The wartime leader who led Britain through it is 'Darkest Hour' has long been admired as steadfastly faithful to his better half Clemmie. But to the outrage of at least one Churchill historian, a fresh documentary will claim selection an exception for the 'ecstatically beautiful' Lady Bateau Castlerosse

He was to become the wartime main character who led Britain through its darkest hour, when it stood alone and defiant against Hitler - although he was also, according to one biographer, "probably the very least dangerously sexed major politician since Pitt the Younger".

She, on the other hand, was "the most ecstatically beautiful woman in London", who maintained "there is no such thing as an impotent man, only an incompetent woman".

And, it is now claimed, Bateau, Lady Castlerosse, proved the lady was no incompetent by seducing the most relatively impossible target of them all: Winston Churchill him or her self.

There have been rumours before, of course.

Now, though, a Channel 4 documented is to expose the recorded revelation of just one person who might have recently been expected to understand the real truth: Jock Colville, Churchill's private secretary.

In 1985 Colville unburdened himself, on recording, to the archivists at Churchill college, Cambridge, but not before insisting: "This is a somewhat scandalous story and therefore not to be handed away for a great many years. "

"Winston Churchill, " said Colville, who died in 1987, "was not only a highly sexed man.

"I don't feel that in his years [of] marriage he at any time slipped up, except on one occasion, by moonlight in the south of France... He certainly experienced an affair, a quick affair with... Lady Castlerosse? nternet site think the lady was called... Doris Castlerosse, yes read that right. "

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If perhaps true, this is practically nothing short of extraordinary. Earlier historians have regarded Churchill as having been so devoted to his better half Clemmie (Clementine) that this individual never strayed from the woman he married in 1908.

This, it is said, was the one husband who could withstand technological advances of Daisy 'Wanton' Fellowes when the lady offered herself to him lying stark naked on a tiger-skin rug in Paris in 1919.

Although Lady Castlerosse, our company is now led to believe, was performed of even more extraordinary stuff.

"She acquired simply to raise an eyebrow, " declared one bayer.

And what eyebrows they were.

For, as every journalist who reports on Lady Castlerosse must delightedly affirm, she was none of them other than the great aunt of Cara Delevingne, the supermodel whose own eyebrows have helped make her famous.

Cara's grandma Angela - "an observed beauty who evaded a kidnapper in Harrods and declined a part in Gone with the Wind" according with her Telegraph obituary - defied the reservations of her mother to marry Lady Castlerosse's impecunious brother Edward Dudley Delevingne.

This, it appears, is a story that has pretty much everything.

The initial seduction occurred on the French Riviera, at Chateau de l'Horizon, the clifftop villa of Maxine Elliott, herself a possible royal mistress (of Full Edward VII), who encouraged Churchill to be one of the extremely few heterosexual men remaining in what she called her "Adamless Eden".

It was 1933. Churchill was long lasting his "wilderness years", before wartime duty and wonder called.

His wife, who would not care for the louche Riviera established, was not there. Woman Castlerosse was.

He colored her three times, once when she was covered seductively over a siège longue.

And, according to historians Warren Dockter and Richard Toye whose research underpins the documentary, Churchill did more than take an artist's interest in her "flower petal tone and blue eyes with enormously long dark lashes" - (to use the description of another admirer).

Rumour has it this individual told her: "Doris, you could make a dépouille come. " Or "Doris, you could make a saint come, " since rumour rarely bothered to get accurate quotes.

Yet forget rumour. The teachers Dockter, of Aberystwyth University or college, and Toye, a teacher at Exeter, now maintain that there actually was an affair and it lasted until 1937, when Doris signalled its end by writing to Churchill: "I hear you are not going to Maxine's. I'm risk-free any more. "

The academics are backed by Caroline Delevingne (Doris's niece, Cara's aunt), who the documentary manufacturers say has become the first in the family to give a televised interview about the affair.

"My mother [Angela] had many reports to tell about when they stayed in my aunt's house in Berkeley Square, " Caroline says the documentary. "When Winston was coming to visit her, the staff were all given the day off.

"Doris confided in my mother about it - they were pals as well as being sisters-in-law - and so, yes, it was known that these were having an affair. "

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And it seems like to get better: the apparent confirmation of the affair indicate that when she seduced the father, Doris had already lured the son.

It is said that Winston's son Randolph had enjoyed Doris's company in 1932, when he was 21.

That, apparently, was when the ma? tre d' of the Cavalry Club exposed an anteroom to be "confronted by a couple of long, stunning legs waving gladly in the air".

