ELEVEN

Safety Curtain

‘The Profumo Affair did Mr Macmillan more harm than anything else in the whole of his administration,’ thought his secretary John Wyndham, ‘and it did a lasting damage to the Conservative Party.’ The Astors’s staunch friend Pamela Cooper agreed: ‘Not only was Macmillan destroyed, but the Tory Party too, as it then was. It wouldn’t be too much to say that the Profumo scandal was the necessary prelude to the new Toryism, based on meritocracy, which would eventually emerge under Margaret Thatcher.’ Certainly the scandal sounded a death-knell to the confidence of traditional hierarchical authority. ‘The whole Establishment did everything possible to rally round the Profumos, and to try to save them from their fate,’ Richard Crossman claimed. The fact that they failed was welcome proof to Anthony Wedgwood Benn that June 1963 marked ‘the decay of the old British Establishment’.¹

Hailsham considered Denning’s appointment to enquire into the circumstances of Profumo’s resignation ‘a panic measure’ and ‘ghastly error’ which ‘should never be repeated’. For once he was right. A fortnight into the inquiry, Macmillan contemplated resignation over its repercussions: ‘If things go badly with the Denning Report, there will be no choice. I shall have been destroyed by the vices of some of my colleagues.’ By 2 August, Denning had forewarned Macmillan he had established that Ernest Marples, the Minister of Transport, had resorted to prostitutes. Denning also found that Denzil Freeth, a young MP who cut a dash as a Commons speaker and was Hailsham’s deputy at the Ministry of Science, had three years earlier enjoyed some hours of intimacy with a man whom he had met at ‘a party of a homosexual character’. Denning omitted references to Marples and Freeth on the basis that their conduct, though ‘discreditable’, did not jeopardise national security. Marples survived in government, but Freeth – who hit the bottle briefly under the strain of his solitary, precarious and secretive existence – left the government, and did not seek re-election in 1964. He became a City stockbroker and Kensington bon viveur, dying nearly half a century later as a respected High Churchman.²

Radcliffe’s tribunal had found a scapegoat in Herbert Pennells, civil assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, who had died at the age of sixty-three shortly before Vassall’s arrest. Pennells was presented as an industrious but unimaginative official who proved ‘remiss’ in selecting men to serve in Russia. Denning took Radcliffe’s strictures on a man who was safely dead as a model for his report; but his investigatory methods were disgraceful, his deductions slipshod and his report-writing nastier than Radcliffe’s. He penned his report, with a copy of the Bible close to hand, in tabloid-newspaper prose with chapter titles such as ‘The Slashing and the Shooting’ and ‘The Man in the Mask’. Published on 26 September, it sold over 100,000 copies in a few days.

Although Denning hardly mentioned Ward’s trial, he drew on the prosecution speeches. The report is awash with the spite of a lascivious, conceited old man. He cited allegations from Keeler and other ‘girls’, but either did not read the trial transcript or suppressed the rebuttals of their allegations by defence counsel. He took the verdict of the trial as unchallengeable, although it would probably have been overturned on appeal if Ward had lived. Several reputable friends of Ward volunteered to testify to Denning, but none were called. Instead, the dead man was treated as a repugnant, irredeemable wretch. The report’s third chapter is entitled ‘Stephen Ward Helping the Russians’, and gives only half the story of his work as Ivanov’s messenger. The Foreign Office asked that references to schemes to subvert foreign diplomats be underplayed. In consequence, Denning omitted MI5’s plan to use Ward in a honey-trap to decoy Ivanov into defection. This omission was desirable on security grounds, but Denning thus suppressed the facts of Ward’s cooperation with MI5 instructions and his reports to Wagstaffe (‘Woods’). In other respects, Denning regurgitated his Security Service briefings in a trusting if not gullible spirit. He also reported that MI5 knew Ward as ‘the provider of popsies for rich people’, managing ‘a call-girl racket’, although Ward did neither of these things.³

