In the summer of 1963 there was a Profumo spree. Rumour-mongers were like hungry lions prowling the London streets in search of fleshy prey on which to pounce. The stuffier members of the Establishment were apoplectic; newspapers incited daily fits of hysterics; and lawyers planned vindictive ways to reassert authority. Some boisterous people enjoyed the cheerful smut flying about, but others flinched at the filth. There was little agreement on how to treat the scandal. MI5 considered that the affair between Profumo and Keeler was a private matter; Wilson’s Labour Party claimed that it was a security issue; The Times sermonised that it was a moral issue; lascivious newspapers dribbled over pretty girls at orgies; Hailsham bellowed that it was a question of Profumo’s integrity; Nigel Birch sniped that it was a product of Macmillan’s ineptitude; the running dogs of Mirror Newspapers barked that it was the sordid, humiliating death-throe of the Establishment.
That was the state of affairs until the end of June. Then, with the sex stories sub judice before Ward’s trial, and with a clamp on spy stories while the Law Lord, Denning, investigated espionage rumours, editors plumped for Rachman’s antics as a slum landlord as the new source of devilment. Finally, from mid-July onwards, as Ward’s show trial was staged at the Old Bailey, with solemn judicial handling of perjurers and tainted police evidence, and the Court of Criminal Appeal performed deplorable tricks, and Denning titillated himself, lawyers took the leading parts for the last act of the drama.
On the mornings of 5, 6 and 7 June, Christine Keeler arrived for Gordon’s trial at the Old Bailey in a Rolls-Royce (hired by Robin Drury, her temporary business manager). She was dressed in mauve, like a film-star ready for priceless photo opportunities. She testified – as Marylebone police officers had instructed – that Gordon had assaulted her in Paula Hamilton-Marshall’s flat on 17 April. Despite being asked by Keeler and his sister to keep away from the trial, John Hamilton-Marshall felt that Gordon should not be prosecuted for something that he had done. He appeared at the court on the first morning, and spoke to a policeman, who sent him away. Hamilton-Marshall was a voluble, gesticulating youth with criminal convictions: he was deterred from speaking out. As he had previously told the truth of what happened to Ward, Ronna Ricardo and Sunday Pictorial reporters, several people knew that Gordon’s was a show trial.
Gordon insisted upon defending himself. He was not allowed to cross-examine Keeler directly, but put questions to her designed to show the extent of her lies. To the gratification of reporters he repeatedly introduced Ward’s name, and demanded to know whether ‘she asked me to find a coloured girl for her brother Stephen so we could make up a foursome’. Keeler agreed that this was true. Later she was ejected from the court for raising a screaming brouhaha when Gordon claimed that she had infected him with venereal disease. Gordon wanted to call Profumo and Ward as defence witnesses, as well as Camacchio and Fenton, the men who had been at the Devonshire Street flat when Keeler’s telephone calls had lured him there. He added that the policeman who arrested him had said that he was investigating Ward for procuring girls for Society men.
Ward appeared on ITV’s This Week programme to deny that he was a procurer, and reiterated that he had told MI5 of the Profumo-Keeler entanglement early on. Burrows, the policeman handling Gordon’s prosecution, told the court on 7 June that Camacchio and Fenton could not be produced as defence witnesses because they were untraceable – an odd claim, because it transpired (too late for Gordon) that Camacchio was remanded on bail, and his whereabouts were ascertainable. The jury took ten minutes to find Gordon guilty of assault, but acquitted him of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. He was sentenced to three years.
In the hectic days following Profumo’s resignation, Wigg was ruthless in ensuring that the Labour Party emphasis was exclusively on the security issue, bogus though he knew this to be. The rhetoric of class conflict was just beneath the surface: ‘The trial of Keeler and her Negro friends must have been the biggest shock to public morality which has been known in this century,’ Crossman wrote after Gordon’s conviction. ‘I can’t think of a more humiliating and discrediting story than the Secretary of State for War’s being involved with people of this kind. It has social seediness and some fairly scabrous security background concerning Ivanov, the lying, the collusion, and the fact that Royalty and the Establishment back Profumo.’ Crossman predicted that if the Queen saw Profumo when, as was the custom for retiring ministers, he returned his seals of office, ‘this would do the Establishment enormous harm … in fact enormously undermine the Government, and so assist in creating the conditions for a Labour Party victory’.1
On Saturday 8 June, in an act of political revenge, Ward, wearing carpet slippers, was arrested in Hempstead Road, Watford, outside the house of his friend Pelham Pound, the features editor of Woman’s Mirror. He was charged with living wholly or partly on the earnings of prostitution, although there was some juggling with the indictment as the police tried to agree with prosecutors what charges had a hope of sticking. David Astor’s protégé Patrick O’Donovan wrote: ‘You only had to say, “I see they’ve arrested him,” and everyone knew whom and what you meant.’2 Few people could be other-worldly about the Profumo Affair, although a Wykehamist who met Christine Keeler at this time, and felt he recognised the surname, asked her if she was related to the Keiller marmalade family.
The next day the News of the World published its scoop ‘Confessions of Christine’, for which it had paid her £24,000. It contained such squalid idiocies as the claim that Ward led her through the Marylebone streets on a lead with a dog collar encircling her neck. Peter Earle also publicised real or imaginary goings-on which had nothing to do with Ward, but were prejudicial to his case. Although the offences with which Ward was charged were misdemeanours, not felonies, he was refused bail. Accordingly he spent three weeks isolated in Brixton prison.
‘The established order went into battle against this man, whose sole offence was a nonconformity in sexual matters that met with the same kind of relentless reaction from the prosecuting authorities that characterised the persecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ wrote the jurist Louis Blom-Cooper. ‘Dr Ward’s arrest and removal to police custody, the refusal to grant him bail until the start of the committal proceedings, the refusal to allow him to organise from prison the sale of his paintings, his committal to the Old Bailey for trial rather than to Quarter Sessions, his trial before a High Court Judge rather than before the Recorder of London or the Common Sergeant – all these things betokened a sense of persecution, even if each event was by itself, but not cumulatively, explicable to those versed in legal procedure.’3
Most Tory MPs felt that Redmayne as Chief Whip, and Macleod as Leader of the House of Commons, who had both interrogated Profumo, had been inexcusably gullible about his replies and slack in informing Macmillan of backbench disquiet on the subject. A few blamed the Prime Minister for not easing Profumo from office: they felt his judgement had been clouded by his wish not to repeat the injustice dealt to Galbraith during the Vassall crisis. The Sunday Telegraph was the most hostile newspaper: Lady Pamela Berry was gunning for Macmillan; and its right-wing followers fomented trouble in the parliamentary party. The Observer editorialised that Profumo had blundered by denying ‘so explicitly that he had had an affair with Miss Keeler – a lie which was all the more foolish since it was widely regarded as such even before his confession’. The paper hoped (in vain) that as Labour had ‘already gained a large electoral advantage by the revelation of these scandals’, it would not ‘dress up the desire to exploit a political advantage as a concern for national security’. To drum up a panic about state secrets would add a new dimension of hypocrisy to an affair already brimming with it.4
Redmayne offered his resignation to Macmillan. ‘If you resign, I shall resign,’ Macmillan replied on 9 June. ‘No man was ever better served in all these difficulties than I have been by you. All this will come right if we have courage and determination. We have nothing with which to reproach ourselves, except perhaps too great a loyalty.’ To compound his woes, Macmillan learnt that Kim Philby, who had vanished from Beirut in January, was in Moscow, and thus knew that another spy scandal was looming. He hoped that he could carry off the Profumo incident with nonchalant bluff. He announced what had been kept secret hither-to: the existence of Lord Dilhorne’s inquiry into the security aspects of the affair.5
On 11 June, The Times published Haley’s notorious editorial, ‘It Is a Moral Issue’, which quoted a phrase from the Washington Post about ‘widespread decadence beneath the glitter of a large segment of stiff-lipped society’. The next day a Tory peer, Lord Caldecote, complained to Rab Butler that Macmillan’s mishand-ling of the scandal proved the need for a change of leadership. ‘I have been tremendously struck by the opinion of so many of my friends, all staunch Conservatives, who are utterly sick of the standard of integrity, of the lack of moral courage and of the politics of expediency. We would suffer both personally and nationally from a Socialist government,’ Caldecote continued, ‘but if this is the only way of clearing up the mess … so be it.’6
Lord Poole, joint chairman with Macleod of the Conservative Party, Redmayne and officials at the party’s headquarters expected that provincial voters would prove to be more puritanical than metropolitan: ‘the main trouble is going to be in the sticks’.7 This conventional wisdom was gainsaid by a survey of hundreds of people conducted by the Banbury Guardian, a newspaper owned by a Labour MP, Woodrow Wyatt, in the week after Profumo’s resignation. The newspaper’s catchment area included the southern edge of Profumo’s constituency. Wyatt’s survey deserves detailed consideration.
