David Bailey, who worked with her throughout the Sixties, says simply: "She is beautiful and great to photograph."

Inevitably, men could not get enough of her. "Because she was shy," says Stone, "she didn't flirt really, but she was beguiling. Men saw her shyness as a challenge. She would sit quietly in the corner. I think that was her attraction. She was charming and they fell for her."

Men, of course, have played a pivotal role in her life. Sandra was spotted by Robin Douglas-Home, a social and sexual butterfly and nephew of the Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, at a fashion show in the late Fifties. They married in 1960. It was a turbulent marriage in which he had frequent affairs (Sandra herself once found him making love to the Marchioness of Londonderry in the back of a car in the garden of their small Buckinghamshire cottage).

However much her husband's serial infidelities wounded her, Sandra's female friends never saw her crack in public. As Ross Jenkinson, another former model and friend, says: "She was incredibly social; we were all in awe of her. Staying with her and Robin was just the kind of fun you wanted: there were models, musicians, writers, but it was genuinely relaxed."

Robin, of course, later went on to seduce Princess Margaret and pursued Jackie Onassis, before committing suicide after Margaret ultimately rejected him. "I remember Sandra was quite scared of Robin," says Mark Birley, founder of Annabel's nightclub. "He bullied her quite a lot, you know, which made her stutter worse." They had one child, Sholto, to whom Michael Howard is said to have been "an exemplary stepfather".

But Sandra Howard, by this stage a model and social hostess, had her own power over men - "she came out of her marriage to Robin determined to make a success of herself," says a friend - and, in truth, she has never been single for long. Before Michael Howard, she was married to PR director David
Wynne-Morgan for four years. He said yesterday: "Her first marriage was rather difficult and it made her absolutely determined and ambitious to be a success."

She was then married to advertising executive Nigel Grandfield for a couple of years before, in the mid-Seventies, beginning an affair and finally settling down with Michael Howard, to whom she has been married for nearly 28 years. The couple have two children, Nicholas, 27, and Larissa, 25.

A friend is slightly less discreet about her marriages: "She was determined to make a successful marriage with Michael - after all, he was number four and she couldn't really have a fifth."

On the day that Iain Duncan Smith was toppled and Michael Howard emerged as the leadership front-runner, Sandra was due to meet up with her modelling friends for a nostalgic lunch. "We were going to ask her along," says Ross Jenkinson, who now runs a bedand-breakfast in Battersea, "but we thought she might be a bit busy."

Paulene Stone says: "We talked about the old days and about Sandra. It was a fun time then, and maybe she's having even more fun now."

Maybe. What's certain is that the girl who so beguiled London society 40 years ago now has her biggest catwalk of all.