Barbara Skelton

Later years found her in Yugoslavia, Egypt, the US, Cuba and back in England. She lived for many years in France before returning to England where she died in 1996.

Her works include a volume of short stories, 1966's Born Losers, two volumes of memoirs, 1987's Tears Before Bedtime and 1989's Weep No More, as well as two novels, a Young Girl's Touch (1956) and A Love Match (1969).

She married George Weidenfeld, a publisher, in 1956; that marriage ended in 1961. She met Weidenfeld when he agreed to publish A Young Girl's Touch. As divorce was very difficult to obtain in Britain until 1967, it was necessary to prove adultery conclusively to the courts to be granted a divorce. In 1956, her marriage to Connolly was ended when evidence of her adultery with Weidenfeld was presented to the court and in 1961 her marriage to Weidenfeld was ended when evidence of her adultery with Connolly was presented to the court.

She wed prominent critic Cyril Connolly in 1950, a marriage which ended in 1956. At the time of her engagement to Connolly in 1950, King Farouk took his much publicised "bachelor party" in Europe, and invited Skelton to join his entourage as he traveled across Europe. Connolly encouraged his fiancée to go with the king as she recalled: "He thought I could get money from Farouk for pay for our honeymoon. He had no idea how tight this king was".

Skelton called Farouk "a complete philistine", but also funny and amusing. She stated about Farouk: "He was very adolescent. He didn't have the stuff to be a great king, he was too childish. But he never lost his temper, he was incredibly sweet, with a good sense of humor. He wasn't a grand passion, but I was bored to death with all the British officers I knew in Cairo. Life in the palace with Farouk was not boring". In 1945, the ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, decided that Skelton was a security risk, believing that she was leaking information to Farouk, and she was reassigned to the embassy in Athens. Of these allegations, Skelton stated: "After all, I was in a sensitive position, and they were convinced that Farouk was settling me up just to get information from me. What they could never understand was that Farouk couldn't have cared less. The only communications to England that mattered to him were his telexes ordering silk neckties from Hawes and Curtis. There was absolutely nothing political about him then". Farouk encouraged Skelton to run up a large bill with dressmakers, promising her he would pay for it all, which he did not when she was informed him that she was being reassigned to Athens, leading her to say he was "staggering cheap".

In World War II, she was recruited into the Foreign Office as a cipher clerk by Donald MacLean, a famous diplomat who unknown to her was a Soviet spy. In 1942, she was assigned to the British embassy in Cairo, where at the Auberge des Pyramides night club, she first met King Farouk, who was throwing bread balls at the patrons. In April 1943, Skelton replaced Irene Guinle as Farouk's "official mistress".

Skelton was born at The Croft, Ellington Road, Taplow, Buckinghamshire, elder daughter of Eric George Skelton, who had been a Major in the West India regiment before being invalided out at a young age, and Ada Eveline (née Williams), a theatre Gaiety Girl. Eric Skelton was a descendant of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan; his brother was the Army officer and writer Dudley Skelton. Her younger sister, Brenda, was born in 1922. Skelton spent some of her early years in India; a difficult child, she once charged at her mother with a carving knife and was later expelled from a convent school. As a teenager, she had an affair with a friend of her father's, which led an abortion.

Barbara Olive Skelton (26 June 1916 – 27 January 1996) was an English memoirist, novelist and socialite.