The web's Belle de Jour?

The anonymous call-girl confessional Belle de Jour is not the work of a prostitute in her twenties but a 42-year-old man, according to fresh rumours sweeping the internet.

The web "blog" - an internet diary - has won its author lucrative publishing and TV deals and just who the mystery writer really is has become one of the most hotly-debated subjects in publishing.

Spin doctor Alastair Campbell, former Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling and Evening Standard columnist Toby Young are among those who have been named as Belle de Jour. All have denied it.

Belle's agent and publisher both insist she is who she claims to be in her best-selling book: a highly educated Jewish graduate from Yorkshire who turned to prostitution because of how well it paid and how much she liked it.

But now the Standard has learned of a dossier that claims Belle is in fact the creation of Stewart Home, a self-confessed hoaxer and published novelist, whose previous works include 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess and Blow Job.

The dossier's author claims to know Home and says he is revealing his secret because of a dispute between them.

"He is so arrogant that he has provided enormous clues both in the weblog and the book," the author says.

There are striking parallels between Home's work and that of Belle. Both intersperse sexually explicit content with literary references.

In two novels published under his own name, Home wrote from a woman's point of view, explaining in an interview he thought it would be "interesting", although he hoped people wouldn't think that the work was autobiographical. "Maybe what I want is a big literary hit," he said. The main character in another of his novels, Down and Out in Shoreditch, was also a prostitute.

According to the online dossier: "Late in 2003, he started publishing it at Blogspot.com, under the name 'Belle de Jour'. The restrictions of the form were grist to his mill and he easily walked off with the Guardian's Best Written Weblog award."