There were three issues, the Banbury Guardian judged: national security; the ‘private morals of a public figure’; and lying in the House of Commons (for which ninety-five per cent of Banbury Guardian respondents condemned Profumo). One outstanding fact emerged from the survey: that the minority who condemned his morality were mostly middle-aged or elderly. Younger people were neither offended nor condemnatory. ‘Despite assertions from the national Press and MPs that the public has been shocked and disgusted by the morality aspect, the survey showed conclusively that this was not so,’ the newspaper reported:
What may have shocked our grandfathers fifty years ago is now accepted – even if it is not condoned. Few of the people questioned were shocked by Mr Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler. They agreed that ‘this sort of thing goes on’ … As one man put it, ‘Those who are shocked by the affair are obviously out of touch with life in the twentieth century.’ …
Despite the disgrace that is obviously felt in some of the villages, there is still a tremendous feeling of loyalty to the Profumo family, especially in Kineton and Shotteswell, where members of his family still live. National newspaper reporters in Kineton last week offered up to £100 for information leading to the present whereabouts of the former War Minister. They were met with a stony silence.
Jack and Valerie Profumo spent thirteen days secreted in a stone house in the Warwickshire village of Radway with his constituent, Air Commodore Victor Willis DSO, commandant of the RAF Staff College at Andover, and pioneer of blind-approach landing, signals intelligence and electronic warfare. If a few Radway villagers knew Profumo was there, none of them blabbed. ‘To them he is still “a gentleman” who had been unlucky to be dragged into the Christine Keeler affair. And some – particularly the women – wouldn’t hear a word spoken against him. They have already forgiven him – and would vote for him again in an election.’8
Two pages of the Banbury Guardian were devoted to vox populi. ‘What he does in his spare time is his own affair,’ said F. A. H. Townsend of 3 Dene Close, Kineton. Ethel Bowden, aged sixty-six, and mother to fourteen children, said: ‘This business has got nothing on Lady Chatterley’s Lover – you could not put this affair in a book, and his wife has my sympathy.’ Mrs S. Parker, of Market Hill, Southam, thought the MP was a good man and felt grieved by his humiliation. She blamed Christine Keeler: ‘I think she ought to keep her thoughts to herself and not sell her story to the papers.’ Mrs J. Morgan of Bishops Itchington said: ‘I am a Labour Party supporter, so from my point of view this is a good thing. The best thing he could do now would be to leave the country rapidly.’
Several neighbours from Station Road in Fenny Compton gave their views. Mrs B. Spencer ‘did not think the affair should be “public property” and did not like to discuss it. But she commented: “I would love to know just what Ministers get up to, but I suppose I shall read about it in the papers”.’ Sidney Hughes felt Ministers must conduct their lives in a manner befitting their position. ‘They should keep their noses clean in the same way a policeman has to. I feel sorry for Mr Profumo now, but he must take his punishment.’ Mrs Emily Robbins sympathised with Profumo. ‘If he stood for election again, I would not hold this against him. He has always been a good Member, and I think this was just a bit of bad luck.’
Many of his Ratley constituents in South Warwickshire were polled. Gordon Leys, aged sixty-eight, had believed his MP when he made his statement in the Commons and felt let down: ‘I am surprised that after doing such a thing he could go to the races and back a winner.’ Mrs W. Halliday of 3 Town Hill Cottages was shocked by the disclosures because she had thought her MP was a good man. ‘You look up to people in the Commons and they have your respect. This was a shock and makes you wonder whether there are any more like him.’ Her son-in-law, a Ratley soldier, ‘who would not give his name because he was afraid the War Office would take action against him under the Official Secrets Act’, added: ‘I am not concerned with the War Minister’s private life but … a few people in high places will have red faces before this is finished.’ Mrs D. M. England of 1 Council Houses, Town Hill, said: ‘I expect my MP to lead a blameless life, and this is dreadful. I cannot forgive him … there is still more to come out, and I think there will be other important people involved.’9
In contrast to this compassionate tolerance, there was a much-publicised speech by the Bournemouth MP, John Cordle, while opening a church fête at Drayton, near Banbury (which raised £40). Cordle was a handsome, vaunting puritan with smug illusions about himself. Parliamentary colleagues treated him as a sickening humbug. Henry Kerby told Andrew Roth after Cordle’s adoption in Bournemouth (secured partly because he was a rip-roaring supporter of the death penalty for murderers) that local Tory women were aghast at his success claiming that he was ‘a man they dared not leave alone with their early-teen daughters’. After becoming proprietor of the Church of England Newspaper in 1959, Cordle vowed that it would campaign for ‘high standards of public life, discipline in the home and a decisive approach to hooliganism’. He opposed ‘easy divorce’, but his own conduct failed the standards that he set for others. When his first wife, from whom he was divorced in 1956, sought his imprisonment in 1964 for breaching a custody order, Cordle only escaped by pleading parliamentary privilege: the judge condemned his conduct as ‘utterly disgraceful’. During the collapse of his second marriage in 1971, he imposed a 7 p.m. curfew on visitors to his wife. His third and final wife, who was thirty-five years his junior, had been his children’s nanny. Cordle, who was a disciple of the American evangelical Billy Graham, felt driven to visit strip clubs in order to be able to denounce them with authority, anathematised Sir Roger Casement’s sodomitical diaries, demanded that copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover be dumped in the sea, and blamed venereal diseases among teenagers on ‘filthy books’. Fourteen years after denouncing Profumo, he resigned his parliamentary seat after entangling himself in venalities that also disgraced the former Home Secretary, Maudling.10
Cordle was an example of the soapy scum that flowed after the sluices of self-righteous scurrility were opened. ‘We have all been shocked recently by the belated disclosure of a Minister’s deceit and misconduct,’ he pronounced at the church fête. The nation required strong leadership, both moral and political, in these difficult days. ‘It is our duty as citizens to maintain the highest standards of rectitude in public life … For the sake of national wellbeing and strength, we cannot afford to have bad security risks in high office. For this reason, men who choose to live in adultery, men who are homosexuals, or men whose highest interest is against the highest interests of the nation ought not to be invited to serve our Queen and Country. Nor should they be tolerated in office if they adopt these destructive practices.’ Cordle added that he was ‘appalled to hear that our beloved Queen should be so wrongly advised to give an audience’ to the disgraced minister: ‘It seems to me surely an affront to the Christian conscience of the nation.’ As a result of Cordle’s intervention, Profumo did not return his seals of office personally to the monarch, as was customary.11
On 13 June, Lord Hailsham, venting hot air like an explosive volcano, and in such a tantrum that his head seemed to change shape on screen, gave a notorious BBC television interview denouncing Profumo for having ‘lied and lied; lied to his family, lied to his friends, lied to his solicitor, lied to the House of Commons’. In the Daily Mirror the columnist Cassandra commented that Hailsham’s rant seemed ‘a rather unattractive mixture of genuine rage and seemingly simulated indignation that only served to heighten the skill and patient questioning of the interviewer’. The irate Hailsham, according to another television viewer, resembled Evelyn Waugh berating a trespasser: ‘It had to be seen to be believed.’12
Hailsham accused Robert McKenzie of trying to exploit ‘a security problem’ as party politics. ‘A Secretary of State cannot have a woman shared with a spy,’ he fulminated, ‘without giving rise to a security risk.’ The security services, of course, had long before discounted the fantasy that the minister had shared a woman with a spy – a story that first surfaced six months earlier when the woman in question was trying to make £1,000 by selling her story to Peter Earle, Reg Payne and Hugh Cudlipp. When McKenzie countered by asking why, if it was not a party issue, the Tory whips had issued a three-line whip, Hailsham was cornered: like Profumo in a fix, he lied. Hailsham insisted that a three-line whip was a summons to attend Parliament, rather than a document of party discipline to ensure a strong vote.
