Sex Scandal as Propaganda: The Libel Trial of Noel Pemberton- Billing, London 1918. ‘No lawsuit has attracted such universal and painful interest’, declared the Times on 5 June 1918. ‘The daily reports have been read and discussed with almost as much deep anxiety as news of the war itself’. 1 The suit to which the paper referred was in fact the libel trial of Noel Pemberton Billing, a right-wing MP, brought against him by the celebrated Edwardian actress, Maud Allan. On 16 February, Billing’s paper The Vigilante, had published a cryptic paragraph entitled ‘the Cult of the Clitoris’, in which was alleged that Allan, then starring in a private performance of Wilde’s Salome was administering to a sinister cult among the upper classes, the so called ‘first 47,000’, said to include ‘Privy Councillors, Cabinet Ministers, diplomats, poets, bankers, newspaper proprietors and members of His Majesty’s Household’, all implicated in German espionage. 2 If the precise anatomical meaning of the title was lost on most, it was certainly understood by Allan herself who immediately began proceedings against Billing on the grounds that it could ‘only mean one thing’, namely that she was a lesbian. 3 Such a heinous accusation her counsel claimed, was in war time tantamount to being accused of treason. 4 Billing’s defence meanwhile rested on his assurance that he could prove that Allan was ‘a lewd, unchaste and immoral woman’ and her performances ‘designed to foster and encourage obscene and unnatural practices among women’. 5 Not surprisingly given the nature of Billing’s allegations, the subsequent trial and its representation in the press generated unprecedented levels of public interest, providing as it did, a welcome distraction from endless causality lists and the ever worsening situation on the Western Front. Yet it also performed an indispensable ideological function. Although nominally orchestrated with the intention of rooting out pro-German sympathies within the British government, the scandal was simultaneously devised to suppress not only opposition to the 1