Seducing the power brokers

It was a summer's evening in Soho and a cross-section of the chattering classes had gathered to celebrate a wedding. As the hundred or so guests arrived on that Saturday night at the Groucho Club, the upstairs rooms buzzed with gossip and raucous laughter. Champagne and canapes were served, while next door, tables were adorned with flowers and vintage wines.

Kimberly Fortier, the 43-year-old glamorous and effervescent chief executive of The Spectator magazine, had just married Stephen Quinn, the deeply popular publisher of British Vogue. "It was an enchanting, fun, social wedding," one guest revealed yesterday.

Since then, Fortier - an ambitious workaholic and the mother of a baby boy, who loves parties as much as business meetings - has gone on to quickly establish herself as a feted social figure in the capital.

Only this summer, in her role as publisher of the weekly political magazine, she co-hosted, along with the editor, Tory MP Boris Johnson, The Spectator's summer party at the magazine's terraced offices in a Bloomsbury street. Each year, this annual event attracts an assortment of writers, politicians, TV personalities and publishing executives, among them the familiar figure of Home Secretary David Blunkett.

But what none of the guests at the party, from Nigella Lawson to Germaine Greer, could have known - and certainly what none of the wedding party could have possibly predicted those few years before - was that two of the most garrulous of guests had recently been engaged in what insiders have described as a "deep love" affair.

According to press reports this morning, Ms Fortier is pregnant and in the throes of an extraordinary tug-of-love between the Home Secretary and her husband. "The future of their relationship is unresolved. They are torn," one insider claims.

But, according to friends, Fortier's involvement with Blunkett - a divorced father of three sons - is the unexpected culmination of what they describe on her part as overwhelming ambition and determined reinvention. Indeed, they paint a not always flattering portrait of a well-meaning but enterprising woman who may simply have become too enamoured of the elevated circles in which she now moves. "Kimberly is nothing if not starstruck," says one.

She is said to have met Mr Blunkett, 57, at a dinner party shortly after her wedding and to have claimed, now famously, that she told him she was "tall and blonde". In fact, she is diminutive, auburn and extremely charming.

What is undoubtedly true is that her relationship with a high-profile Cabinet minister is but the latest chapter in Fortier's remarkable success as an intellectual and political networker in London. "Kimberly can appear like one of those American women in London who thinks that by reading the right books and being seen with the right people - politicians and writers - she herself is 'intelligent' and 'powerful' by association," says a friend of the couple.

But such is her undoubted charm - "It's a bit like being Exoceted with this huge smile," one admiring man says - that over recent years she has become close to an assortment of powerful and largely male admirers, such as broadcaster John Humphrys, who is a good platonic friend and was a guest at her wedding.

This morning, however, friends of Fortier's husband Stephen Quinn are already suspicious over the manner in which the story of the alleged affair first emerged. Both the News of the World, which originally broke claims of an affair, and The Sun newspaper, which today says Fortier is pregnant, featured carefully constructed quotes from "insiders" said to be close to the Home Secretary.

These anonymous sources spoke of how sad and heart-rending it was for two adults to find themselves in the midst of such a complex love affair. "None of this rests easily with David," claims one source. "He has a deep conscience. But this is no casual fling. He's totally in love with her." The "spun" story, it appears, is that marriages do break up, that falling in love can hurt innocents involved. But according to friends of Fortier's husband, there is another, less sympathetic side to the story. "Of course, people have affairs, but we have to remember that the Home Secretary appears to have engaged in some kind of affair with a married woman who had just had a child," says one friend.

"Who is the wronged party here? She has an adoring, faithful husband who has encouraged her throughout her career in London.

"Stephen will be absolutely devastated by this, and his entire concern will be for the welfare of his young son. To suggest that both Fortier and Blunkett are somehow deserving of the public's sympathy is risible."

In such a highly charged tale, it would be censorious to condemn people for falling in love. But it is inevitable that people will take sides. Close friends of the couple, who are themselves still reeling from the revelations, point out that while Fortier is independently wealthy, her relationship with her husband did elevate her to a social and professional elite.

She and Quinn, who is in his midfifties, met around 10 years ago when Fortier - then a nervous and slightly manic figure who comes from a wealthy Californian family - joined Condé Nast, the upmarket magazine publisher in central London.

"When Stephen first met her, she was very Beverly Hills, a bit of a Hollywood heiress," says a friend. "She was a slightly ditzy West Coast girl, but engaging."

She first arrived in London in the late Eighties. She had been married once before, to a City banker she had met in the US, a chapter in her life which friends maintain she was extremely cagey about.

Quinn himself was a long-standing divorcé. "Stephen adored her, lavished her with attention, rather in the way that Blunkett is now doing," says a friend. "He is utterly devoted and loyal to her."

According to colleagues at Condé Nast, Quinn was nonetheless very careful not to be seen to promote his girlfriend. But through diligence and shrewd manoeuvring, she became head of PR at the magazine company.

"Many of Stephen's friends were a bit wary of her at first, which is only natural," a close intimate says. "She could be the most infuriating name-dropper, outrageously so, but she used to do it in such a cack-handed manner that you felt rather sorry for her.

"For example, she would sit at dinner and drop names and stories about people the other guests either worked with closely or knew very well. It became a bit of a joke: she appeared to think she was the only person who knew anyone of importance in London. She went from being Beverly Hills to a Today programme intellectual."

Fortier and Quinn live in a £2 million three-storey town house in Mayfair. With its grand entrance hall, a scattering of antiques and sumptuous furnishings, it has often played host to catered dinner parties for an eclectic mixture of writers, publishers and business tycoons.

According to friends, it was a happy marriage, which makes Fortier's involvement with Blunkett all the more curious. "She made Stephen happy," says one friend, "and because of that, some of us put up with her eccentricities. But the knives are being sharpened now. Some people were polite to her because they were loyal to Stephen."

In a sense, perhaps blinded by the attention and adulation of powerful men, Fortier appears to have become a victim of her own success: she is rightly credited with helping to turn around the once ailing and old-fashioned Spectator, nearly doubling its weekly circulation to 60,000. But friends also noticed a change in her once she had been elevated to the position of publisher. "She did become terribly grand and full of it," says one.

Either by accident or design, Fortier was seated next to Blunkett, who divorced in 1990, at a state banquet for President Bush at Buckingham Palace last November. "We all did rather wonder how on earth she had wangled that one," says a former colleague.

Some detractors describe Fortier as something of a social and intellectual dilettante. She became one of the leading lights in a book club based around west London, which included actress Sarah Standing, daughter of Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman.

Although she once apparently described herself as a "nice Left-wing girl", the truth appears to be that her political views are largely formed by one thing: whoever is in power.

"She always claimed to be a Tory," one friend explains, "certainly when the Tories were in power or she was in their company. She even said at one point that she was 'advising' them."

But her New Labour contacts grew. She remains friends with glamorous PR boss Julia Hobsbawm, whose one-time business partner, Sarah Macauley, is now Mrs Gordon Brown.

Today, among their friends there is a sense of sadness and disappointment that a seemingly happy couple should now find themselves in such public difficulties. Quinn, who loathes personal publicity, will be deeply traumatised by events.

Meanwhile, Blunkett is on holiday with his sons. As for Fortier, the current media attention has been sobering, to say the least. In her time at The Spectator, she has enjoyed frequent mentions in newspaper gossip columns, endless stories which even detailed the life and times of her dog, Laszlo.

Now she must endure rather more uncomfortable attention.