This fib outraged MPs. In the Commons Reginald Paget decried Hailsham as a ‘lying humbug’ and ‘hysterical demagogue, with a brutal tinge’. He mocked, too, the Leader of the House of Lords as a bully and glutton: ‘From Lord Hailsham we have had a virtuoso performance in the art of kicking a fallen friend in the guts. It is easy to compound for sins we are inclined to by damning those we have no mind to. When self-indulgence has reduced a man to the shape of Lord Hailsham, sexual continence involves no more than a sense of the ridiculous.’ This was striking hard, because Hailsham liked to discuss sexual acts and bedroom etiquette with metaphors drawn from the table: ‘If you gobble your food, it’s not quite so nice. If you eat HP sauce like [Harold Wilson], it’s not so good as oysters and Quenelles de Sole Newburg.’ In distinguishing good sex from bad, he would say, ‘the whole difference is between crêpes suzettes and pigs’ trotters’.13
In the opinion of most voters, Profumo’s resignation was mandatory because (to quote the Economist) it was ‘essential to insist – quite remorselessly – that no minister should ever be allowed with impunity to tell lies in the House of Commons’. They did not add that he would have been equally forced to resign if he had told the truth. Politicians, too, were indignant that he had lied to colleagues, despite themselves lying robustly on occasions. Lying is a means for politicians to prove their power: they make a resounding declaration, which their listeners know is untrue but do not dare to challenge; and by doing so they affirm their invulnerability and raise their status. Selwyn Lloyd, as Foreign Secretary, gave a flat denial to the Commons on 31 October 1956 of collusion as the Israelis invaded Egypt. Kilmuir, Lord Chancellor at the time of Suez, had the effrontery to declare in his memoirs published in 1964 that ‘the wild accusations of collusion between the British, French and Israeli governments which were hurled by the Labour Party had absolutely no foundation in fact’. The deliberate inaccuracies similarly tumbled like acrobats in Kilmuir’s parliamentary speech opposing Lord Mancroft’s Privacy Bill of 1961.14
In 1964, Nyasaland became the independent state of Malawi under the presidency of Dr Hastings Banda. Dilhorne, the Lord Chancellor, who five years earlier as Attorney-General had told the Commons that Banda had planned to massacre every European in the country, from the governor down to infants, and moreover had convinced the Tory majority to pretend to believe him and give him an ovation, represented the British government at the independence celebrations and congratulated Banda on his assumption of power. On the Labour side, Harold Wilson’s smears of Lord Poole in the Bank Rate Leak stunt of 1957 were calculated mendacity. Crossman perjured himself in a notorious libel action against the Spectator. George Brown, ‘half-seas-over’, lied when he appeared on television on the night of the Kennedy assassination, declaring ‘Jack Kennedy was one of my best friends’, when they had met only twice in formal interviews.15
It seemed to sober, rational minds that the Macmillan government was ‘about to be overthrown by a twenty-one-year-old trollop’. The greatest threat to him came from the restive right-wing of his party. During the previous year his most trenchant backbench critics had been Nigel Birch, Lord Lambton and Sir Harry Legge-Bourke. Birch’s parliamentary colleagues believed that he was one of the few attackers whom Supermac feared. ‘There is something about his fierce wit, his supercilious grouse-moors manner, his superior snobbery, which seems to demoralise the Prime Minister – who goes to some lengths to pacify him. Birch is the kind of man that Macmillan admires – General’s son, Etonian, brilliant businessman, first-class intellect. But Birch regards Macmillan as a sham, a played-out actor and a trickster.’ Macmillan doubtless felt dread when he heard that Birch intended to speak in the Profumo debate immediately after the Commons reconvened on Monday 17 June.16
Wilson returned from a visit to Khrushchev two days earlier, and spent the weekend mastering Wigg’s dossier and honing his indictment of the Prime Minister. ‘We’ve got him on toast,’ Wilson said when the speech was written.17
Wilson’s intervention proved formidable. ‘This is a debate,’ he declared, ‘without precedent in the annals of this House. It arises from disclosures which have shocked the moral conscience of the nation.’ He asked whether ministers – soiled by their contact with ‘a sordid underworld network’ – connived in Profumo’s lies, or were negligent in accepting them. He told MPs about Ward’s calamitous meeting with Wigg, and Wigg’s written summary of it: ‘a nauseating document taking the lid off a corner of the London underworld of vice, dope, marijuana, blackmail, counter-blackmail, violence and petty crime’. He accused Macmillan of ‘indolent nonchalance’ and reckless bluff. ‘After the Vassall case he felt that he could not stand another serious security case involving a Ministerial resignation, and he gambled desperately and hoped that nothing would ever come out. For political reasons he was gambling with national security … this is why he was at such pains to demonstrate to me his unflappability.’ Although Ward had been working with MI5, he was vilified by Wilson as ‘a tool’ of the Soviets, who exemplified a ‘sleazy sector of society’. Wilson denounced hereditary privilege and skewed pay differentials: ‘there is something utterly nauseating about a system which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays a Prime Minister, 250 times as much as it pays its Members of Parliament, and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion’. Egalitarianism, he suggested, would prove the necessary moral purgative of ‘a diseased excrescence, a corrupted and poisoned appendix of a small and unrepresentative section of society that makes no contribution to what Britain is, still less can be’.18
Macmillan’s response was moving to his friends, but sounded querulous to less sympathetic listeners and gave the impression of a spavined old warhorse. ‘On me, as head of the Administration, what has happened has inflicted a deep, bitter, and lasting wound,’ he said. ‘I could not believe that a man would be so foolish, even if so wicked, not only to lie to colleagues in the House, but be prepared to issue a writ in respect of a libel which he must know to be true.’ Macmillan stated that he had not been told of the security aspect to the business, but did not give the reason: that Ward’s remark to Keeler that she should ask about atomic warheads for Germany had been a joke, which was never taken in earnest by MI5. Only low journalists pretended to take it seriously.19
Birch’s speech scorned the government for being so easily duped by Profumo: ‘He never struck me as a man at all like a cloistered monk, and Miss Keeler was a professional prostitute,’ Birch declared (although Keeler was never a professional prostitute). ‘There seems to me to be a certain basic improbability that their conduct was purely platonic.’ Humphry Berkeley was in Iraq when he was summoned by Redmayne to vote in the debate. He was incredulous to learn that Macmillan had never confronted Profumo about the rumours, and disappointed by the quavering tone of the old man’s speech. He was one of twenty-seven Tory abstentions in the vote. Several MPs only supported the government on Redmayne’s assurance that Macmillan would resign by autumn.20
Sir Peter Smithers, the wise and gentle Tory MP for Winchester, said that panic overwhelmed the Commons at this time. ‘I use the word panic, for panic it was. Every MP remembered his own transgressions, great or small, past or present.’ The panic centred on the Smoking Room, where everyone worried who was going to be denounced next, and the Press Bar, which swirled in rumours.21
Anthony Sampson watched MPs work themselves into frenzy after the Commons reassembled on 17 June. ‘Absurd rumours, involving half the Cabinet, were believed, repeated and elaborated. Plots and conspiracies to overthrow the Prime Minister were hatched around every corner. Wild stories and schemes were leaked to the Press who, in turn, built up the crisis and generated still further alarm. Members of Parliament who returned to England in the midst of the furore were astonished to find that Parliament had apparently lost its head.’ Mark Bonham Carter, after his spell as a Liberal MP, likened the Commons to a boarding school in a memorable interview for Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain. The parliamentary hysterics of June 1963 reminded Sampson of one of those sudden moral panics that overwhelmed boarding schools. ‘The shock vibrates through the school and so terrible is it to the splendid traditions of the place that wave upon wave of rumours emerge, each one more preposterous than the last, suggesting that the entire school has, for years past, been corrupt and obscene. The processions, Latin mottoes and founders prayers seem to have been no more than a front. Every prefect and every master has some secret vice ascribed to him, and the headmaster himself is accused of the most sinister complicity.’22
