Ann Summers CEO Jacqueline Gold was turned down for a New Year’s honour

Jacqueline Gold made quite an entrance to the Conservative Party’s last Black And White Ball

Smiling for the cameras as she emerged from a silver Rolls-Royce, her diamond-encrusted necklace, handbag and watch twinkling under the flashbulbs, Jacqueline Gold made quite an entrance to the Conservative Party’s last Black And White Ball.

While many other wealthy guests scurried in through a side door, a few even shielding their faces in the process, she happily stopped and posed in a velvet dress for the paparazzi who had gathered on the pavement of London’s Park Lane, outside the exclusive Grosvenor House Hotel.

It was a very public show of support for a Tory party which had, just a month earlier, unveiled Ms Gold — who as chief executive of Ann Summers is best known for bringing the ‘Rampant Rabbit’ sex toy to Britain — as its latest glamorous celebrity supporter.

Having never previously expressed much interest in politics, she had suddenly appeared in the front row at January’s media launch of George Osborne’s pre-election attack on Labour spending plans, before proceeding to give a series of interviews pouring scorn on Ed Miliband.

‘He seems like a nice man, and I don’t want to be hurtful, but it’s important to be honest: he’s bumbling and dithering,’ went one.

‘Whenever there’s a camera on him he seems to make constant gaffes which border on embarrassing. He reminds me of a groom at a wedding who’s drunk too much and can’t perform when it matters.’

It was, perhaps, in return for these priceless endorsements that David Cameron personally invited Gold — who is worth a reputed £240 million — to sit at his right hand at February’s £1,500-a-ticket ball, at which a bronze bust of Margaret Thatcher sold for £210,000 and a shoe-shopping trip with Home Secretary Theresa May fetched a four-figure sum.

It was a very public show of support for a Tory party which had, just a month earlier, unveiled Ms Gold (pictured with David Gold) as its latest glamorous celebrity supporter

Joining her at the Prime Minister’s table were such tycoons as hedge fund manager Andrew Law and City tycoon Michael Spencer.

Quite a blue chip circle, one might observe, for a brassy female entrepreneur who grew rich bringing ‘Vibrating Nipple Clamps’, ‘Couples Vibrating Love Eggs’, and the ‘Divine Prostate Massager’ to the British High Street.

Not least since Ann Summers is still (according to its annual accounts) controlled by her father David, a pornographer whose stable of degrading magazines once included Teenage Hardcore, and whose titles advertised ‘barely legal young sweet p***y’.

Our Prime Minister was doubtless perfectly comfortable in Miss Gold’s company, however. For he appears to take a relaxed attitude towards her family’s line of business.

After all, it’s only two years since Cameron gave a Conservative peerage to Karren Brady, a longstanding protégée of David Gold’s business partner David Sullivan — making her his official ‘Small Business Tsar’ in the process.

Back then, it was widely noted that the convent-educated Brady, nowadays best known as a sidekick of Alan Sugar on The Apprentice, has a colourful past for a member of our Upper House.

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She had, after all, begun her career in the Eighties as a director of Sullivan and Gold’s ‘boobs and bums’ premium sex lines, and of their smut-filled Sport newspapers.

Fast forward to last spring, and Jacqueline Gold’s journey to join Brady at the heart of the Tory establishment was continuing apace.

She campaigned vigorously for the Tories during both the election and the ensuing autumn conference season, when she hosted a fringe event addressed by Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary and Minister for Women.

That journey was then completed this week, in spectacular fashion, when the New Year’s Honours were announced: Gold, 55, was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

On paper, this signal honour was granted for all the right reasons.

It did not, the announcement stressed, represent some form of payback for her recent decision to support David Cameron.

Neither had it anything to do with a misguided notion that Britain should somehow celebrate the trade in sex toys, bondage gear and racy underwear that her 138 Ann Summers stores stock.

Instead, according to the official announcement, Jacqueline Gold was accorded the CBE — just one step down from a Damehood — for her ‘Service to Entrepreneurship, Women in Business and Social Enterprise.’

Jacqueline Gold campaigned vigorously for the Tories during both the election and the ensuing autumn conference season, when she hosted a fringe event addressed by Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary and Minister for Women

It’s only two years since Cameron gave a Conservative peerage to Karren Brady, a longstanding protégée of David Gold’s business partner David Sullivan — making her his official ‘Small Business Tsar’ in the process

Karen Brady had, after all, begun her career in the Eighties as a director of David Sullivan (far left) and Gold’s (centre) ‘boobs and bums’ premium sex lines, and of their smut-filled Sport newspapers

It should at this stage be stressed that during her 35-year career, Gold has undoubtedly contributed to all three spheres.

