Skelton was born at The Croft, Ellington Road, Taplow, Buckinghamshire, elder daughter of Eric George Skelton, who had been a Major in the West India regiment before being invalided out at a young age, and Ada Eveline (née Williams), a theatre Gaiety Girl.
[3] Skelton spent some of her early years in British India; a difficult child, she once charged at her mother with a carving knife and was later expelled from a convent school.
[5] In World War II, she was recruited into the Foreign Office as a cipher clerk by Donald Maclean, a diplomat who unknown to her was a Soviet spy.
[6] In 1942, she was assigned to the British embassy in Cairo, where at the Auberge des Pyramides night club, she first met King Farouk, who was throwing bread balls at the patrons.
[7] In 1945, the ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, decided that Skelton was a security risk, believing that she was leaking information to Farouk, and she was reassigned to the embassy in Athens.
[8] Farouk encouraged Skelton to run up a large bill with dressmakers, promising her he would pay for it all, which he did not when she informed him that she was being reassigned to Athens, leading her to say he was "staggering cheap".
[9] Despite encouraging his fiancée to go with Farouk, Connolly became consumed with jealousy and started stalking the royal party as Skelton remembered: "Cyril turned out to be more jealous than I first thought.
[4] She had affairs with, among others, Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Charles Addams, Bernard Frank, John Sutro and Alan Ross.
Anthony Powell used her as the basis for Pamela Flitton, a character in his novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.