Bill Astor, with his peaceable nature, was thrown into vertigin-ous uncertainty as the Pharisees hounded him. Malise Hore-Ruthven, who had joined the Moral Rearmament movement to save the world from sin and communism, tried to bully his sister-in-law, Lady Gowrie, into forsaking Parr’s Cottage at Cliveden to protect her grandsons from Astor depravity. At Royal Ascot, during the second week of June, Astor’s supposed friends cut him dead, and boasted of it afterwards. A newspaper refused to publish a letter by him on coordinating relief to victims of natural disasters. On 19 June, just as his Ascot guests were dispersing, Chief Inspector Herbert appeared at the house with Burrows. When they told Astor that they were collecting evidence to charge him with allowing a brothel at Spring Cottage, he nearly collapsed. The Astors were ineluctably stigmatised as leaders of ‘the spiv aristocracy’, of which Nicholas Mosley had recently written: ‘foursomes in the brothels of Marseille, voyeurs and exhibitionists, the modern ways of making love’.23
Those who did not live through this period cannot imagine how the words ‘intercourse’ and ‘prostitute’ suddenly entered daily parlance. I recall, as a ten-year-old-boy, asking a racy great-aunt, who lived in a flat above the King’s Road, Chelsea, how to pronounce the word which I found on front pages of the cook’s Daily Express. ‘Pros-ti-tutty’ was my original shot. Lip-smacking revulsion provided an adult awakening for an observant child. My coeval Tom Utley was boarding at a preparatory school in Suffolk in June 1963. He was puzzled that the broadsheet newspapers arrayed in the school library for boys to read after breakfast were cut to tatters every morning. Only the Court and business pages seemed to evade extensive scissoring. His father, in answer to a letter asking the reason for these holes, sent a detailed account of the Profumo Affair, which the school matron confiscated.24
On 22 June, Macmillan attended a fundraising garden party in his constituency. He had a dazed air amidst the coconut shies and lucky dips. As he posed for a photograph with the daughter of a constituent, someone hissed: ‘Take your hands off that little girl. Don’t you wish it was Christine Keeler?’ It was in this fetid atmosphere that Macmillan submitted to Labour’s demand to appoint an inquiry into the rumours besmirching the integrity of public figures. He decided to have a one-man inquiry, by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, who had been a wartime divorce judge and was President of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship. Macleod, as Leader of the Commons, argued with Macmillan about this. ‘I was against it from the beginning, and believed we ought not to give an inch to all the filthmongers.’ When he went to dissuade Macmillan, he found the Prime Minister ‘in a terrible state, going on about a rumour of there having been eight High Court judges involved in some orgy. “One,” he said, “perhaps, two, conceivably; but eight – I just can’t believe it.” I said, if you don’t believe it, why bother with an inquiry? But he replied, “No, terrible things are being said. It must be cleared up.”’25
Osbert Lancaster’s front-page cartoon in the Daily Express of 22 June showed his heroine Maudie Littlehampton flourishing a newspaper headlined: ‘“WHIPS! WHIPS! MASKS!” SAYS MANDY.’ ‘Honestly, darling,’ she tells her husband, ‘I do really think that National Kinky Week has gone on quite long enough!’ The Economist that day, as Time & Tide had a year earlier, urged Macmillan ‘to retire to an Earldom as soon as the Party can definitely determine his successor’.26
The most devastating bombardment was directed not at Macmillan individually but at the governing class of which he was a luminary. Hugh Cudlipp engineered a devastating special issue of the Sunday Mirror on 23 June. Under the front-page headline, ‘Who Runs This Country, Anyhow?’ the Sunday Mirror declared: ‘The man who torpedoed Macmillan’s hopes of leading the Tories into the next election is not John Profumo, but a civil servant … Name: Lord Normanbrook of Chelsea.’ The Cabinet Secretary, so Cudlipp’s scribes reported, had confronted the Secretary for War about his visits to Ward’s flat in 1961, but had not informed the Prime Minister. ‘Is it safe for the Mandarins of Whitehall, who know so little of life outside their own narrow world, to wield such influence?’ Officials were, after all, ‘in no way accountable to Parliament or to the People’. The Sunday Mirror mercifully did not know the story of the Warden of an Oxford college recalling Normanbrook’s arrival there as an undergraduate from Wolverhampton Grammar School. ‘Very quick, Brook,’ said the Warden, ‘learned the tricks. Came up with a front pocket stuffed full of pens. Soon disappeared inside.’ The Cudlipp-King school of journalism scorned such class assimilation. Normanbrook remained a bugbear to the Labour left: ‘a real old Establishment figure’, Anthony Wedgwood Benn reckoned in 1964.27
Elsewhere in the Sunday Mirror, Malcolm Muggeridge was master of revels at ‘The Slow, Sure Death of the Upper Classes’. The upper class had passed away, he gloated, in the week since the Profumo parliamentary debate: ‘We who have watched their demise with enthralled interest, amusement and satisfaction certainly do not want to see them rise again.’ In forty years of journalism he had never heard such a tidal wave of slander. Yet, he warned, ‘there have been scandals in plenty before, and the Upper Classes have managed to survive them’. Muggeridge, who had a reiterated repugnance of homosexuality, recalled that during Oscar Wilde’s trials ‘the Channel Steamers were full of Top People who felt that a trip abroad would be expedient’. They were soon back practising their filthy tricks with impunity. ‘The dirty linen of Debrett is frequently given a public washing in the divorce courts. Promiscuity is more evident in stately homes than in semi-detached villas, if only because there are more bedrooms and longer corridors.’ The Profumo scandal was ‘the culmination of a series of episodes all calculated to undermine the repute, not just of Upper Class individuals and circles, but of the class system.’ Abuse was well-deserved: ‘the Upper Classes have always been given to lying, fornication, corrupt practices and, doubtless as a result of the public school system, sodomy’.28
Richard Crossman was deployed to attack Whitehall officialdom. Macmillan’s explanation to the Commons had confirmed that the ‘British government and British administration – which used to be recognised as the best in the world – are fast becoming a standing example of amateurism and incompetence’. Macmillan, with his ‘indecision and personal empire-building at the top’, was culpable for the ‘incompetence and corruption’ festering beneath. The people were stuck with ‘an establishment still dominated by the mandarin mind which despises the expert and the technician and relies on a genteel amateurism out-of-date even in Edwardian Britain’, Crossman explained. This class-bound dilettantism was the cause of the successive ‘security scandals which have disgraced Macmillan’s regime’.29
The foreign correspondent James Cameron explained to Sunday Mirror readers ‘Why the World is Mocking Britain’. Macmillan, he wrote, was ‘scarcely a real person himself, but a kind of self-induced illusion’. Diplomats were anti-democratic conspirators in the Century of the Common Man. ‘Every man jack of our Foreign Service abroad is a creature not of the Government of the day, but of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, owing allegiance not to any popular administration but to the Machine.’ Their disinterested, non-partisan ethos was deplorable because the diplomatic service was manned by ‘gentlemen of impeccable tastes and great civility; they are always excellently educated, and usually well-born’. (One wonders if Cameron wished to have populist diplomats who were bad-mannered and ill-educated.) He recalled that when Ernie Bevin became Foreign Secretary in 1945, ‘it was claimed that the Diplomatic Service was going to be revolutionised, democratised, disinfected of its almost total adherence to the upper-class myth, purged of its insistence on the Public School and Oxbridge’. Instead Britain would be represented abroad by ‘technicians, businessmen, trade unionists’. However, ‘the great crushing irresistible weight of the Establishment overlaid the plan … and left the FO exactly as it was: the pasture of the public school, the grazing-ground of the upper-class intellectual, above all the haven of the play-safe’. Cameron then swung his diatribe towards the Profumo scandal. ‘If the Old Etonian Counsellors advise the Old Harrovian Ambassadors who advise the Old Etonian Foreign Secretary to advise or not advise the Old Etonian Premier, WHO decides what goes on in the mind of the Old Ukrainian City Scholar who runs the Soviet Union? Maybe the same people who knew all about Christine Keeler, and didn’t let on … the faceless gentlemen of unchallengeable upbringing who protect statesmen from the business of statesmanship and insulate Government from the troubles of governing, and care not that Premiers come and Premiers go, for they go on forever.’ 30
