There is an obvious source for some of what precedes. The Profumo Affair of 1963 gave me some of the plot and a few of the details of the second quarter of this book. Equally, there are other, perhaps less obvious sources – the case of Detective Sergeant Challenor of 1962, the defection of Kim Philby, also in 1963, and the resignation of Lord Lambton some ten years later. I was also influenced by, among others, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger,V.C. Fishwick’s Pigs: Their Breeding and Management (rev. edn, 1956), the poetry of Brian Patten and the Diaries of Alan Clark.
This is not a roman à clef. It does not helpto presume that Woodbridge is Profumo or to presume that Charlie is Philby. Equally, Fitz is not Ward and Tara, Caro and Clover are neither Mandy nor Christine. The ‘real’ people are the minor characters – Driberg, Rebecca West – or background figures who do not appear – Wilson, Kennedy et al. I made the rest up. Only two ‘speeches’ made by anyone in 1963 are used in this book, the first uttered by Stephen Ward at his trial is given, slightly amended, to Marty Pritch-Kempon p. 231, and the second, uttered, perhaps apocryphally, by Rebecca West is on p. 188.
I’ve bent history as little as possible, but for reasons of plot I sent Troy and Driberg to the Establishment Club after the real Establishment had folded, and I’m well aware that a 1952 Bentley Continental was a two-door car, and that I gave it four.
If a novel can have a single starting point, it was this. Several years ago I interviewed a reporter who had covered the Stephen Ward case in 1963, and had known Ward well. ‘Any idea that he was bumped off is fantasy,’ I was told. ‘He killed himself.’ And I started to think of a plot whose premise was ‘supposing he didn’t?’ Once I’d gone down that road, since I’d no doubts that Ward did kill himself, the resemblances to what really happened in 1963 became those of mood, as in ‘national mood’, and tone rather than of incident and character. I stuck with the axis of the plot being a sex scandal because no other plot would be authentically as axiomatic of the times. As Rebecca West put it: ‘The state of mind of England in 1963 was itself a historic event . . .’