The Day Miss Whiplash Was On The Receiving End Of A Blow From The UK Taxman
- U I Team
- May 15, 2023
- 5 min read
Way back in 1990, Lindi St Clair, better known to Britain’s tabloid readers as “Miss Whiplash”, lost her long and rather colourful fifteen-year battle with the Inland Revenue. It was a court fight that had more leather, cross-dressing inspectors, and startled vicars than any normal tax case deserves.
At the heart of it all was one simple fact: the tax office wanted back taxes, seeing prostitution as a legitimate trade. Lindi, true to form, fired back that this made them “nothing more than Her Majesty’s pimps.” It was exactly the kind of line that kept Fleet Street’s red tops in business.
A Taxman in Drag and a House Full of Secrets
The entire saga, by Lindi’s own telling, started when she refused to give a discount to a cross-dressing tax inspector. This petty stand-off would snowball into a headline-grabbing brawl with the Treasury.
By then, St Clair was already infamous among London’s vice squad. Police raids on her luxurious London townhouse had twice ended in surreal scenes. During her second bust, officers found Lindi calmly entertaining a vicar in a gas mask handcuffed to the lounge wall, a nobleman trussed up in a straitjacket and stuffed in a cupboard, and a Member of Parliament chained to a dog kennel in the back garden. The girls had all fled out the back door, leaving only Lindi to face the music — which, in her eyes, was just another kind of tax.
When the Revenue’s forms started dropping through her letterbox soon after, she binned them. Instead, she fired back a letter asking, rather reasonably in her view:
“If brothel-keeping is to be recognised and taxed, then will my brothel convictions be quashed and my fines refunded?”
From Rural Teenager to London Madam
Born Marian June Akin in 1952, Lindi’s story was always going to stand out. She bolted from her rural home at just 14, landing in London with few choices and plenty of streetwise resolve. She worked the streets until she saved enough for her real ambition: buying a grand house and turning it into what she later branded the “House of Fetish and Fantasy.”
Her clientele included the discreet corridors of Parliament, the Foreign Office, and the City. Business was so brisk she bought herself a Rolls-Royce and a yacht to match — a far cry from her days scrabbling for cab fare on London pavements.
Diamonds, Jaguars and a Very Unusual Audit
Inevitably, success brought unwelcome attention. By 1981, the Revenue had estimated that from 1973 to 1981 she owed over £110,000 in unpaid taxes — no small sum, especially for someone without a single ledger or receipt. The estimate wasn’t plucked from thin air; a 1980 ITV documentary had shown her cruising in her Jaguar to buy diamonds in Mayfair with her credit card. Not exactly subtle tax planning.
Lindi’s accountant managed to haggle this down to £46,000, despite the absence of any formal accounts. But Lindi wasn’t satisfied. So the Special Office dispatched two inspectors to her premises to take a closer look at how “Miss Whiplash” earned her keep.
She did not disappoint them. For the entire interview she was topless, flanked by three women in black leather fetish gear and one stark naked. She gave them a full tour and even quizzed them on whether she could claim tax relief for haemorrhoid cream and a tonsillectomy to “improve her oral technique”. A fair question, to this day unanswered by HMRC’s manuals.
An agreement was eventually reached: she would pay £40,000 plus interest. That should have ended it.
The State Is a Pimp
But it didn’t. Lindi never paid up. After five years of chasing, the Revenue sued — by then the debt had grown to nearly £59,000 with interest. She retaliated with a sharp letter to the court, arguing that if the Crown took her money, it too was guilty of “living on immoral earnings.”
A judge agreed she had a point — enough to stall the Revenue’s demand. They appealed. Outside the High Court, Lindi’s loyal fans waved placards and chanted, “The State is a Pimp.”
Inside, her barrister argued that prostitution couldn’t be a trade because prostitutes can’t do things normal tradesfolk can: no advertising, no partnerships, no companies, no suing non-payers, no renting premises openly. Running a brothel, of course, was outright illegal.
The High Court brushed all this aside. The judge famously ruled that burglary profits are not taxed not because burglary is illegal, but because burglary isn’t a trade. If something is run like a business — legal or not — it’s taxable. Lindi was undeterred and took her fight to the Court of Appeal.
Dressed to Lose
Ever the showwoman, Lindi turned up for her appeal hearing in full dominatrix kit. In her own words: “I felt that if I were to be taxed as a tart, I would appear as one.” Fishnet tights, a shiny PVC dress and a studded belt jangling with handcuffs didn’t win over the judges.
They ruled prostitution was indeed a trade — an “immoral” one, but still a trade for tax purposes. And while her past brothel convictions existed, the Revenue had wisely based their calculations on her earnings as a prostitute, which remained legal under British law.
Her argument that she couldn’t legally advertise or sue for debts was dismissed with withering logic: “If a plumber chooses to ply his trade without doing any of those things which would constitute crimes if done by a prostitute, he is plainly still carrying on a trade.”
Vanished, Found, and Finally Bankrupt
In 1993, when her car was found abandoned on the south coast, police feared the worst and launched a nationwide hunt. In reality, Lindi was enjoying a first-class cruise — paid for, she later bragged, with the very money the Revenue wanted.
By May that year she was dragged back to court and declared bankrupt for unpaid taxes. Asked what she would do now, she told reporters:
“The bankruptcy petition was for £112,000 the Revenue claims I owe, but that is only up to 1983. There is a further 10 years’ unpaid tax they are claiming, bringing the amount up to £250,000. But the Government can whistle up their dispatch boxes for it. I went on that lovely world cruise first-class and blew the lot. They are not getting tuppence out of me. Now all I’ve got left is zilch. I sold my brothel last year. I’ve got no assets. Now I’ve retired. I’ve gone past my sell-by date. I’m going to sign on as unemployed.”
Miss Whiplash Becomes Miss Akin Again
Ever the political showboat, Lindi, or sometimes Lindi St Claire, depending on her mood, had stood for Parliament no fewer than eleven times under her own “Corrective Party” banner. She never won but always made headlines.
In a final twist worthy of the tabloids that once adored her, she reverted to her birth name in 2009 and embraced Christianity, confirmed in the Church of England by the Bishop of Hereford.
From whip-cracking dominatrix to penitent Christian, Lindi’s journey remains one of the oddest, and most entertaining, footnotes in Britain’s long and tangled love affair with sex, scandal, and the taxman.
