The oil boom of the 1980s made London the worldÂ’s premier party town
The accusation last week that Heather Mills, the former model and soon to be ex-Lady Paul McCartney, was immersed in a party scene where girls regularly took money from wealthy Arabs for sex in the early 1990s sent shock waves round Britain. Certainly Mills herself was dismayed — and plans to sue over the claims — but should the rest of us have been so thrown by the idea? There was indeed a shadowy world of late-night parties where middle-class English roses would do all sorts of things for the right price, as anyone who experienced the heady days of petrodollar fever will remember.
It began with OpecÂ’s quadrupling of crude oil prices in 1973, continued by virtue of arms sales to the Middle East in the 1980s and petered out only in the early 1990s, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. During that time Arab money flooded into Britain and with it insanely rich Arab party givers.
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