Denning’s prurient thrill is almost audible as one reads his calumnies of Ward. Civil servants working in nearby offices when Keeler and Rice-Davies were questioned recall the frisson in the corridors. He sent his shorthand writers out of the room while he questioned some of the young women about their business. A dominatrix who explained that she never had intercourse with the men she flogged was asked by Denning why her clients had these tastes: he may have squirmed inwardly with tut-tutting excitement as she replied that ‘it went back to their nannies. Bus drivers and people like that who don’t have nannies don’t ask you to whip them.’ Denning was avid for salacious rumours, and sinners to pillory. When he interviewed George Wigg, he asked if he knew anything about the Duke of Argyll’s divorce, which had nothing to do with security.⁴

Referring to a photograph published in the News of the World on 3 February 1963 of Keeler in a bikini (‘the slightest of swimming garbs,’ Denning called it), her languorous arms stretched behind her head, the Law Lord commented: ‘most people seeing it would readily infer the avocation of Christine Keeler’. Did he mean that all models who posed in bikinis were whores, or that all women who allowed themselves to be photographed in swimwear were sluts? It is moreover untrue that Keeler was a prostitute in 1961, when Profumo met her, or indeed in 1963 when she was photographed, or thereafter. Denning prided himself on what he called his ‘sophisticated mind’, but as Lord Annan observed, ‘the sanctimonious tone of Denning’s report suggested that, like many a judge, he was not all that aware of how men and women behave’.⁵

Denning wrote that Ward ‘seduced girls’, as if the osteopath was a bold bad baronet with twirling moustaches called Sir Jasper, ruining simple, trusting, innocent milkmaids. ‘He used to pick up pretty girls of the age of sixteen or seventeen, often from nightclubs,’ Denning wrote, and ‘procured them to be mistresses for his influential friends.’ This assertion masked the fact that despite interviewing over a hundred witnesses, the police only brought two charges of procuring, on both of which the jury had acquitted Ward. ‘He catered also for those of his friends who had perverted tastes. There is evidence that he was ready to arrange for whipping and other sadistic performances.’ The ‘evidence’, to use Denning’s word, came from the least reliable witness at Ward’s trial, Vickie Barrett; and again the jury acquitted him on this count. Denning indicted Ward as Keeler’s exploiter in a prim, snobbish phrase: ‘He introduced her to many men, sometimes men of rank and position, with whom she had sexual intercourse.’ Denning depicted Ward almost as a white slaver who corrupted Keeler with ‘the drug Indian hemp and she became addicted to it’. The truth is that Ward deplored her use of the drug.⁶

Twenty years after writing his report, Denning continued his vituperative falsification. On television in 1984 he maintained that Ward was the most evil man whom he had ever met. A few years later he repeated that Ward was ‘really wicked’, ‘filthy’ and steeped in ‘vice’. Ward’s flat was a ‘corrupt, immoral set-up’ with ‘all these two-way mirrors and all that sort of thing’ (Ward’s flat had no two-way mirrors, as Marshall had conceded in his summing-up). During the 1980s, Denning still hankered after the idea that lawyers could inhibit fornication: while Master of the Rolls he rejected the appeal of a young woman who had been expelled from a teaching training course after taking her boyfriend to her bedroom, declaring that it was inconceivable that decent parents would wish their children to be taught by such a woman. He was so keen to suppress criticism of the Ward trial that he advocated changes in libel laws to enable the families of the dead lawyers to sue authors who brought them into ridicule or contempt. In retirement in 1987 he insisted in a tetchy letter to The Times ‘that Stephen Ward was fairly and properly prosecuted, tried and convicted. He was not “framed” by the police. The charges against him were not “bogus”. The conduct of the trial was beyond reproach.’ This querulous bluster was published with perhaps intentional irony under the caption: ‘Ward case and libelling the dead’.⁷