Ann Summers, which is based entirely on-shore, employs 10,000 people, including 7,000 female Ann Summers ‘party organisers’, who between them host around 4,000 Tupperware party-style events each week, becoming financially independent while they sell chocolate body paint, fluffy handcuffs, and battery-powered sex toys to guests.

Gold is also a major patron of three charities, and the founder of an entirely commendable campaign to advance women in business through an initiative called ‘WOW’, which organises networking events and mentors female entrepreneurs.

Yet the timing of the CBE, so soon after Gold chose to publicly support the Conservatives, will do nothing to blunt criticism that the British Honours system nowadays revolves around the most tawdry form of political patronage.

In this context, it is certainly intriguing to be able to reveal that Gold was actually turned down for an honour just a few years ago — before she agreed to publicly support the Conservatives.

I gather that aides filed an official application, on her behalf, but apparently without her direct knowledge, in the late 2000s. However it was unceremoniously rejected by the committee of the great-and-good which vets potential appointments.

This year, after she had ventured into politics, the very same committee didn’t just decide to honour Gold with an MBE or OBE, but to instead make her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one of the most illustrious awards available.

So why the change of heart?

‘There was almost no real difference between the two Jacqueline Gold applications,’ explains a source close to the process. ‘Her business was just as successful, it employed as many people, and in fact ran a few more stores then than now. Her forms contained exactly the same bumpf about her role helping women in business and campaigning for female empowerment.

Some people have speculated that Tories links with Jacqueline Gold represent a response to the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘women problem’

The timing of the CBE, so soon after Gold chose to publicly support the Conservatives, will do nothing to blunt criticism that the British Honours system nowadays revolves around the most tawdry form of political patronage

Ann Summers, which is based entirely on-shore, employs 10,000 people, including 7,000 female Ann Summers ‘party organisers

‘This time, however, there was one extra factor: Gold effectively now had the Prime Minister’s endorsement. That’s incredibly valuable, because while the process is supposed to be totally independent, in practice, as everyone knows, it works by nudges and winks.’

In light of this revelation, it’s also intriguing to note that Gold’s application for an honour was this year filed (possibly without her knowing) by her PR agent Phil Hall, an urbane former News of the World editor.

Did his impeccable political connections help Gold’s chances of success?

On paper, absolutely not. But neither can they have harmed them much, either. Questions have also been asked about West Ham Football Club, nowadays the family’s main asset — David Gold owns it in partnership with David Sullivan (Karren Brady sits on the board). 

It is West Ham who, in an opaque and highly controversial deal, were chosen to take over the Olympic Stadium following the 2012 Games. The stadium, built at a cost to the taxpayer of £429 million, has been converted for use as a football ground at a further public cost of around £257 million. West Ham will pay just £15 million to move there, along with annual rent of around £2.5 million.

That arrangement, which remains shrouded in secrecy, was described as ‘incredibly suspect’ by Andrew Boff, the Tory leader in the London Assembly. Barry Hearn, the sports promoter whose Leyton Orient club also bid for the venue, told this newspaper it was ‘the worst-negotiated deal since the North American Indians gave up their land for a handful of trinkets’.

The extremely favourable contract was negotiated by a quango called the London Legacy Development Corporation, and the stadium’s conversion into a Premier League football ground (West Ham will host matches there from next season) is a crucial part of the so-called ‘legacy’ of the 2012 Games.

Whatever one’s view about the background to this deal, a more pertinent question thrown up by the honouring not just of Jacqueline Gold, but also Karren Brady, is this: why, exactly, are David Cameron’s Tories choosing to get into bed with the protégées of two of Britain’s most notorious porn barons?

Some have speculated that their links with the female duo represent a response to the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘women problem’, which pollsters have waxed lyrical about since a widely reported Mumsnet survey suggested that many female voters thought him too ‘posh and out of touch’.

The theory goes that by parading his links to successful, entrepreneurial businesswomen, Cameron (who once told Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear’) can undo the perception that his party is dominated by, and speaks largely for, public school-educated men.

This may, by the by, explain his disastrous decision to give a peerage to Michelle Mone, the perma-tanned Scottish entrepreneur whose status as his ‘business start-up tsar’ appears to be increasingly at odds with her ability to make her own businesses turn a profit.

