Emma Basden has just stepped off a 10-hour flight from LA, but not that you’d know it. She looks fresh and tanned, and sports a pair of low-rise designer denims with a grey T-shirt and cobra-skin boots. Her hair is styled in that just-got-out-of-bed-but-not-really way, and she looks like she’s ready to run a marathon (not that exercise is really her thing).

By her own admission, Emma Basden is best known as ‘Rebecca Loos’ former lesbian lover’, and gained a high degree of publicity when she was revealed as the woman seeing Loos at the same time Loos was allegedly seeing David Beckham.

High-profile love triangles aside, however, Emma has a successful TV career as a property pundit – she’s just finished shooting for Channel 4’s House Auction, and presented the BBC’s Safe As Houses series last year – and owns two businesses based in East London, where she lives with her girlfriend, Jen, and her two dogs, Henry, a Lhasa Apso and Molly, a Shih Tzu. Dressing her two dogs in hoodies, I wonder if Emma is poking fun at the latest taboo – the symbol of the so-called yob culture – in her own special way.

Emma and Rebecca met each other five years ago and, she confesses, were attracted to each other’s personalities from the start. After building a close friendship, they became romantically involved, but their relationship was more ‘fling’ than ‘full on’, ‘It was never “Rebecca and I”,’ says Emma. When the News of the World contacted Loos to say they were going to break the story about her alleged affair with Beckham, with or without Rebecca’s version of events, Emma advised her to contact Public Relations guru Max Clifford, and arranged for Loos to give her first TV interview with Kay Burley on Sky.



Emma’s intervention was clearly borne of concern for a friend to whom she remains unflinchingly loyal, arguing that Rebecca isn’t the marriage-wrecking type. ‘If you’re with somebody on a daily basis, and their wife isn’t there, and they’re saying they’re slightly unhappy and lonely, things can just happen. You can forget that that person is a soccer idol and that they’re married with children. We’ve all done it – perhaps not with a soccer idol, but we’ve all been there at one stage or another.

‘Rebecca’s a bit of a wild card and does put her foot in it, but she knows that and that’s the beauty of her. She’s one of the most grounded, loving, funny people I know.’

After the Loos–Beckham story broke, the Daily Mirror ran an interview with Basden, in which she was quoted as saying, ‘There were three of us in this relationship’, and which she now denies. ‘I learnt a big lesson from that interview. It hurt me and it affected me.’ For the first time during our interview she appears vulnerable. ‘My friends told me they knew I’d never say stuff like that, but the rest of the world didn’t.’

Last year, when she attended the premier of Kill Bill 2 with Rebecca, some papers accused her of purposely dressing like Beckham, revealing just how little some journalists know about dyke chic. ‘I’ve dressed like that for years. I always wear boots, jeans, a shirt or T-shirt and a jacket, and I have dozens of rosary beads.’

Not that Emma minds media attention; ‘It tickles me when someone recognises me. It kind of makes me think, “I’ve made my mark”’ No Jamie Oliver media-jadedness yet, then? She laughs at the comparison: ‘I don’t, and am never likely to, experience that kind of media-attention on a daily basis.’ Is she a publicity-seeker? ‘Not at all. If I was, I could have done a hell of a lot more to expose myself.’

Emma remembers papers hounding her outside her house through both her affairs with model Sonja Walker (whom Basden dated when Walker was suing her female boss at BHS for sexual harassment in a high-profile case) and Loos. Yet she maintains that she agreed to the Mirror interview because she thought someone should stand up and say ‘Hang on a sec!’ about what was being written about Loos, not because she wanted publicity for herself. ‘I could have done the most salacious pieces and be sitting here with £100,000 in my pocket, but I didn’t. I enjoy my privacy.’

Privacy is just what you get chez Basden in her stylish, spacious East London apartment. Watching Emma make fresh coffee in the kitchen, though, I get the feeling she’s not at home very often. ‘I’ve forgotten where things are,’ she says looking around for the cafetiere. What strikes me first are the two electric guitars, mounted on a wall. One features a Union Jack and the other, cream, is home to a snake of fairy lights. Does she play? ‘No, but I’m shit-hot at air guitar,’ she says laughing.