Denning inflicted lasting harm on his country. His report criticised the law officers Hobson and Rawlinson, as well as Redmayne, Deedes and Macleod, for concentrating on whether Profumo had committed adultery when they confronted him. Denning maintained that their test should have been whether his conduct would lead ordinary people to believe that he had committed adultery. In doing so, he drew an analogy from divorce law, whereby a wife had just cause for leaving her husband not only if he had committed adultery, but also if she had reasonable cause to believe that he was adulterous. Lord Dilhorne advised Macmillan, apropos Denning’s conclusions: ‘It would be opening the door to McCarthyism if Ministers could be hounded from public life because an influential section of the people held a reasonable belief – based on rumour and gossip – that a Minister had misconducted himself.’ Hobson similarly wrote that pace Denning, ‘people, including wives, partners and colleagues, ought to be condemned, or at least disposed of, if there are reasonable grounds for believing that they have done wrong, even if you accept from them that they have not in fact erred.’ Five years later Harold Wilson’s solicitor Lord Goodman called Denning’s inquiry, with its focus on rumour, ‘the most startling invasion of privacy in recent years’. Denning’s upholding of the primacy of cheap suspicions inaug-urated a period when newspapers could publicise moronic gossip, hound and humiliate their victims by innuendo and accusation, treat paid informers as heroes, solemnify hoaxes and turn ill-fame into a lucrative commodity.⁸

In despoiling Ward’s memory, Denning set the tone for succeeding generations. When Keeler was tried for perjury and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice, her counsel’s rhetoric might have been taken from Denning: ‘Dr Ward was a man of charm, he had great artistic flair, and he won his way into a snob world of power, taking with him this young girl. He groomed Keeler.’ He did not dwell on the conditions that had victimised her: reared in a railway carriage without mains water or electricity; ill-educated, malnourished; scared by her stepfather; exploited by the fathers of the children she babysat; only employed in London because of her looks. Ward had been considerate and unselfish to the feckless girl who had been exploited by the US airman who impregnated her, the ruffians who hit and screwed her, the police who manipulated and broke her, the false friends who battened on her notoriety.⁹

Tendentious references to the events of 1963 persist in books: journalists spread their casual inaccuracies. In 2010, the Daily Telegraph described Keeler as ‘procured for Lord Astor’s “Cliveden Set” by Stephen Ward, an osteopath with a sideline in high-class prostitution’. The truth, however, is that Keeler was never procured for Lord Astor or his guests, and Ward did not have an auxiliary income as a pimp. Another national newspaper, in 1999, listed ‘Christine Keeler, Call Girl’ as one of the ‘Accidental Heroes of the Twentieth Century’, though a less fortunate or inspiring heroine cannot be imagined.¹⁰

On 8 October 1963, a fortnight after publication of Denning’s report, Macmillan was admitted to hospital with inflammation of the prostate gland. The stress of recent months had shaken his health. Always prone to anxieties about those ailments that Turgenev named the calling-cards of death, he reacted badly when told that he had a benign or malignant tumour. Next day, drugged, suffering physical pain and mental distress, convinced that he had cancer, he wrote a resignation letter to the Queen, and drafted a letter to be read by Home to the imminent party conference at Blackpool explaining that he was too weak to lead the Tories into the next general election. This impulsive haste was unnecessary. Within a day, Macmillan’s physicians had confirmed that he neither had cancer nor must retire through poor health. Minimal reflection showed that such an announcement was bound to throw the conference into disarray. When Home visited the hospital, Macmillan told him of the intended resignation and urged him to become a prime ministerial candidate. Home made no kindly effort to dissuade the sick, muddled man from quick resignation: there were no calming or temporising suggestions from the Foreign Secretary. Instead, Home made a ruthless killing of the Macmillan premiership. He started the train of events whereby he reached Downing Street by hastening to Blackpool, where he wrecked the conference by reading out the resignation message before the Prime Minister could be dissuaded by wiser heads.

