Christine Wheatley stunned officials when she confessed to working in Paris as a “tart” for Fr20 a time. She had been shortlisted for the Copeland seat in Cumbria.

Last night the Labour Party defended its decision to scratch her name from the candidacy on the ground that she had failed to inform officials of her six-week career on the streets.

A senior official said that when Ms Wheatley was asked whether she had any skeletons in the cupboard she neglected to mention that she was once a member of the oldest profession. “She clearly does not regard this as a skeleton,” he said.

Ms Wheatley shared that view and remained defiant yesterday. She was not ashamed, she said. In fact, she was more ashamed that she had once been an encyclopaedia saleswoman in Germany. “Yes, I worked as a tart. I’m not ashamed. It was before I found proper work. It was fun,” she said. “We have single mothers who want to be MPs, gay and lesbian candidates, so why not former sex workers?”

Ms Wheatley went on to describe how she would pick up men in Paris in the mid-1970s after being sent down by Oxford University, where she studied politics, philosophy and economics at St Anne’s College.

“I was a delightful young woman,” she said at her tower-block council flat in Birmingham. “I used to sit at a café on the Boulevard St Michel. French guys would come along and say, ‘Would you like something to drink?’ I would say, ‘I will have a coffee’.

“Then I would say, ‘Would you like to make love?’ They always said yes. Then I would say, ‘Do you have the money?’ Then we would go to a hotel.

“It was not truly Parisian love. It was usually only three minutes. I used to charge about Fr20. It wasn’t a good living but it kept me going until I got a job as a secretary.”

The 53-year-old is now training to become a lawyer at the Inner Temple in London.

She was hoping to be selected to replace Jack Cunningham, a former Cabinet minister who is retiring, and the walls of her home are lined with pictures of former prime ministers, including Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Macmillan, Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli.

Ms Wheatley said that she left St Paul’s Grammar School for Girls, Birmingham, where she learnt French, before going to Oxford. Having travelled and worked in Europe for several years, she returned to Britain, she said, in the 1980s and took a variety of jobs. After reading in the left-wing magazine Tribune that prospective candidates were wanted for Copeland, she decided to apply.

Ms Wheatley was invited to a hustings meeting in the constituency last Saturday and put on a shortlist of seven candidates. At the meeting she gave a five-minute speech.

Party members heard about Ms Wheatley’s past only after she gave a candid interview to a local paper.

A spokesman for the Labour Party said: “Christine Margaret Wheatley was given full opportunity to disclose all the facts that might be relevant to her candidature for the position of parliamentary candidate for Copeland. It has become obvious that she failed to do this and therefore the Labour Party have had no choice but to withdraw her from the shortlist of aspiring candidates.”

Ms Wheatley said: “When they heard about my past as a tart a representative from the regional office shouted at me and told me I had brought the Labour Party into disrepute.

“I will persevere in politics, although this is a grave setback.”

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