White House Sex Scandal on Capitol Hill

She looks the picture of a demure businesswoman, with her dark hair, navy suit and horn-rimmed spectacles. But Deborah Palfrey's business involved sexual favours - and now she's ready to kiss and tell. Rupert Cornwell explains why

In Washington they call it "Taking out the trash" time - the dead hours of late Friday afternoon when a government department dumps an embarrassing piece of news, hopeful it will be overlooked by the Saturday papers and otherwise lost and forgotten amid the pleasures of the weekend. And last Friday provided a classic of the genre.

At 5.30pm the surprise news came over the wires: Randall Tobias, 65, a deputy secretary of state in charge of US foreign aid programmes and a former chairman of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, had resigned "for personal reasons", effective immediately. The ritual tributes flowed in. "A rich legacy on which he can look back with justifiable pride," declared Sean McCormack, spokesman for Condoleezza Rice. A couple of hours later the sensational truth emerged. Mr Tobias, by all accounts a much-liked figure, had quit because his name was about to surface in a long-simmering scandal about a high-class prostitution business in Washington DC, run by a woman based in California, whose clients may have included some of the biggest names in town.