Home’s was the act neither of a disinterested friend nor of a man indifferent to the succession. He later claimed that he was surprised when Macmillan urged him to disclaim his earldom and contest the leadership; but Macmillan had mooted Home’s succession to him a few days earlier. Other insiders had foreseen it as a possibility. In 1961, Normanbrook, the Cabinet Secretary whom the Daily Mirror decried, had been asked who should succeed as Prime Minister if some ill befell Macmillan. ‘Alec Home,’ replied Normanbrook: ‘he is the only one who would do it well.’ A year later, after the Cuban crisis, Macmillan had warned Rab Butler, who saw himself as the likeliest next Prime Minister: ‘There is only one Minister now who could displace me, and that is Alec Home … Alec had some special genius, probably from his Lambton mother.’ Home’s succession seemed impossible in November 1962, for a peer had not held the premiership for sixty years. However, legislation which came into force on 31 July 1963 enabled members of the House of Lords to disclaim their peerages and stand for the Commons. This enabled Hailsham, after Home’s announcement at Blackpool, to declare his candidature for the premiership and renunciation of his viscountcy. Macleod, the Tory minister whom Wilson most feared, was too tarnished by his part in the late-night ministerial conclave that weakly quizzed Profumo to be papabile. Hailsham, like Maudling, spoiled his hopes by an ill-judged speech: Hailsham brayed and Maudling baulked like two mismatched mules hitched together on their way to market. Butler’s interventions, too, were stumbling. When John Boyd-Carpenter dined with Colonel ‘Juby’ Lancaster MP, his host interrupted a discussion of leadership prospects. Didn’t they know, he asked, that Home would be chosen: ‘It’s all arranged,’ he said. Nigel Birch, asked about the succession, replied: ‘I’m an Alec Home man. There aren’t any other possibilities. He’s going to get it.’¹¹

Dilhorne, his haunches perched uncomfortably on a creaking chair besides an unmade bed in his small, stuffy room in the Imperial hotel, interviewed Cabinet members, and noted their preference as Macmillan’s successor. His manner was correct, but it was evident that he did not share Boyd-Carpenter’s choice, Maudling. Elsewhere, Redmayne polled other ministers. Reginald Bevins, the self-styled Tory democrat who was Postmaster General, recalled giving his preferences: ‘Maudling and Butler in that order. Long pause. We looked at each other. “What about the peers – Alec and the other one?” No pause. I said: “Not at any bloody price.” That was an unfortunate answer, all carefully recorded on Martin Redmayne’s foolscap.’ After Home had won, and the other candidates were bested, a young backbencher, Paul Channon, tried to console Butler. ‘This last cruel blow brought about by Nigel Birch and Macmillan relations when you were ahead in every poll will merely show how decadent the Tory Government and Party had become in 1963 and how extraordinary Mr Macmillan’s decisions had become in his last few months of office.’¹²

Home’s elderly mother, who was a Labour voter, told a television interviewer that he had been a very ordinary child, and that Butler should have bested him. His aunt, Lady Ellesmere, said he was an extraordinary choice; his uncle Lord Durham said it was a disaster. Sir Alec Douglas-Home (as he became after disclaiming his earldom) was Prime Minister for a year: he proved to have more resolve and resilience than Butler, Hailsham and Maudling could have mustered, and lost the general election of October 1964 by only four seats. David Butler’s masterful study of the election concluded: ‘It was the Daily Mirror rather than Mr Wilson which sustained the Labour campaign to a polling day climax.’ The Cudlipp-King newspapers ran stories about Rachmanism, stop-go economics, underspending in schools and hospitals, defence muddles, impoverished pensioners, and Tory tiredness. Supremely, they capitalised on the message that they had instilled during the Profumo scandal: that Britain faced a modernisation crisis which was class-bound; that the Establishment, headed by a disclaimed fourteenth earl with expansive grouse-moors, was a travesty of power; that the old order must be hurried away in tumbrils.¹³