Therefore famous were these lower limbs - "the prettiest thighs that ever entered into a punt or danced a foxtrot" - that the ma? tre d' did not need to see a face to know the identity with their owner.

When "the man between the thighs looked up", the mother? tre d' saw Randolph Churchill, who had recently been soon shouting at him to: "Get out! inches

Who could resist such tales of posh indecency?

The historian Andrew Roberts, biographer of Churchill, admirer of Margaret Thatcher, that's who.

From his blog on the webpage of The Spectator comes a great splutter of indignation and, it must be acknowledged, a pretty persuasive case for the support of Winston.

"This extremely uxorious man with absolutely no track record of infidelity, " declares Roberts, "should not become the latest casualty of the post-Weinstein phenomenon, however much the media likes to drag down our game characters.

"For papers of record to present the tale as true, without selecting any of the wide variety of Churchill historians, or members of the Churchill family, before they rubbish the reputation of the Greatest Englishman, is a disgrace. inch

It was not immediately clear whether Roberts, author of Hitler and Churchill, Eminent Churchillians and the soon-to-be released Churchill: Walking with Success, was aware of the involvement in the skin flick of Dr Dockter and Professor Toye, both of whom have written literature on Winston Churchill.

Nevertheless it was pretty clear he didn't like the documentary.

Roberts said Jock Colville's taped allegation of Churchill's affair had not escaped the attention of previous historians.

"Having recently been researching a biography of Churchill for the history four years... I took in to it [the tape] many a few months ago, as has Allen Packwood, the director of the Churchill Archives. And Colville actually said the words to another vem som st?r, Dr Correlli Barnett, again in 1985.

"When My spouse and i heard the tape, We decided to investigate the allegation closely - and located that the facts, and other correspondence in the Archive, simply do not support it. very well

For one thing, says Roberts: "The alleged affair took place in 1933-37, but Colville did not become Churchill's private admin until May 1940, so this is at best second-hand information, and Colville does not say that Churchill ever spoke to him about this.

"He was also speaking half a century afterwards, an ridiculously long time frame for historians to take oral proof seriously. "

Churchill portrait Lady Castlerosse thrice supposed nothing. He painted Clemmie three times, says Roberts.

"He also painted Friend Walter Sickert's wife Therese, Arthur Balfour's niece Blanche Dugdale, Sir John Lavery's wife Hazel, his own sister-in-law Lady Gwendoline Churchill, his secretary Cecily Gemmell, his wife's cousin Marryot White, and Lady Cat Somerset. There is absolutely no suggestion this individual was sleeping with any of them. "

Neither is the historian influenced by the testimony of Cara's aunt: "The truth that the Delevingne family, including the supermodel Teknik and others who were also not alive at the time, claim that an affair took place is equally flimsy facts. Plenty of folks like to claim notorious relates to the famous, as Trik herself must have uncovered by now.

"Similarly, the sly insinuation that maids were given the nighttime off so that Churchill would have sex with Lady Castlerosse can be easily explained by the simple fact that they wanted level of privacy to talk and chit chat. Servants were known to sell overheard information to newspapers.

"Even palace maids were not allowed into the weekly lunches that Churchill had with the king during the conflict. "

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In least Roberts confirms the affair with Randolph.

Yet he does cite, in evidence for Winston, something that might be a little hurtful to the memory of Doris.

"We know from the memoirs of men and women who stayed at the Chateau de l'Horizon, " says Roberts, "that Churchill believed Lady Castlerosse to be extraordinarily darkish; she did not know that the League of countries was stationed in Geneva, for example.

"Would Churchill have really put up with this unaware mistress for the four years alleged at this time plan? "

Well, the skin flick makers might would like to withstand, Lady Castlerosse's life account would suggest she was hardly dull.

She was created a humble haberdasher's girl in south London in 1900.

Doris followed her dad into the clothes trade by selling old evening dresses to fashionistas and chorus girls, which gave her an entr? e in to the demi-monde of nightclubs and rich, louche men.

It wasn't her dressmaking skills that made her fortune.

She learned a sexual technique so powerful that, as one of her lovers input it: "If you come across one of those, you sign away your empire. "

To assist with this procedure, Doris is said to have simplified her surname from Delevingne to "Delavigne", because it was easier for rich men to spell on a cheque.

Getting a real kingdom, yet , allegedly steer away from her because when your woman went for Edward VIII, she found Wallis Simpson already barring the way in which.

And according to Doris's biographer, Lyndsy Spence, author of The Mistress of Mayfair, when Edward's brother Royal prince George attended one of Doris's parties he acquired a telling off from his father King George V.