Throughout the summer weeks that followed, the Sunday Mirror had other eloquent articles instilling this post-Profumo message about ruling-class corruption, traitors and modernisation. Significantly when, in early July, Macmillan, Wilson, Redmayne and Bowden met to discuss the Denning inquiry, Wilson mooted a connection between Ward and the licentious Duchess of Argyll, who was being noisily divorced by her duke. Fourteen months later, Britain had a general election in which Labour squeaked past the Tories with a majority of four seats: a victory swung by Mirror Group newspapers deploying special features like this.31
Macmillan, when he announced the Denning inquiry in the Commons on 21 June, referred to ‘rumours … which affect the honour and integrity of public life in this country’. Tom Denning in turn used this phrase when calling witnesses to appear before him. He was a judge with a corrective spirit who did not believe that he often overreached himself. It was impossible, he felt, to demarcate crime from sin: libertines should be harried, disgraced and scourged. In 1957, during a parliamentary debate on the Wolfenden recommendations, he urged that it should be a criminal offence for a man to undergo a vasectomy which enabled him to have ‘the gratification of sexual intercourse without any of the responsibilities’. Whether heinous sexual acts were criminalised should depend on whether they were reckoned ‘morally reprehensible … in the minds of right-thinking people’, or struck ‘at the safety or wellbeing of society’, as did ‘unnatural vice’ which threatened ‘the integrity of the human race’. He continued his speech by warning that if homosexuality was no longer a criminal offence, the unthinkable might happen: a man might be charged with assault for punching another man who flirted with him. ‘In all these cases the law must either condemn or condone,’ he told his fellow peers. ‘Is it not the case that for so many people now it is the law alone which sets the standard? If you reprove such a one for his conduct, he will say “Why should I not do it? There is no law against it” … I am afraid that Hell Fire and eternal damnation hold no terrors nowadays. The law should condemn this evil, for evil it is, but the judges should be discreet in their punishment of it.’32
The People on 7 July, under the headline ‘THREE MINISTERS NAMED IN JUDGE’S PURGE’, noted of Denning: ‘His probe may lead to a purge of public life generally, with a view to excluding the risk that politicians who “sin” in private will be blackmailed by enemy agents.’ Scotland Yard and Special Branch officers, under Commander Arthur Townsend, were enquiring ‘into the private morals of public men’ in parallel with Denning. ‘They are compiling a dossier covering homosexual practices as well as sexual laxity alleged against civil servants, Service officers and MPs.’ A Special Branch man supposedly told The People: ‘the Russians jump at the chance of exploiting any moral weakness’. Startling information, he added, was pouring in.33
In the second week of June 1963, some days after Ward’s arrest, there was a meeting at the Athenæum club in Pall Mall. All of the men who attended held responsible jobs; most had been Ward’s patients; some knew him socially too. Each of them had been asked by Ward’s solicitors if they would appear at the Old Bailey to testify to his good character. Each wanted to know what the others had decided. One of those present was a high-ranking Foreign Office man, who twenty years later spoke non-attributably about the Athenæum discussion. ‘On the one hand we liked and respected Ward and we wanted to help him. On the other, if we were seen to be involved in such a sordid case in no matter what role, then we would be ruined. We decided that if Bill Astor, Ward’s oldest friend and patient, was not going to give evidence on Ward’s behalf, then we could also decline.’ They felt that Ward’s legal team would not subpoena them lest, ‘in order to save our own skins, we turned hostile. We’ve all had to live with our decision. For my part I can’t tell you of the moral awfulness of abandoning a friend when he needs you most, and a friend, moreover, who was completely innocent of the charges against him.’34
The risks to Ward’s acquaintances in coming forward in his defence were real. Vasco Lazzolo, the portrait painter, who had known Ward since 1946, agreed to give evidence on his friend’s behalf. He was threatened by Chief Inspector Herbert that if he did so, the police might visit his studio, plant some pornography and arrest him.
On Friday 28 June, Ward’s committal proceedings opened at Marylebone Magistrates Court. He was charged with eight violations of the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, including brothel-keeping, procuring, living off the earnings of prostitutes, and abortion offences. This was a preliminary hearing before a magistrate to determine whether the prosecution had enough evidence to justify sending the accused for trial in a higher court. The defence case was not heard at all. Whereas in France examining magistrates hear the prosecution’s case in camera, in England the hearings can be fully publicised – with prejudicial publicity in lewd cases like Ward’s. The charges involving abortion and brothel-keeping, together with the initial procuring charges, were dropped before Ward’s trial three weeks later; but the prejudicial damage had been done. Reports of the magistrate’s hearings created two opposed impressions. ‘The first was of ineradicable grubbiness,’ wrote Sybille Bedford, ‘a feeling that Ward might well be a procurer, a ponce, a pimp, and that … the fellow was untouchable with a barge pole. The other impression was that the actual evidence against him was inconclusive and of tainted origin; in fact that the prosecution case was thin.’35
The prosecution was led by Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a tall, imposing man who, as prosecuting counsel in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial three years earlier, had asked the jury whether it was a novel that they would wish to be read by their ‘young sons, young daughters, because girls can read as well as boys’. Was it, he continued, a book that they would leave lying around the house: ‘a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’36 He had no thought that the jury might not have servants, or that if they did, the servants had minds of their own to decide what to read. At Ward’s committal proceedings Griffith-Jones showed that he felt sullied by the case by refusing to speak directly, except in court questioning, to any of the prosecution witnesses, including the police. Nor did he let them speak to him. All contact was delegated to junior counsel, Michael Corkery. He addressed the court in the tones of a public school bully, using his privileges as counsel to humiliate anyone who thwarted his case, interrupting witnesses in mid-sentences, scorning their testimony. His voice was cold, rasping and stiff. His testy arrogance and sardonic morality at the committal proceedings deterred witnesses from volunteering to speak in Ward’s defence at the criminal trial. The police opposed bail by claiming that Ward might vanish or interfere with witnesses. It was widely reported that the magistrate set bail at the high figure of £2,000, which intensified the notion that Ward was an arch-villain from whom society needed protection.
Under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, a man who was ‘habitually in the company of a known prostitute’ had the onus of proving that he was not living off her earnings. Ward faced three counts of living on earnings of prostitution: from Keeler, when she had lived at Wimpole Mews from June 1961 to July 1962; from Rice-Davies, when she had been his lodger at Wimpole Mews during September to December 1962; and from two prostitutes, Vickie Barrett and Ronna Ricardo, who had visited Bryanston Mews between January and June 1963. Another section of the Sexual Offences Act criminalised those who introduced a man to a woman aged between sixteen and twenty-one if sexual intercourse ensued.
