NEVER does a man twist and turn more than when he has been found out.

Official papers from 1973, released this week under the 30-year rule, show how imaginative Lord Lambton was when he was caught naked in bed with two prostitutes and a cannabis joint.

You would have to be pretty imaginative to find yourself in such a position in the first place, but the more Lambton, of Biddick Hall, near Chester-le-Street, tried to explain himself the more his imagination ran riot.

He was an Under Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, with special responsibility for the RAF, and the country still recalled the horror of ten years before when the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, was found sharing a mistress with a Russian colonel - a liaison that eventually brought down Harold Macmillan's government.

So when grainy photographs taken through a keyhole emerged - showing Lambton in bed with Norma Levy, who had grown up in Stockton, and a black prostitute known to this day only as Kim - Lambton was forced to resign.

His initial statement was commendably blunt. "I have no excuses to make," he said. "I behaved with incredible stupidity."

Then he became dismissive of his crime, as if it were an everyday occurrence. "I think that people sometimes like variety," he told Robin Day.

MI5 got involved, desperate to discover if MoD secrets had been blown along with the cannabis.

Lambton's excuses became imaginative. At first he blamed losing a three-year battle over his hereditary title. His father, the fifth Earl of Durham, had died in 1970 and although Lambton had disclaimed the title so that he could remain MP for Berwick, he still wanted to use 'viscount'.

"He sought to forget his obsession in frantic activity," says the MI5 report released this week. "He had, for example, become an enthusiastic and vigorous gardener. Another example of this frenzied activity was his debauchery."

An energetic pruning of the shrubbery is one thing, a cannabis-fuelled romp with a couple of call girls is quite another.

However, Lambton then claimed he couldn't remember what he was doing in the bed.

"After the disclosures in the press, he had been in such a state of shock that he was no longer able to recall with any certainty the details of his debauchery," says the MI5 report. "They had been erased from his mind."

Finally, MI5 pressed the Durham noble on whether he had taken any secret defence papers with him to his illicit meetings. He denied he had and came up with another excuse.

"Indeed, he had no need to, since he had so little work to do," said the report. "He implied that the futility of the job was one of the reasons he had got up to mischief."

So, his lordship was in bed with prostitutes and drugs because he wasn't allowed to be a viscount, because gardening did not get rid of enough pent-up energy, because he couldn't remember and finally because being a member of Edward Heath's government was boring. Not a bad list of excuses for someone who initially said: "I have no excuses to make."

Lord Lambton, whose extraordinary ex-wife Bindy died in February, now lives in Italy, from where he said recently: "I never think about the past any more. It is not worth regretting."