A thoroughly modern mistress

She took no money for her tales of bonking at the Bank ... but that doesn't make Mary Ellen Synon a good woman, say ANGELA LAMBERT and VICKY WARD

If ever a woman were determined to prove that a mistress can win the eternal battle for her man - the battle between his secret role as adoring lover and the public face of the respectable married man - Mary Ellen Synon was that woman. Not satisfied with being Rupert Pennant-Rea's mistress, she was dead set on making him her husband.

Mr Pennant-Rea and Ms Synon were contemporaries at Trinity College Dublin in the heady years of the late Sixties. By the time they encountered one another at the Economist he had two ex-wives and two children, in addition to his current household. This did not prevent him from embarking on a torrid affair. Very little does, to those who are that way inclined, particularly when they are beckoned by a clever woman with "beautiful" eyes and a penchant for wearing suspenders but no knickers. Men are easily led astray.

Ms Synon, for her part, was undeterred by the fact that all the obvious cards were stacked against her. When their affair began, Rupert Pennant- Rea was in his forties - an age at which a thrice-married man is beginning to settle down to the deep peace of the double bed and is disinclined to risk yet another marital upheaval, another change of home, another set of alimony payments.

Mary Ellen Synon might have reasoned like this. She was no bimbo. Sure, she had a pretty face and - according to Mr Pennant-Rea's indiscreet but burning love letters - a good body to go with it. But on top of that she had a brain; a career, a future redolent with possibility. Married - as she planned - to the deputy governor, perhaps in due course the governor of the Bank of England, there need be no limit to her ambitions. Editor of the Economist? Why not? Special financial adviser to the government? Who knows? All things were possible, given the marriage she aspired to and the patronage and high-level connections it would naturally bestow.

A year ago, those hopes were shattered. Ms Synon may have been piling on the pressure too hard; her lover may have been cooling; or he may have become suspicious (as well he might) about her chronicling of his indiscretions. Be that as it may, he told her the affair was over - or as unfaithful husbands always phrase it, he had decided that loyalty to his wife and family came first.

She was furious, and told him so. She said she would expose him and for a year he has been waiting for the bombshell to drop. Last weekend it did. If there is one thing worse than a woman scorned, it is - as Ms Synon herself pointed out - a clever, high-flying, single, Irish-American woman scorned. Ms Synon has spent many months planning her revenge, and this week she got it. Within days of her revelations, her ex-lover felt obliged to resign.

In one sense this is simply the latest in a long and fast-moving line of stories about public figures enjoying affairs, each of which provokes as much prurient interest as it does indignation. It is, after all, only a fortnight since the junior minister Robert Hughes resigned after confessing an affair with a constituent; a month from now there will doubtless be a new and vivid tale of adultery to absorb us.

In Ms Synon's case, the difference lies in the detail. She makes a very different mistress from her famous predecessors: unlike Sara Keays or Julia Stent, she cannot easily be cast as a victim; unlike Bienvenida Buck or Antonia de Sancha she cannot be labelled a gold-digger.

The manner in which Ms Synon conducted her entire affair suggests that she was the controller rather than the controlled. She explains that Mr Pennant-Rea first "caught her eye" in 1976, but that he was "over-eager". When she did allow the affair to proceed in 1991 she kept photocopies of air tickets and room keys from their clandestine trips abroad. Even Bienvenida Buck, arguably the most manipulative of modern mistresses to date, only resorted to sabotage after she had decided to betray her lover, Sir Peter Harding, organising the photo-shoot outside a hotel that led to his downfall.

Ms Synon has not been left with a child to support, and she appears to be comfortably self-sufficient. The way she spilt her beans is also different from her predecessors. They became desperate because of pregnancy (in the case of Sarah Keays, Cecil Parkinson's mistress), or sheer jealousy (Pamella Bordes, Andrew Neil's amour) or by dint of circumstance (Antonia de Sancha, whose flatmate ratted on her to the press, leaving her no choice but to spill the beans about David Mellor). Ms Synon, however, waited a whole year after Mr Pennant-Rea broke off the affair before revealing it to the press. She gathered her evidence, warned him what she would do, chose her moment and acted with clinical efficiency.

Perhaps the strangest - and cleverest - of all her actions to date is that she has taken no money for her story. This prevents the public and the media from denouncing her, as people did with Bienvenida Buck, as a grasping opportunist. More than anything, though, it keeps her on an even footing with Pennant-Rea: for this is an unusual mistress story in that, in terms of class, education, intellect and opportunity, the protagonists appear to be each other's equal.

Ms Synon has displayed clear-sightedness throughout and this was evident in a passionate defence of her feelings that she wrote for yesterday's London Evening Standard. "Rupert has lost his job at the Bank. That hurts. I know," she wrote - but they were in love, planned to spend their lives together and he betrayed her. She writes with some wit as well as a clear mind. Answering charges that only Mr Pennant-Rea's job could have made him attractive, she wrote: "Three brides and more than one ex-girlfriend suggest that Roo offers something more interesting than a good line on Alan Greenspan".

Yet nowhere does she mention the hurt done to Mrs Pennant-Rea, and nowhere does she recognise that chasing married men is a dangerous game, and one in which she was an eager participant.

If one asks whose is the greatest fall, the answer is hers, of course. Yes, for the time being Mr Pennant-Rea is out of a job. But the chaps' world of the City will look after him. A few months, at most, will pass before he is discreetly reinserted into the boardrooms and business diaries of his fellow bankers. His wife has taken him back into the marital home. In the long run he has probably lost very little.

And Mary Ellen Synon ... what of her? What married man will risk embarking on a relationship with her now? Her colleagues will look at her askance and decide that on the whole it is probably better not to invite her to join them for a drink, or lunch, or dinner at the weekend. She will find it hard not to be defined in terms of her affair, in the way that Sara Keays' name is now indissolubly linked with that of Cecil Parkinson, and Antonia de Sancha's is with David Mellor.

There is no doubt that Rupert Pennant-Rea, Lord Parkinson and David Mellor will always be invited to make speeches, take up jobs, come to dinner, open ftes without giving the slightest thought to past misdemeanours. The most their former mistresses can hope for is to cash in on their brief notoriety, and the fact that Ms Synon did not sell her story means that she does not even have the consolation of a few thousand sweet smackers in the bank. Bienvenida Buck is now considerably richer than she was before her affair, as a result of selling her story to the press. "I've got two books on the go," Bienvenida said the other day, "I feel I've set myself up as an icon for women."

Aside from lurid book-writing, however, none of them has exactly turned into a figure of national fascination. At best they are pitied, at worst ridiculed.

Ms Synon set out on her affair intent on upsetting the form guide and winning her man. In this she failed, though she set new standards of revenge along the way and has shaken every married man who imagines he can love and leave a mistress with impunity.

Perhaps the best she can hope for now is to disappear swiftly from newspaper pages, other than in her capacity as a writer. "I'm sure we will employ her again. She is a very provocative writer with a large following," the deputy editor of the Sunday Business Post in Dublin said yesterday. "I can't see recent events getting in the way of that."