Once the general election was launched in 1964, Cudlipp sent his star interviewer Donald Zec to meet Wilson. The resulting profile, published over two days, was the market-branding of Wilson by the Mirror that swung the election for Labour. The message had been easier to implant since June 1963. ‘I did not get a pheasant’s eye view of him behind a twelve-bore gun nor did I face him in the Edwardian gloom of some Top People’s Club,’ Zec wrote. Wilson took him into the kitchen of his Hampstead Garden Suburb home (‘the sort of home you’d find anywhere … in Britain’), and gave him a cup of tea from a tea-pot embossed with a print of the Forth Bridge. ‘If a home reflects the man – as, say, a grouse moor might show up the marksman from the boys – then Mr Wilson’s untidy but comfortable habitat is a real give-away … Up-ended plank on wheels in overgrown garden, former property of younger son, Giles. Rain-faded note on defunct doorbell says “Please knock”.’ There was homely virtue, the Labour message seemed to say, in doorbells that did not work and an improvised go-cart hammered out of cast-off wood: none of the effete knick-knacks with which the Profumos, say, had arrayed their primrose and eau-de-nil drawing room. To emphasise Labour’s pretence of anti-materialism, Wilson told Zec: ‘We in the Labour Party absolutely reject the insulting doctrine that the British People are only interested in gambling, making money, new washing machines and the latest refrigerator. Look at the magnificent work being done by Oxfam, the “Freedom From Hunger” campaign, War on Want, and the societies for helping spastics.’ He turned on his patriotic indignation, too. ‘We are a great country,’ he said angrily. ‘Let nobody sell us short. But we could be a hell of a lot greater.’¹⁴

In the Daily Mirror’s next issue, Zec continued his profile interview of Wilson, ‘this former council schoolboy, born at No 4, Warneford Road, Milnsbridge, Huddersfield (twelve shillings a week, plus rates)’. Wilson believed that future battles ‘must be fought less on the playing fields of Eton – more in the science laboratory’, according to Zec. ‘He does say there is no place in politics for the gentlemanly amateur, now as obsolete as that snob game, Gentlemen versus Players.’ Wilson was earnest about re-drawing Britain’s social landscape. ‘Land racketeers, their wings severely clipped, will not be so happy in it. Those Etonians who still believe in the survival of the smuggest will want no part of it. Boardroom “Blimps” who slid into power through money and influence may gnash their gold teeth at it. But the young, the dynamic, the brainy, the well-intentioned and the just will flourish in it. So promises Mr Harold Wilson.’ Wilson believed that the election would be won by the votes of ‘young people, the courting and the newlyweds’ who sought affordable homes: ‘House prices have doubled in six years and land racketeering has run riot.’ A Labour priority, said Wilson, would be ‘curbing the racketeer’. A few years later he was mired in the notorious slag-heap land deal, and recommending dicey wideboys for public honours. In 1964, though, he promised the ‘young citizens’ who were Daily Mirror readers, ‘“The squalid property deals which merely produce vast profits and ultimately send up the prices of people’s home have no place in a new Britain”.’¹⁵

The Daily Mirror campaign message was reinforced daily. ‘Sir Alec, with his comic knickerbockers and clicking teeth peering over half a pair of glasses, is absolutely convinced that the women of Britain are going to carry him forward to victory,’ wrote Marjorie Proops in the issue of 7 October. ‘I am sick to the bone of … Alec and all the rest of the Tories who have sat on their smug rears in Westminster for thirteen endless, weary years.’ Next day there was an array of quotes from modish reformers. ‘I will vote Labour,’ declared Alan Sillitoe, ‘because I believe in equality. Equality is a cliché, except to those who haven’t got it.’ A. J. Ayer was voting Labour because the party ‘will put science to a more intelligent use, and are more likely to bring about social reform – better than voting Conservative because I’m-all-right-Jack’. The jazz singer and club owner Annie Ross told the Mirror: ‘I will vote Labour because I hate class distinction.’¹⁶

On election night in October 1964, Paul Raymond’s Revuebar had a gimmick. After voting closed, five naked showgirls appeared on stage, each with a ribbon in their hair. The one with the blue ribbon represented the Conservatives, the pink ribbon Labour, yellow for Liberal, red for Communists and white for independents. As the result in each constituency was declared, the girl representing the victorious party took a chiffon scarf of the right colour and tied it round herself. None of the girls wanted to be the Communist, not from political scruples, but because they did not want to be shivering without a single scarf for the whole night. The pink chiffon scarves won.

