During the autumn of 1992 Lamont became a press target in a string of largely fabricated stories: that he had not paid his hotel bill for "champagne and large breakfasts" from the Conservative Party Conference (in fact his bill had been forwarded on for settlement); that he was in arrears on his personal Visa credit card bill (true); that in June 1991 he had used taxpayers' money to handle the fall-out from press stories concerning a sex therapist, who was using a flat he owned (the Treasury contributed £4,700 of the £23,000 bill which had been formally approved by the Head of the Civil Service and the Prime Minister; there was never any suggestion that he had ever met her); and that he had called at a newsagent in a seedy area of Paddington late at night to purchase champagne and cheap "Raffles" cigarettes. The last story turned out to have been entirely invented.