During cross-examination by Griffith-Jones at Marylebone Magistrates Court, Keeler testified that during a meal at the Brush & Palette restaurant with Ward, they had seen a nineteen-year-old called Sally Norie with a youth. The two couples started talking and flirting: Keeler paired with Norie’s boyfriend, while Ward later went to bed with Norie. Ward’s counsel interrupted this evidence, as it was extracted by Griffith-Jones, with a jibe and a protest: ‘Even a honeymoon would sound obscene in the hands of my learned friend,’ he said of Griffith-Jones. ‘Here is a case where a man, looked at in its worst context, asked a girl he was with to give him an introduction to another girl. Then it is suggested that they made love. It is said that this is a criminal offence. We must not take leave of our senses.’ He then asked the magistrate, ‘How can it be a criminal offence for two persons, if they choose, to enter into an intimate relationship?’ The magistrate replied, ‘If one introduced someone knowing it was for the purpose of intercourse, it becomes procuring.’37
‘Everyone is lying to grind his own axe,’ a battered but impenitent Ward told Dominic Elwes, who stood bail for him. ‘Every witness who does not give the answer the police want is tampered with … Every motive I had is twisted. All I have left between me and destruction is a handful of firm friends, the integrity of the judge and the twelve men on the jury. God alone knows what will happen. I know that one day the truth will eventually come out. And the truth is very simple: I loved people – of all types – and I don’t think there are very many people the worse for having known me.’38
Bill Astor’s Cliveden friend Maurice Collis visited Feliks Topolski’s studio under an arch on the South Bank after the committal proceedings. ‘When we were seated over a vodka,’ Collis recorded, ‘we got talking, as was inevitable, on the Ward case which literally has set the whole word buzzing, as it has all the elements of a popular shocker, as presented by the press, with spying and leakage of vital secrets to Russia, orgies, a broken Minister, prostitution, organised vice, flagellation, voyeurism, the threatened fall of the Conservative government, all with the sauce that a noble lord, very rich, owner of racehorses, a great mansion, a wife famous formerly as a model, and a name which for a generation or more has been news on account of his mother’s wit and eccentricities, had been mixed up in the imbroglio.’ Topolski recognised the Ward prosecution as a stunt: ‘His was not a real case of living on immoral earnings, arranging abortions, maintaining a brothel. When the laws were framed they had not in view men like Ward, but underworld racketeers.’ Topolski felt sure that if the police succeeded in securing Ward’s conviction on any charge, it would be a miscarriage of justice.39
Bill Astor, too, believed that the prosecution evidence was so weak that Ward would be acquitted. He wanted to speak, but his lawyers advised against volunteering evidence. Neither prosecuting nor defending counsel called him during Ward’s trial. When Collis commiserated on his ordeal, Astor replied with a sigh: ‘The only thing to do is to keep up one’s dignity, go on as before and not engage in a public slanging match with those women. After all, I don’t live like that, Maurice. Hundreds of people know exactly how I live, what my interests are, how I occupy my time, what I do in the public service, what my private life consists of. We are being pestered by the press, spied on; the press helicopters are the worst, hovering over the house.’40
On 1 July, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, confirmed that Kim Philby had been the Third Man. After David Astor’s Observer then revealed that Philby had been appointed as its Beirut correspondent at the Foreign Office’s request, the Daily Mirror launched a new fusillade:
Hardly a day goes by without some fresh revelation of how the Old Boys work in high places to keep the Old Boys in high places. Don’t worry, Old Boy, if you’re found out – there are buckets and buckets of surplus whitewash in Whitehall, and your friends will see you through …
Look at what happened to Maclean. Working for the Foreign Office in Cairo he was as soused as a herring, involved in wild and disgraceful episodes which no business concern would tolerate for a second in its messenger boys.
Fired? Not on your life, Old Boy. Dear old Donald was given a rest until his hangovers cleared up, and then he was given another Foreign Office top job.
Look at jolly Jack Profumo – Harrow, Brasenose College, Oxford, fifth Baron of the late United Kingdom of Italy, and all that taradiddle. If Jack says he calls all his lady friends ‘Darling’ (including Miss Keeler) then why shouldn’t we believe him?
Once you’re in the gang they let you down gently. You’re given the benefit of the doubt. If you’re a cat that walks at night, even into the wrong bedroom, you’re given nine lives – like all the other Top Cats.
It is no use Mr Macmillan telling Mr Wilson, as he did in the Commons yesterday, that he must learn to distinguish between invective and insolence … This sort of wigging for people who aren’t in the Club is merely whimsical. But is it any good blaming Mr Macmillan any more? It is beginning to look as if the whole of the Tory Party approves of the cover-up, hush-up, keep-it-dark, Old Boys technique of getting in power and staying in power – and to hell with what the country thinks.
Such ebullitions were dispiriting for Whitehall mandarins, and indeed weakening for national governance. ‘It is a bore that the facts have not got across to the public; but I am afraid that the Press are determined to misunderstand or misrepresent whatever they can,’ Normanbrook wrote to Macmillan on 6 July. ‘I hope that all this will blow over when Denning has reported and the Ward trial is finished.’41
With the Ward prosecution sub judice between the committal proceedings and trial, attention switched to Rachman, who could not sue: ‘an easy target’, said a Polish photographer who was pursued by journalists for pictures of the dead landlord ‘with his girls, his Rolls-Royce, and his big fat cigars’. On 8 July, Ben Parkin, Labour MP for Paddington, intervened in a debate on housing. Parkin, a sincere campaigner about slum conditions with a prurient interest in the street-walkers who were conspicuous in his constituency, now plunged into unscrupulous sensation. ‘All Fleet Street is full of the idea that he is not dead,’ he announced of Rachman. ‘It would be an easy thing to switch bodies – dead on arrival at Edgware General Hospital … a very good idea for a substitution and very useful, too – just ten days before all hell broke loose.’ Rachman, of course, had been alive and talking when he reached hospital, and could not have foreseen that ten days later Edgecombe would shoot up the Wimpole Mews flat: still less could he have substituted a dead body – even if, as gossip suggested at Daquise, the Polish restaurant where he played chess, he had a twin brother, who had conveniently died. ‘I know he’s dead,’ Parkin told a member of a Notting Hill tenants’ association, ‘but don’t tell anyone, and keep the rumours going, because if Rachman is dead, our case is dead too.’42
Much might be written on the frenetic press investigations of Rachman, bribes to unreliable informers, and racial prejudice intended to sustain tension before Ward’s trial. Police obtained signed statements from David Waxman, the Mill Hill physician who was treating him for heart disease, as well as Fortis Green ambulancemen, confirming that it was Rachman who died. The matron at Edgware Hospital said scornfully, ‘I do not permit body-switching in my hospital.’ On 16 July, Sir Charles Cunningham wrote to Sir Joseph Simpson stating that Brooke, the Home Secretary, had commented, after reading the file on Rachman: ‘He is now believed to be dead, but what about his business associates and his sponsors, particularly Colonel Sinclair of Farnham Common? Do the police keep themselves informed about that man’s other activities?’ These questions are a pointer to how the Home Office may have directed the Metropolitan Police’s attention to Ward after the latter’s colloquy in the Commons with Wigg became known.43
Ward’s trial opened at the Old Bailey on 22 July and closed on 31 July. The judge, Sir Archie Marshall, was a plump little man with a vain bustle and long experience of criminal cases in the Midlands. He rejected an application for an adjournment until September so that the defence might be better prepared, because he said it was in the public interest to have an early trial. ‘We at the Bar are men of the world,’ he declared while intervening in the cross-examination of Ronna Ricardo – upon which Ludovic Kennedy commented that this was a common delusion of judges: ‘theirs is one of the most cloistered of all the professions.’ Lawyers of Marshall’s generation, and Denning’s, stubbornly adhered to creeds that were sundered from real human experience.44
There were five charges: three of living off the immoral earnings of Keeler, Rice-Davies and the two other women; and two of procuring. Griffith-Jones’s opening address (delivered with harsh, cold fervour) made assertions that exceeded the evidence that he later brought. He also made assertions involving matters about which Ward was not being prosecuted. He proceeded by innuendo, posturing, and distortion. He dealt in unfounded inferences and reckless characterisations. He liked a righteous wallow in indignation. He seemed to threaten witnesses that they would be branded as sexually corrupt, and deserving of social ostracism and professional ruin, if they did not reply in the terms that he wished. Yet repeatedly they gave responses that seemed the oppo-site of what he expected. The trouble appeared to be that the witnesses had been chivvied into falsehoods in their police statements so many months earlier that they could not remember what they were supposed to say. The overall impression of the prosecution case was of startling inconsistencies which Griffith-Jones knocked aside.