But Doris would get a Viscount, Valentines Browne, Viscount Castlerosse. That they married in 1928. This individual was smitten, she probably wasn't.

The balding viscount was apparently so excess fat he couldn't bend down to tie his shoelaces. And he didn't have any money to go with his title.

Once Viscount Castlerosse's mother, Woman Kenmare, heard bout the top secret Hammersmith register office wedding, she disowned her boy and refused to meet his bride.

Which intended Doris had to continue winning the affections of other wealthy men, to the fury of her husband.

The Castlerosses eventually opted for taking individual suites at Claridge's, performing their epic rows in the hotel's corridors.

That they divorced in 1938, which means the affair with Churchill (senior) - if it happened - was conducted while Lady Castlerosse was, at least technically, wedded.

By then Doris acquired acquired tastes way further than her beginnings, which acquired also included a period as an 18-year-old kitchen maid.

She could send a chauffeur on a 400-mile round trip from L'Horizon to retrieve a swimsuit left behind in London - (because, after all, it showed off those famous legs to such great advantage).

Your woman would buy 200 pairs of couture shoes at a time, especially after she moved - with Margot Hoffman, her prosperous American lesbian lover - to the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni beside Venice's Grand Canal.

According to Judith Mackrell, author with the Unfinished Palazzo, during her first Venice season the parties at the Edificio Venier dei Leoni were graced by the presences of the likes of the American actor Douglas Fairbanks and a fresh Prince Philip of Portugal. (No you are suggesting Bateau and Prince Philip ever before enjoyed Churchillian relations).

Yet then came the conflict, which made Churchill a hero and Doris's new home of Italy foe territory.

She fled with Margot Hoffman to Fresh York.

Margot, though, sick and tired of her and her actions.

Alone, far from home, and with her appears now fading, Doris was reduced to pawning her diamonds.

According to the Channel 4 documentary, when Churchill went to America to see President Franklin Roosevelt in the summertime of 1942, the two "former lovers" dined collectively in Washington.

However Toye and Dockter claim, Churchill came to worry about THAT portrait - the one of the young Doris reclining on the chaise longue - possibly falling into the wrong hands, leaving him prone to blackmail or the subject matter of your damaging newspaper history.

It really is believed that in Sept 1942, one of Roosevelt's advisers, Harry Hopkins, organized for Doris to come back home on a vessel to England.

Viscount Castlerosse was expecting her in London. According to Lyndsy Spence he had written to Doris offering to remarry her.

When the lady stepped off the teach, at nighttime of the wartime blackout, all was young reconciliation between them. Although, says Spence, when the viscount saw the elderly, faded Doris by the light of a Dorchester hotel room he was so shocked by her haggard appearance that this individual scurried back in Enid, Viscountess Furness, "an Australian wines heiress and serial widow".

Running out of options, Doris sent a telegram to the New You are able to pawnbroker, telling him to sell her diamonds. Small did she know that selling diamonds during wartime was illegitimate and her telegrams ended uphad recently been intercepted by Scotland Lawn.

Doris was visited by detectives, and left worrying a jail sentence.

And after this, in the eyes of the high society that had once embraced her as the most ecstatically beautiful woman in Birmingham, Doris had resumed her natural status as a "common little demi-mondaine" - as one of them called her.

She was even lower than that to some of these.

By simply heading for America Bateau had, in their sight, deserted England in time of war - during its "Darkest Hour", to borrow the title of the latest film to indicate her old L'Horizon associate Churchill.

In her publication The Riviera Set, the writer Mary Lovell recounted how, in the corridor of the Dorchester, Doris took place after an earl with whom she had once had "a dalliance".

"He cut her dead but muttered aloud as they passed that she was obviously a traitorous b***h. "

After which, one early morning soon afterwards, staff at the Dorchester unlocked Doris's door with a grasp key and located her in bed, unconscious, a clear pill bottle at her side. The airport terminal overdose left her lifeless when justin was 40.

Churchill's painting of her in her chaise oblongue glory, the documentary creators suggest, was discreetly recovered by Churchill's friend Master Beaverbrook after a trip to Doris's brother Dudley Delevingne, grandfather of the modern beauty Cara.

And so the mystery of what happened between Churchill and girl Castlerosse remains unresolved.

But having noticed of her life and her cruel end who, beside perhaps a Churchill relative and a vem som st?r or two, could begrudge this exceptional woman her moment of posthumous celebrity?

Perhaps the story of the girl and the leader is much like Doris in her excellent: irresistible, but of suspect virtue.

Churchill's Secret Affair is on Channel 4 at 8pm on On the 4 March