Party organisers between them host around 4,000 Tupperware party-style events each week, becoming financially independent while they sell chocolate body paint, fluffy handcuffs, and battery-powered sex toys to guests.

The theory goes that by parading his links to successful, entrepreneurial businesswomen like Jacqueline Gold,  Cameron can undo the perception that his party is dominated by, and speaks largely for, public school-educated men.

Indeed, reporters who raise impertinent questions about Ann Summers, or ask whether its success might have contributed to the sexualisation of the High Street, are often treated to a lecture about how the stores empower or liberate women

Yet if that is indeed Cameron’s thinking, Gold and Brady are hardly the most suitable of champions.

For each owes their career (and much of their wealth) to a business built on the proceeds of one which degrades, rather than empowers, women.

Brady’s mentor Sullivan, who in his Seventies heyday owned 139 sex shops, 20 magazines, 40 race horses and a number of massage parlours, used to boast that the material he peddled was ‘the strongest legally available’ in the UK.

In the spring of 1982, the self-styled ‘Prince of Porn’ was tried at Snaresbrook Crown Court on charges of living off immoral earnings; in other words, of being a pimp.

The alleged offences related to his two London massage parlours, where undercover policemen were offered sexual ‘extras’ by the ‘underpaid and exploited’ female staff who were offering ‘French and Continental’ — as sexual services were euphemistically termed — for £20.

Sullivan denied the charges but was found guilty and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. He served 71 days in Wormwood Scrubs and Ford Open Prison.

Brady, whom he hired as a teenager in the late Eighties, has almost never deigned to discuss how her boss’s line of business sits with either her supposed feminism, or her current status as both a peer and a mother. In 2012, on one of the rare occasions an interviewer was brave enough to raise the subject, she said: ‘If Sky TV has porn channels does that mean you’ve worked for a pornographer? That’s how it felt to me . . . What [Gold and Sullivan] were involved in during the Seventies and Eighties is a reflection of them, but it can’t be a reflection of me.’

Jacqueline Gold’s father David, for his part, managed to stay on the correct side of the law throughout his career. But he nonetheless spent the Seventies being dragged in and out of court in deeply unseemly circumstances.

In 1971, he and his company were cleared at the Old Bailey of publishing obscene materials for gain. He was in the Central Criminal Court again in 1975, to defend himself in relation to 11,000 seized magazines dealing with bondage and flagellation. Gold was cleared once again, as he was in another obscenity case the following year.

Shortly before selling his pornographic titles, which he offloaded in 2007, just ahead of the growing popularity of internet smut causing the printed market to collapse, he said unapologetically: ‘I’m a top-shelf publisher. But that’s how I started out, that’s what I am. And I’m proud of everything I have done.’

Jacqueline joined the family firm in the early Eighties, when she was recently out of school, and over the ensuing years, successfully turned David’s small string of Ann Summers sex shops, patronised by what she called the ‘dirty anorak brigade’ into a High Street chain popular with women, which last year turned over almost £105 million.

It was her idea to devote large areas of the stores to selling erotic lingerie, and novelty items such as edible nipple tassels (with sex toys confined to small sections of the shops), since it meant that they would no longer be officially classified as sex shops, which need to be licensed by local councils.

The brand’s success is, she argues, built on good clean fun. And it has been extremely profitable. In the heyday of the ‘Rampant Rabbit’, made famous by the TV show Sex And The City, she claimed that Ann Summers was selling 2.5 million vibrators in the UK each year. Each costs very little to make, but can retail for more than £50.

Like Brady, she has rarely been made to discuss the issue of her father’s association with the porn trade.

Indeed, reporters who raise impertinent questions about Ann Summers, or ask whether its success might have contributed to the sexualisation of the High Street, are often treated to a lecture about how the stores empower or liberate women.

In 2005, on one of the only occasions an interviewer succeeded in getting her to address the issue of pornography, the encounter ‘turned a bit chilly’.

‘If you’re talking about hard-core pornography, like most people, I don’t want to see it in stores, or available,’ Gold said. ‘If you’re talking about soft porn, like top-shelf magazines, I personally don’t have a problem with that.’

Asked if she was a feminist, she responded: ‘In the popular sense of the word, no. But I believe in equality for women.’

The Honours committee appears to agree. As, we can only assume, does our Prime Minister.

So it goes that the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire has, like 140 of Britain’s High Streets, now been tarnished by association with Rampant Rabbits, Vibrating Love Eggs, and a family business built on ‘top-shelf’ smut.

 

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