Ludovic Kennedy, who attended the trial, wrote that Griffith-Jones assumed the role not merely of state prosecutor of criminals, ‘but as the state guardian of private morals … acting as a sort of Establishment front-man for an ethos which few people besides himself any longer believed in’. This, perhaps, accorded with Henry Brooke’s hopes when he initiated the police investigation of Ward four months earlier. Griffith-Jones’s cross-examinations gave Kennedy the impression ‘not that Ward had committed a single obvious crime which cried out for justice, but rather that the prosecution were trying very hard to elicit facts which would bring Ward’s activities into the compass of a recognised crime’. The prosecution case depended upon ‘uncorroborated statements by proven liars: it was a hotchpotch of innuendoes and smears covered by a thin pastry of substance. It was a tale of immoralities, rather than crimes.’45
The two-way mirror in Rachman’s flat had been smashed by Rice-Davies, and there was no such mirror in any of Ward’s flats. Yet one was repeatedly mentioned by Griffith-Jones in order to emphasise Ward’s association with vice. The jury was given the impression that Ward’s claim to have helped MI5 was a fantasy. Griffith-Jones exploited the fact that Rachman was now a national hate-figure to state categorically but falsely that Ward had introduced Keeler to the slum landlord (in truth, they had met by chance while flat-hunting), and to suggest that Ward was responsible for Keeler becoming Rachman’s kept woman.
Amidst the welter of extraneous material, contradictory allegations and inconsistent accusations from palpable liars, Griffith-Jones scored two hits. Keeler testified that she had been introduced by Ward to a man called Charles, who lived in a house off Park Lane. She claimed to have forgotten Charles’s surname (which was Clore) despite pressure from counsel and judge to remember it. He had given her £50 after ‘intercourse’. Some of this money she had used to repay a loan from Ward.
The more damaging episode involved a story which Rice-Davis produced under police pressure after her arrest on the concocted television-set charge when she was desperate not to return to Holloway prison. She said that while visiting the Marylebone High Street coffee bar with Ward they met a man who became her short-term boyfriend. In court he was referred to as ‘the Indian doctor’. In fact the man was a Ceylonese confidence trickster known as Emil Savundra, who had once been extradited from England to serve a prison sentence in Belgium, and by 1963 was masterminding a grandiose insurance swindle which resulted in a long prison sentence in 1967. Rice-Davies said that Savundra left between £15 and £25 after each visit to Wimpole Mews – a total over £100. Griffith-Jones alleged that Ward got £2 or £3 from each visit. It is striking that neither Clore nor Savundra were called to corroborate, amend or deny these stories.
The Old Bailey was besieged by mobs. There were police constables, crime reporters, foreign correspondents, press photographers, taxi men, law clerks with heavy files; but supremely, an ugly, screeching mob. ‘Going out of the main entrance of the Old Bailey,’ wrote Rebecca West, who covered the trial for the Sunday Telegraph, ‘was to walk into one vast leer, a concupiscent exposure of dentures, the significance of which was quite clear to anyone who had been caught in one of the crowds who mobbed Christine Keeler in her car. She was a pitiful spectacle, sitting in terrified dignity, her face covered with a pancake make-up which levels out the natural toning of the skin, and her determination to make a good show levelling her features to the flatness of a mask. First, the photographers surrounded her, then they fell away, and their place was taken by women, mostly old or in late middle-age, and they were without exception ill-favoured and unkempt, and elderly men of the unprosperous sort. Their cries and boos expressed the purest envy.’ West was shocked that this old rabble was jealous of Keeler’s rackety vulnerability.46
The trial was slow-motion horror. As the injustices proceeded, the philosopher A. J. Ayer came as near to publishing a protest as anyone could without risking Marshall summoning them for contempt of court. His article, headed ‘Morality 1963’, was published in Punch on 31 July. It began: ‘We do right to be concerned with public morality. It is our chief, indeed almost our only protection, against tyranny and exploitation.’ Then, in carefully oblique terms, he addressed the Ward trial. ‘Among all the forms of official wickedness, the perversion of justice outrages us the most. Not that the egoism or even the stupidity of a poli-tician, or the corruption of a civil servant, may not do more harm.’ Yet the palpable injustice when scapegoats like Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti were prosecuted should arouse ‘more resentment than a naked exercise of tyranny, just because it makes a mockery of the law. One of the most appalling features of totalitarian purges is that they are made to masquerade as trials.’ The parallel was clear if implicit.47
A travesty of justice was about to occur in the Court of Criminal Appeal. During Ward’s trial, Keeler said repeatedly that her April injuries had been caused by Lucky Gordon. When Gordon’s denial that he had caused her injuries was put to her, she replied: ‘The man is mad. Of course they were.’48 She repeated her denials that Camacchio and Fenton had been present in the flat. This was the second time she had lied on oath about these matters. Once she had been set on this course by the police, she could not retreat. However, Robin Drury, a sidekick of Ward’s who briefly convinced Keeler that he should become her business manager because he had held the same job for the lyricist Lionel Bart, had in May tape-recorded ten hours of her (sometimes stoned) reminiscences with a view to ghosting a book. When their agreement fell into acrimonious disarray, he offered these tapes, in which she revealed that Fenton and Camacchio had been in the Hamilton-Marshall flat when Gordon arrived, to Peter Earle of the News of the World, who baulked at his price of £20,000. The tapes reached a young man named Alex Wharton and a freelance hack twenty years his senior called Alastair Revie.
Wharton was an energetic youth (born in Scunthorpe in 1939), who as a teenager had sung in the earliest production of the musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be, and had been part of a hit duo called The Most Brothers, performing in a basement coffee bar in Old Compton Street that was run by an Australian wrestler. At the age of twenty he became a boy-prodigy producer with Decca Records, for whom he created a string of hits; later he managed the band The Moody Blues. In the summer of 1963 it was thought that this lively youngster was so attuned to the spirit of the age that he might help to present a saleable Keeler memoir. Revie was a ghost-writer (responsible for the melodramatic junkie memoirs of Barry Ellis, I Came Back from Hell) whose trashy novel That Kind of Girl was published in 1963 with the strapline: ‘Her Sin Was Ignorance – Her Reward Was Shame’.
Wharton and Revie, from worlds that were fearsome and incomprehensible to Griffith-Jones and Marshall, came near to wrecking the ruthless pomposities at the Old Bailey. Revie not only heard Drury’s tapes, but met John Hamilton-Marshall, who told him, as he also told solicitors representing both Ward and Gordon, that he rather than Gordon had been Keeler’s assailant in the Devonshire Place flat. Revie informed Wigg that Keeler had committed perjury during Gordon’s trial. Wigg passed Revie’s letter to the Attorney-General, Sir John Hobson. At Hobson’s instigation, Scotland Yard obtained Drury’s tapes a week before Ward’s trial opened, and began transcribing them. The police, who during Gordon’s trial had protested that Camacchio and Fenton were untraceable, now found them easily. Camacchio made a statement exonerating Gordon from the attack on Keeler; Hamilton-Marshall reiterated that he was the man who hit her; and other evidence pulled the frame apart. Gordon was granted leave to appeal by Lord Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice.
When Parker was chosen by Macmillan in 1958 it had been expected that he would prove to be a lenient influence. As a barrister, though, he had been a Treasury counsel, and was therefore predisposed towards the government. When criminal appeals came before him he so often increased rather than reduced prison sentences that barristers advised clients not to risk the Court of Criminal Appeal. In 1961 he sentenced the spy George Blake to forty-two years’ imprisonment. When the Profumo Affair came under his influence, he evinced a ruthless, prim malice which he believed served the public good.
On Tuesday 30 July, the day that Griffith-Jones made his closing address at Ward’s trial, three judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal, sitting an hour earlier than usual so that few onlookers were in attendance, took just nine minutes to set aside Gordon’s conviction. Gordon had been sent to prison for seven years only six weeks earlier. The reasons for his swift release were suppressed by the judges who made the decision. Keeler had, of course, perjured herself, under police pressure, at Gordon’s trial. Yet Lord Parker emphasised when delivering the court’s judgement that this was based on the new evidence from Camacchio, Fenton, Hamilton-Marshall, Revie and others and that the court did not hold that Keeler’s evidence was untruthful: indeed that she may have been speaking the truth. As her evidence was contradicted by everyone else, this was unlikely.
Parker and his fellow judges read the witness statements, but not aloud. They neither asked the witnesses to testify nor said in court what the new witnesses had revealed. They thus concealed Keeler’s extensive perjury from the public. If the court had revealed the new evidence, and Parker had then maintained that Keeler might be telling the truth, he would have been scorned. The Lord Chief Justice’s decision was taken by shorthand writers, checked and revised by him, then sent by special messenger from the Court of Criminal Appeal to the Old Bailey.