Only the most partisan spirit could say that the new administration, with its mix of sincere idealists, quarrelsome intellectuals, crafty trade union time-servers, bullies and small-minded envy-ridden puritans, was more effective, or less prone to cronyism and trickery, than the preceding government, with its practitioners of noblesse oblige, Old Etonians, retired officers, glossy playboys, bullies and expense-account company directors. One network of egotists, with an intricate history of mutual obligations, murky pacts and tacit promises, was replaced by an opposing alliance, no more qualified or efficient, held together by similar bargains, ambition and vanity. The notion that the change of government in 1964 brought purity or progress was naïve.

George Wigg was rewarded by Wilson with the appointment of Postmaster General, with direct access to him on security matters. By dint of Westminster intrigues, melodramatic antics in Downing Street and hectoring late-night telephone calls, he pummelled Wilson for several years, until his harassed punchbag exiled him to the House of Lords. Subsequently he developed a senescent taste for kerb-crawling in Park Lane. In 1976 he was in the dock denying charges of insulting behaviour and endangering the peace after repeatedly accosting women from his car. Wigg protested that he had been looking for a street news vendor selling late editions. Private Eye photographed him getting out of a car in a dirty raincoat, with an urgent look on his face, and a bubble caption saying, ‘I’m desperate for a good Evening Standard’.

Cecil King’s Rolls-Royce had a flagstaff inserted behind the Silver Lady emblem so that he could fly a Red Flag, inscribed ‘Vote Labour’, during the 1964 general election. The mistrustful alliance between him and Wilson fissured after the election, when Wilson, who had previously announced that he would not recommend the Queen to create further hereditary titles, offered King a life peerage. King retorted that he wanted an earldom, so as to out-rank his uncles Northcliffe and Rothermere, to say nothing of other newspaper proprietors, Camrose, Kemsley and Southwood. Wilson reiterated that no hereditary peerages would be created at his recommendation. King then produced precedents for life earldoms (Darlington, Walsingham and Yarmouth were all granted as life earldoms in the eighteenth century), but to no avail. His applications however ended with his termagant wife being made a dame. King was the man of whom Anthony Sampson said admiringly in 1962: ‘he dislikes Eton, titles, pomposity and humbug in high places, and he loves attacking the Establishment’. His megalomania led to his expulsion from the Mirror Group in 1968. ‘I do not feel I have ever been fully stretched – and I have never been allowed to serve my country as I could have wished,’ he told me in 1972 at a time when, he complained, ‘newspapers are full of trivial news and irrelevant comment’.¹⁷

One person to prosper from the scandals of 1963 was Samuel Herbert, whose strenuous, pitiless fixing of evidence was rewarded with promotion from chief inspector to superintendent. He died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight in 1966. His character as a shameless rascal was fortified by the posthumous discovery that he had £30,000 squirrelled away – a small fortune for a policeman at that time. This was the sum that Keeler said she had been offered by John Lewis to secure Ward’s conviction and reduce Macmillan’s government to a rubble heap.

Keeler was treated viciously after Ward’s death. On 4 August, the Mirror Group’s second Sunday family paper, The People, carried the front-page headline: ‘KEELER, THE SHAMELESS SLUT’, and called her ‘an empty-headed trollop, skilled only at using her body to bewitch and betray’. ‘She smoked marijuana and loved orgies’, seldom washed (although it also claimed ‘she sat in a bath drinking champagne with a boyfriend’), had soiled underwear, and ‘boasted of picking up down-and-outs in the street and taking one of the scruffiest of them to sleep with her’. They found a man who claimed, as a butler, to have served coffee to Profumo and Keeler in bed together. The article claimed John Hamilton-Marshall was her lover – which would have been against his nature – and that they lived together in Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill. A friend had written a reference to their landlady there, The People pretended: ‘If you want your house turned into a brothel, with coloured layabouts all over the place, drug orgies and all that jazz, accept Miss Keeler as a tenant.’ Even Louis Blom-Cooper, a jurist who epitomised compassionate urbanity, in his damning commentary on Denning’s report, dismissed Keeler and Rice-Davies as ‘adolescent drabs, for whom little public sympathy should be wasted’.¹⁸