There’s a large colour print of a bare-breasted blonde in the kitchen; in the living area a glass coffee table sits on a cowhide rug in front of a large, L-shaped, coffee-coloured suede sofa. An exercise bike rests in the corner (more of a clotheshorse than a functioning sweat-breaker, she admits), and a toy model of her ice-blue Lotus sports car – the real version is parked outside – sits on the side. She also has a jeep ‘for Sunday walks on Hampstead Heath’.

She later shows me around upstairs, where there’s an en-suite master bedroom. There are a lot of clothes lying about and a set of weights, which she admits aren’t used often, and which I take to mean ‘at all’. Emma keeps her five-foot six-inch frame trim by just being constantly on the go. That includes frequent travel abroad. Emma likes her sun. Miami and LA are favourite holiday destinations, particularly Miami, which hosts her favourite bar, Nikki Beach. ‘It’s just fucking the bollocks,’ she says.

There’s a definite hint of Hollywood chez Basden. Prints of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Clark Gable hang in her studio office, which has a long, wall-to-wall, black Perspex desk that she made herself. Elvis died and Madonna was born on her birthday – August 16th in case you’re thinking of sending flowers – all of which lends itself well to the rock ’n’ roll party feel of the place.

As she pours our coffee – she takes hers black with sugar – the subject of partying pops up. While she and Jen often go out for dinner – favourite haunts include Lounge Lovers in East London and Boheme Kitchen in Soho, but ‘Never pubs!’ – what excites Emma most is hosting her own parties. ‘It’s a Leo thing,’ she says. ‘I love being centre stage,’ and with an outdoor decking area and built-in bar, the flat seems made for parties. I wonder if this fondness for holding court suggests a controlling trait? ‘No, I don’t think so, I just know I throw the best parties!’

Ever since she was seven, Emma’s known she was gay, so sexuality has never been an issue. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ she says. ‘I love women. They’re sexy, they smell good, they’re just amazing creatures. I like to watch them, to be around them and talk to them.’ She thinks for a moment: ‘I find women all-consuming, and I don’t find that in men. I can feel totally lost in a woman’s eyes, in her presence, and forget anybody else is in the room,’ she says. ‘I’ve never felt like that about a man.’

Emma met Jen when she employed her to work at MySpace and, she says, it just took off. ‘Jen left her boyfriend, moved in with me and that was that.’ And that seems to be her general modus operandi. Affairs, business plans, career breaks, all seem to have taken off effortlessly for the 33-year-old. Born in Buckinghamshire, she had a happy childhood growing up with her older sister and parents; her father was a property surveyor and architect, and her mother a fashion designer. She went to Juniper Hill, a libertarian school where alligators (real ones) roamed the corridors and there was no homework or rules. ‘It was a place where your individuality was allowed to grow,’ she explains. The family moved to Cyprus when she was 11. She was expelled before taking her A-Levels for spending all her time in the darkroom developing her passion for photography. From there, she worked as a graphic designer, and then found a job crewing on a yacht, despite the fact she couldn’t sail: ‘By the time they figured that out, it was too late to turn back.’

Emma doesn’t let small issues get in the way of success. Ambitious, driven and, above all, positive, she also managed to convince a bar owner in Mykonos to take her on for a year, even though they weren’t hiring. ‘I walked into this bar set in a cave, and I thought, “I want to work here”,’ Emma remembers. The next day, having successfully managed the bikini fashion show, she found she’d landed herself a job. When she returned to the UK, she began working for Foxtons Estate Agency, where she was spotted for the BBC’s Safe As Houses series. Secretly, she’s angling to host a late-night chat show, though, ‘to express more of my personality’.

Emma’s good at self-expression and being in charge. Recently, she set up Apple London, an estate agency, and has also just started a talent management company, Pink Management. The ‘Pink’ doesn’t denote anything gay, mind: ‘I chose “Pink” because it’s positive and feminine,’ she explains. Currently, she’s looking after Loos, who recently shot a documentary on power-lesbians in LA for Sky TV.

Aside from her career, Emma wants to raise a family and plans to adopt. ‘I don’t think we live in a nice world, and I don’t think we need to bring new life into it,’ she says. She sits a little further forward on the edge of the sofa: ‘If there are kids who don’t have love, then why not look after them first? It’s like they’ve been left on the roadside. They don’t deserve that – nobody deserves that.’ She pauses for a second. ‘I’d like to give a couple of little hearts some love. I’ve got a lot of love to give.’

Emma holds her thoughts for a second, then says, smiling, ‘I need to get things sorted don’t I?’