This exceptional proceeding – this corrupt, contemptible sequence of events – was undertaken by Parker in order to undermine Ward’s defence. It enabled Griffith-Jones to say during his final address: ‘Gordon’s appeal has been upheld. That does not of course mean to say that the Court of Criminal Appeal have found that Miss Keeler is lying. As I understand it from the note I have, the Lord Chief Justice said it might be that Miss Keeler’s evidence was completely truthful, but in view of the fact that there were witnesses now available who were not available at the trial, it was felt that the court could not necessarily say that the jury in that case would have returned the same verdict as they did if those two witnesses had been called. That is all it amounts to.’ Nevertheless, once Ward was convicted, Keeler was tried for perjury in the Gordon case, and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. As she had been told to perjure herself by Marylebone police officers, this was hard justice; but what does it say of the justice of Parker of Waddington?
In his closing address, Griffith-Jones indicted Ward for moral turpitude rather than immoral earnings. ‘The evil,’ he insisted, ‘goes very deep.’ He spoke of ‘this doctor, so-called’; harked on Rachman’s two-way mirror; and referred to the defendant as a man who plunged ‘the very depths of lechery and depravity’. In words that struck hard, he suggested that there was a patriotic duty to convict: ‘Members of the jury, you may think that it is in the highest public interest to do your duty and return a verdict of guilty.’ Griffith-Jones had an overpowering effect, as a juror told Knightley and Kennedy over twenty years later. ‘He called Stephen Ward a thoroughly filthy fellow, and we all knew he must be a thoroughly filthy fellow. Then a string of girls was paraded through the court, and we really didn’t know what was going to come next.’49
The judge’s summing-up was hostile to Ward, as his interruptions had been during the trial. He instructed the jury that the Appeal Court’s decision in the Gordon case was extraneous, and must not influence the Ward case, and again quoted Parker’s crafty wording which seemed to uphold Keeler’s reliability as a witness. He pitched phrases like ‘sink of iniquity’ and ‘filth and vice’, applying them to newspaper coverage, but in a way that reflected on Ward. The evidence showed that Ward had subsidised Keeler and Rice-Davies from his earnings as an osteopath rather than taking their earnings from prostitution. Neither woman, indeed, was a common prostitute, street-walker or call-girl. Marshall’s summing-up nevertheless directed the jury that Keeler and Rice-Davies came within the legal definition of prostitution: he used a loose interpretation which criminalised tens of thousands of unmarried women who did not share his notions of shame.
Ward heard all this with a quailing heart. For fifteen years he had struggled against the shackles of convention, and now revenge was being taken by conventional people. On this Tuesday evening, after hearing Marshall’s summing-up, he telephoned a Home Office assistant with a message for Denning. A few hours later, before the last day of the trial on which Marshall was to conclude his summing-up, he took thirty-five grains of barbiturate at the Chelsea flat of his stalwart ally, Noel Howard-Jones, where he had taken refuge during the trial. He was found in a deep coma by Howard-Jones on the morning of Wednesday 31 July. After the ambulance took away his friend, Howard-Jones wrestled his way upstairs to slam his front door before a scrum of photographers could tumble into the flat.
Marshall refused to halt the trial, finished his address to the jury, which he rushed into reaching verdicts while Ward remained alive. Later that Wednesday, after four and a half hours in the jury room, the jury acquitted Ward of the two pimping charges, and of the accusations involving Vickie Barrett, but found him guilty on the charges relating to Keeler and Clore, and to Rice-Davies and Savundra. Marshall suspended proceedings, stating that he hoped that Ward would be fit enough to attend court to receive his sentence on Tuesday 6 August (after a Bank Holiday weekend). Instead, Ward died three days after his conviction on Saturday 3 August. If justice had been permissible under Parker’s regime in the Court of Criminal Appeal, his conviction would have been quashed.50
‘The case to end all cases,’ as Cassandra of the Daily Mirror called it, ‘snowballed with scandal and shock and squalor and depravity into a situation that for human interest (admittedly often of a gloating and morbid kind) has never been equalled in my time.’ Those who sent flowers to the hospital as Ward lay dying were proffering garlands to depravity, Cassandra said. Magnanimity was not a Mirror Group virtue.51
Peter Earle’s News of the World profile of Ward on the day after he died was frank about the dubious evidence on which the conviction rested. ‘Look at the muck the Crown had to rely on at the Old Bailey. Lying whores; frightened little scrubbers; irresponsible little tarts.’ He admitted, approvingly, that what was on trial was not so much Ward personally as ‘moral laxity and sexual decadence. Mr Justice Marshall knew it. Upon his red-cloaked shoulders fell an additional mantle of responsibility. This was a straight fight between good and evil.’ Ward was ‘a diabolical, malevolent mischief-maker’ who lived in a ‘cess-pit’ and was responsible for ‘the stealthy corruption of the innocent, the worsening of the already bad’, according to Earle: ‘quite literally my flesh crawled sometimes in his presence’. No holds were barred in belabouring a man who could not fight back. ‘If he ever did good, I swear it was but a means of doing something else far worse.’ The epithets flew from Earle: ‘that fiendish laughter of his – those strange protruding blue eyes flashing an inner fire of wicked triumph’; ‘demon’; ‘devil’; ‘depraved’; ‘disgusting perversions’. Earle even suggested that Ward’s ‘snake-like cunning’ had been behind the marriage of ‘top fashion model’ Bronwen Pugh to Lord Astor. This outpouring ended on a vile note: ‘The last and biggest crime of all of Ward in the eyes of decent men was that at the pinch – he just couldn’t take it.’52
The front-page story of the Mirror Group’s People was fairer than Earle’s. ‘Ward was no backstreet ponce. Nor was he at the centre of a call-girl ring serving London Society, as rumours had it. His offences in respect to Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were minor, almost technical.’ In truth he was ‘the victim’ of misrepresentation of his relations with women: ‘He did not exploit them. He did not ravish them … Ward was a “kickster”, a connoisseur of sensual experience. He would do almost anything for “kicks”.’53
The Times refused to publish a letter from Hugh Leggatt, Ward’s art dealer, stating that he knew dozens of men who had asked him to arrange for Ward to sketch their wives or girlfriends, that Ward had never pounced on these women, and that he could not understand why these men had not volunteered to speak in Ward’s defence. Many who had known Ward were appalled by his posthumous vilification. ‘Poor Stephen,’ said Pamela Cooper, ‘became the universal scapegoat: security risk, promoter of orgies for the rich and powerful; consorter with racketeers; pimp who lived off the immoral earnings of the prostitutes he introduced to his clients. Like the medieval church, which outlawed then hunted lepers, witches, Jews and prostitutes, the press promptly set itself up as the protector of the Ordinary Decent Folk of England against the licentious aristocracy and governing classes.’54
As Ward lay dying, a Beaverbrook reporter was sent to Cliveden to pester and humiliate Bill Astor, who was depicted as a man skulking in disgrace. ‘Lord Astor cannot entirely retire behind the walls of Cliveden,’ the Daily Express threatened. The family that had dispensed lavish hospitality in the past was now boycotted: ‘Today, Cliveden has plenty of sightseers, but very few visitors.’ John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, brandished a quote which he attributed to Ward: ‘Bill could have spoken up for me. His silence crucified me.’ Gordon then noted that Cliveden had been given to the National Trust ‘to evade death duties in the normal way some of the abnormally rich evade them’. This gave him the pretext for nonsensical spite with which to flurry the Astors: ‘The Trust must be disturbed about the disrepute brought upon the estate it owns. What if it decided to cancel the arrangement and return the estate to Lord Astor bringing the shadow of future death duties back upon his family? That would certainly be a popular retribution.’55
‘In the Profumo Affair,’ wrote Wayland Kennet in 1963, ‘the political frivolity, the moral myopia and the herd credulity of latter-day Toryism led to convulsion and the sacrifice of one life, of one career and several reputations. What happened was horrible.’ A few days after Ward’s death, with the press storm abating, Macmillan (revived in optimism) wrote jauntily, ‘There is, perhaps, quite a hand to be played yet.’56