Blunkett's ex-lover Quinn escapes to US with their son

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David Blunkett's confession that his affair with a married woman drove him to the brink of madness was one of the most startling political admissions of recent years.

But his former lover Kimberly Quinn could not have cut a more anonymous figure as she and Mr Blunkett's illegitimate son William went grocery shopping in California.

The supermarket customers rubbing shoulders with the plainly-dressed mum earlier this week had no inkling that she was at the centre of a political scandal which has once again cast a shadow over the Blair government with the publication of Mr Blunkett's explosive diaries.

And that was just what Mrs Quinn had intended when she flew 5,500 miles away from London to escape the fall-out of the former Home Secretary's memoirs.

She and four-year-old William have been staying in the US with her parents.

Her husband, Vogue magazine executive Stephen Quinn, is understood to have stayed in the UK with the couple's 20-month-old son Lorcan.

One family friend said: "Kimberly knew the Blunkett diaries were going to be serialised in the paper this week and she just wanted to get away from all of that and protect William."

"She has never spoken about her affair with Mr Blunkett and she has no intention of doing so in the future."

"She was able to see an advance copy of the diaries and she was pleased to find she wasn't mentioned by name in them, but she'd rather they hadn't been published at all, because it just brings the whole thing up again."

Mrs Quinn, 45, who is publisher of the Spectator magazine, took William shopping in her parents' home town of San Marino, where the boy famously referred to as "that little lad" by Mr Blunkett when he resigned as Home Secretary sat patiently in a trolley.

After loading up her Chevrolet rental car at the Bristol Farms store, the American equivalent of Waitrose, Mrs Quinn returned to the home of her father Marvin Solomon, who owns a successful engineering firm, and mother Lugene, once the highest-paid actress in America, when she starred in the 1950s sitcom The Life of Riley.

In his diaries, serialised in the Daily Mail this week, Mr Blunkett, 59, described how his acrimonious split from Mrs Quinn left him "clinically depressed", adding: "At one point I really did think I was going mad."

He admitted that at a time when he was in charge of the nation's security: "My whole world was collapsing around me. I was barely sleeping and yet I was being asked to sign Government warrants in the middle of the night."

He also revealed that Tony Blair had been aware of his three-year affair with Mrs Quinn from the beginning and had promised to support him.

During the affair Mrs Quinn gave birth to William but after she and Mr Blunkett split in August 2004 she refused to admit he was the father and the MP went to court to prove paternity.

Mr Blunkett quit as Home Secretary in December 2004 after it emerged that he had helped Mrs Quinn's Filipina nanny obtain a visa.

At the time he tearfully talked about William and said all he wanted to do was to once again "hold him as I did as a baby in my arms."

Mr Blunkett, who now has regular contact with William, returned to the Cabinet as Work and Pensions Secretary after last year's general election but resigned again last November because he had failed to seek permission from a government watchdog before accepting lucrative appointments whilst out of office.

Although he decided not to name Mrs Quinn, or William, in his diaries, the woman who reportedly told Mr Blunkett she had "always wanted to know what it was like to sleep with a blind man" dominates the book - after all, if he had never had the affair he would, in all probability, still be Home Secretary.

The fallout from the affair not only ruined Mr Blunkett's brilliant career, but also caused untold pain in the Quinn household; it emerged that Mr Blunkett was just one of a string of lovers who had succumbed to Mrs Quinn's charms, among them Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart.

The highly dignified Stephen Quinn, regarded by all who know him as a bastion of decency, was left humiliated by his wife's behaviour (which inspired a wickedly satirical Channel 4 drama and even a stage musical) yet the 62-year-old Irishman has stood by her and in recent months they have re-emerged from their self-imposed social exile.

Mrs Quinn has lost a stone in weight, given up smoking and has accompanied her husband to glamorous parties at the National Portrait Gallery, Chelsea Flower Show and Somerset House, to name but a few.

Friends say Stephen Quinn's three grown-up children from his previous marriage have made it clear that they feel he should have left Kimberly, but he remains deeply in love with her and is prepared to forgive almost anything.

"Stephen never expected to meet someone as young, bubbly and outgoing as Kimberly when he was in his 50s," said one friend.

"He has remained completely besotted with her, and in a bizarre way the paternity suit only made him more determined to keep the family unit together."

"Even though it was a massive shock to find out that the son he had believed was his own flesh and blood was, in fact, David Blunkett's child, he remained fiercely protective of William and Kimberly."

In turn, Mrs Quinn has defied those who predicted she would give up on her battered marriage.

She is independently wealthy, owning the couple's £2m home in Mayfair as well as having highly successful parents and a six-figure salary of her own, and so does not need her husband for financial support.

But before she met Mr Quinn (whom she married in 2001) she was an anonymous freelance writer with little social standing.

Her husband's impeccable contacts have allowed her access to a whole new level of society to which she had long aspired.

Also, as another friend put it: "Stephen is the one thing she couldn't either buy or seduce in the corridors of power - an absolutely adoring husband who is prepared to stand by her."

Mr Blunkett, meanwhile, has admitted that he is a lonely man with time on his hands after his Whitehall career came to an abrupt end.

He talks in his diaries of awkward phone calls to former colleagues such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who are clearly too busy to talk to him while, in stark contrast, he has nothing else to do.

And there was more bad news for him yesterday when he faced fresh questions over his finances as it emerged that his earnings from his diaries are being paid into a private company which could help him avoid paying thousands in income tax.

Mr Blunkett set up Hadaw Productions and Investments Ltd specifically to receive his earnings from the book, which he intends to be a nest egg for his four sons.

He has already declared a £100,000 advance from his publishers which has gone into the fund, and hopes to make £400,000 in total.

Because he has not taken the money out of the company as income, he is not liable to pay income tax, and may instead be able to pay a business tax which will cut his tax bill in half, saving around £40,000.

Although Mr Blunkett has not broken any rules, former independent MP Martin Bell suggested he should be "seen to be paying the proper rate of tax."

 

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