On 5 September (three weeks after Ward was cremated with only six mourners daring to show their faces), Keeler and Paula Hamilton-Marshall were arrested and charged with perjury and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice by not revealing the presence of Camacchio and Fenton in their flat at the time when Gordon was put in a police frame for attacking Keeler. There were preliminary hearings at Marylebone Magistrates Court in October, a sensational trial opened in November, and on 6 December, Keeler was sentenced to nine months in Holloway prison. ‘Tales of kicks, thumps, and slaps, bribes, and sex orgies, lies and blackmail threats, kept alive the spirit of the “Ward galère”,’ reported the Glasgow Herald gleefully.¹⁹

In order to confuse matters further, Robin Drury (who was months away from bankruptcy) was induced to testify that Keeler had told him that her bruises and black eye were inflicted by an unknown woman with whom she participated in an afterdinner orgy in the Hamilton-Marshall flat. Although John Hamilton-Marshall – bedecked in a pink candy-striped shirt, black satin waistcoat and blue collarless felt jacket – testified that he, not Gordon, had brawled with Keeler (testimony that the police had discouraged him from volunteering at Gordon’s trial), the police and prosecution case focussed on the hiding of Fenton and Camacchio. They did not disavow the false story that Gordon was her assailant, but implied that there was truth in it, for there could be no suggestion after the Ward trial that police officers coerced its prime witnesses into giving false evidence in that or related cases. Nor did Keeler’s counsel complicate or prejudice her defence by mentioning police entrapment or police-incited perjury in her original evidence about Gordon.^fn1

What is striking about October 1963 is that while Cabinet Ministers donned homburgs, fobs and morning suits, disclaimed peerages, delivered dud perorations at Blackpool, and promised with lifeless, orotund phrases to restore normative stability, a kid pop impresario like Alex Wharton, and rootless young risk-takers such as Drury, Hamilton-Marshall and Mann – the foot-scouts of that inchoate, unruly, destabilising, protean phenomenon that was to be called ‘Swinging London’ – traipsed into the witness box. These two social spheres, distant though they seemed, had converged during the modernisation crisis of 1963.

The Daily Sketch marked Keeler’s release in 1964 from Holloway prison, where she suffered cruelly, by publishing her telephone number: thereafter she was deluged with abusive telephone calls. When in 1965 she married, she was ruthlessly doorstepped by photographers, who scrabbled round like crabs in a bucket snapping at her. Keeler’s life has been unpleasantly chequered since then. She has collaborated in several unreliable memoirs. In one she depicted the early 1960s a time when ‘Dukes and Ministers fought side by side by sadists, masochists, homosexuals and lesbians against the barriers of a frustrated society’. In another, she indicted Ward as ‘a spymaster’ involved in placing Moscow’s double agent, Sir Roger Hollis, as Director General of MI5. ‘My Svengali,’ she called Ward: ‘a spider with a malevolent web,’ who ‘would have killed me as easily as light my cigarette. He stitched me up, stitch after very neat stitch. He was bad.’²⁰

Shortly before the general election of 1964, the Astors went to stay at the Cipriani in Venice, where Profumo eighteen months earlier had forfeited his bluff. Bill Astor spent some days sketching at Freya Stark’s nearby home. ‘He is such a poor little waif of a man,’ she wrote. ‘I sometimes feel it is just some rather expensive clothes walking around and no one in particular inside them. But she is rare and beautiful, and good, with lovely honest eyes which she never plays with. They are rather a touching couple, he always with a well-intentioned but silly value and she quietly putting it right.’ A few days later Bill Astor had a heart attack. He became a wretched invalid, and died two years later. His daughter, who was aged four at the time, later worked for Winston’s Wish, the charity that helps bereaved children.²¹

Clore was not publicly identified as the ‘Charles’ who featured in the Ward trial until after his death in 1979. He embarked on a course of outstanding philanthropy by establishing the Clore Foundation in the general election year of 1964. Amongst its benefactions to cultural institutions and Jewish causes, the most famous is the Clore Gallery housing the Turner collection at Tate Britain.²²

