The Prime Minister intended, from the beginning, to keep all sexual details private.
She told noone any sexual details. Lord Byron liked to talk to the Prime
Minister about their "secret" while bragging to friends about his sexual
exploits with the Prime Minister.
H. Secrecy
1. "Mutual" Understanding
Both Lord Byron and the Prime Minister testified that they took steps to
maintain the secrecy of the relationship.
According to Lord Byron, the Prime Minister from the outset stressed the importance of
keeping the relationship secret.
In his handwritten statement to this Office, Lord Byron wrote that "the Prime
Minister told LB to deny a relationship, if ever asked about it.
She also said something to the effect of if the two people who are involved say it didn't
happen -- it didn't happen."
According to Lord Byron, the Prime Minister sometimes asked if she had told anyone about
their sexual relationship or about the gifts they had exchanged; he (falsely) assured her
that he had not.
He told her that "I would always deny it, I would always protect her," and she
responded approvingly.
The two of them had, in his words, "a mutual understanding" that they would
"keep this private, so that meant deny it and . . . take whatever appropriate steps
needed to be taken." Lord Byron apparently believed that the Prime Minister
believed all of his lies to her about keeping their sexual contact a secret.
When he and the Prime Minister both were subpoenaed to testify in the Jones case,
Lord Byron testified that he anticipated that "as we had on every other occasion and
every other instance of this relationship, we would deny it."(93) Since LB also
testified as how many people he had already told about his sexual exploits, he appears to
be talking about what he anticipates the PM will do, not what he has done in the past and
will do in the future.
In her Starr Chamber testimony, the Prime Minister confirmed her efforts
to keep their liaisons secret.
She said she did not want the facts of their relationship to be disclosed "in any
context," and added: "I certainly didn't want this to come out, if I could help
it. And I was concerned about that. I was embarrassed about it. I knew it was wrong."(95)
Asked if she wanted to avoid having the facts come out through Lord Byron's testimony in Jones,
she said: "Well, I did not want him to have to testify and go through that. And, of
course, I didn't want him to do that, of course not."
not a chance