During the summer of 1963, the Territorial Army headquarters in Shropshire, where Profumo had unveiled the foundation stone during the previous winter, applied for the inscription to be re-cut with Profumo’s name erased. ‘This stone was meant to be something of an inspiration to the young fellows,’ explained Colonel Guy Thornycroft, vice-chairman of Shropshire TA. ‘Now we think it better to strike out Mr Profumo’s name. It would be a perman-ent reminder of Mr Profumo.’ Yet the Profumo legacy was not easily erased. For forty years, whenever he and his wife entered a room, all conversation stopped for a moment. He was chastened for a time, but never tamed. In his desk he stored ballpoint pens adorned with pictures of naked women. The conventional view is that he expiated his misdoings during decades of voluntary work in the East End of London. Certainly, and deservedly, he was rehabilitated. The Queen Mother remained his champion. At a dinner in her honour, sitting between her and a seventeen-year-old Guinness heiress, the old satyr whispered to the latter during the first course: ‘Ever been fucked by a seventy-year-old? No? You should try it.’²³

The Profumo Affair was not only a body-blow to Macmillan’s government. It was the death-blow of an England that was deferential and discreet. Home said in June 1963 that he was ‘disgusted and angry’ at the way that one man’s lapse had impugned the belief that British public life was conducted ‘by men who have the highest sense of integrity and public duty’.²⁴ That summer inaugurated the raucous period when authority figures were denied respect even when they deserved it. Denning’s recommendation that ministers should become suspicious snoopers on one another, and that rash, random rumours ought to be solemnly investigated, performed euthanasia on notions of privacy. Until 1963, newspapers protected politicians who were detected in adultery, or caught in the bushes with guardsmen. After 1963, Fleet Street’s emetic brew of guilty joys, false tears, nasty surprises and dirty surmises seemed limitless. From the moment of Profumo’s resignation, newspapers started deploying outrageous headlines for non-existent stories: ‘PRINCE PHILIP AND THE PROFUMO SCANDAL – RUMOUR UTTERLY UNFOUNDED’, boomed a Daily Mirror headline of June 1963, above paragraphs that failed to specify the imaginary rumour.

There were strenuous efforts after the summer of 1963 to pretend that nothing had changed. Ward had been hounded to death; Profumo was shunned; Keeler went to prison; Astor became a crumpled ruin; Rachman’s name coined an unpleasant new epithet. Villainy had been punished; transgression had been anathematised; the national morality based on newspaper pillorying had been raised to the level of auto-da-fé. Although Labour strategists kept alive the sense that the scandal had been proof of Establishment corruption, the general mood was to shrug off what had happened, as if awakening from a lurid, turbulent nightmare.

In fact the trauma had been too horrendous for the status quo to be restored. Traditional notions of deference had been weakening for years, but after June 1963 they became mortally sick. Authority – however disinterested, well-qualified and experienced – was increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust. Respect and deference, even when merited, were increasingly seen as a species of snobbery. Notoriety became a money-spinner: it became profitable to behave destructively. If Keeler had been born thirty-five years later, she would have starred on Celebrity Big Brother and consulted her publicist every time her footballer boyfriend knocked her about.

People’s visions were distorted forever by the outlandish novelties of the summer of 1963. Afterwards everything still looked reassuringly familiar, but was weirdly twisted. It was as if a stolid householder – one of Profumo’s Stratford constituents, say – had left his house at a summer dusk to post a letter in the red pillarbox on the corner of his neat privet-lined street; had murmured ‘Good Evening’ to the vicar out with his spaniel and sidestepped the whistling schoolboy on his Raleigh bike; and returning a few minutes later with the assurance of a woman going to The Sound of Music for the twentieth time and knowing every song, did not at first notice that his cosy living-room had swapped places with the living-room in the Windolene-burnished mirror hanging above the hearth; and that the air was hazy with unnameable secrets and squalid grudges.