The previous page is a blank, because that taxi driver, who told me the story, belonged to the old world. He named the men who sat around the pool, some of whom have never been named by the history books; but he only did so anecdotally. He never sold his remarkable story to a newspaper. What happened in the case of the Profumo affair, as it came to be known, was that hypocrisy, that last ragged garment with which the old governing classes could swathe themselves, was rudely snatched away. Matters which had never been mentioned in the press, unless they had been aired in court (hence the popularity, for News of the World readers, of lurid divorce hearings), could now be set down in print by newspapers prepared to risk the libel laws. Some time in 1929 David Lloyd George gave a dinner in a private room of a London hotel to which he invited a group of politicians supposedly at odds with one another. One of the younger men exclaimed, when he saw the guest list–‘This will lift the roof if it gets out.’ ‘Lloyd George replied with his ineffable dumpling expression: “My dear boy. If everything I have done in this hotel during the last forty years had got out, you have no idea how many times I would have had to retire from politics.”’¹ A. J. P. Taylor thought six of the twentieth-century Prime Ministers (pre-1968) had committed adultery²–three presumably were Asquith, Lloyd George and MacDonald. The other three are harder to pin down. The point is, that although gossips and those in the Upper Ten [Thousand], as the Victorians called them, all ‘knew’ about such things, they were never aired in the newspapers. A distinction was maintained between the pleasures of private gossip and the baldness of public discourse.

The Profumo affair changed all that, and if it made for a more exciting press, and a more candid atmosphere, it also was a key factor in the diminishment of British political life. Post-Profumo, British politicians were noticeably less intelligent. What intelligent person would choose to enter a sphere of life where it was deemed legitimate for the popular press–and, in time, all newspapers, and even the BBC–to publicise love affairs and sexual indiscretions? It is arguable that for those who were thrust into public life either by insatiable ambition (the politicians) or by the accident of birth or marriage (the Royal Family) the scrutiny was actually intolerable, a fact which is surely one of the explanations for the psychological oddity of so many late twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century politicians and royal persons. In an ideal world, corrupt standards in public life would be purged by exposure. Dishonesty, sexual depravity, financial irregularity by public figures would result in their disgrace, and replacement by those who were pure, lovely and of good report. In the imperfect world we actually inhabit, the elimination of double standards resulted in the weakening of any standards at all. But in the early 1960s there was a public mood of impatience with the Old Gang who had ruled Britain since the war. Macmillan’s pose as a remote Edwardian aristocrat was a source of as much irritation as admiration, and was the underlying reason for the vengeful moralistic public fury which led to the ruin of his Secretary of State for War, John Profumo.

The central figure in the story was Stephen Ward, an osteopath who practised in Wimpole Mews, the medical district of Marylebone. He had treated all manner of famous patients, including members of the Royal Family, Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, Nubar Gulbenkian, Danny Kaye, Sir Anthony Eden and Sir Malcolm Sargent. He had also–and here was how the tale began to unfold, treated Nancy, Lady Astor and her son Lord Astor. Ward was a frequent guest at Cliveden and, in return for a peppercorn rent, he kept a cottage on the estate as a weekend retreat.³

The osteopath was always surrounded by pretty young women, whom he was happy to introduce to friends. One of these was an extremely beautiful long-legged girl with long, rust-coloured hair who had begun modelling for Tit-Bits when she was fifteen (in March 1958), moved on to bare-breasted dancing at Murray’s Cabaret Club in Beak Street, Soho. ‘She was a nymphomaniac in the true sense of the term, in that she felt emotionally secure only when she was giving her body to someone…She once admitted that she would allow a man to use her in any way that pleased him as long as he did not want to kiss her on the lips.’⁴ Her name was Christine Keeler.

She moved into Ward’s flat, and became a regular visitor to the Cliveden cottage within days of meeting at Murray’s Cabaret Club. They never had a sexual relationship. He kept her amused with constant jokes, he impressed her by his famous contacts, he was her rescuer. Ward introduced her to the friends who looked to him as a purveyor of young women. Among them was a bridge-playing naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy, Commander Yevgeny Ivanov. Another who met Keeler during a hot weekend round the swimming pool at Cliveden in July 1961 was John Profumo, an Old Harrovian, recently elevated by Macmillan to the post of Secretary of State for War. Ward was in the perfect position to be a blackmailer, or an agent for the Soviet Union. He was neither. He had merely allowed a situation to develop whereby a Soviet naval attaché and a Secretary of State for War were sharing, albeit unwittingly, the same mistress.

Then a crisis occurred. On 14 December 1962 a young West Indian called Johnny Edgecombe turned up at Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews and fired shots at the window. Inside were Christine Keeler and another of Ward’s girls, Mandy Rice-Davies. Edgecombe had come round with a gun because Mandy had displaced him in her affections with another West Indian, one Lucky Gordon. Edgecombe was put on trial for the attempted murder of Keeler, and for possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life. He was acquitted on the murder charge–Keeler having absconded–but when the court learned of previous convictions for ‘living on immoral earnings’ and theft and drug possession, he was sent down for seven years.

By now, the rumours of Keeler’s affair with Ivanov and Profumo was common knowledge. The satirical magazine Private Eye on 22 March, led the way with:

IDLE TALK

Reveals

Lunchtime O’Booze

Mr Silas Jones, a West Indian immigrant of no fixed abode, was today sentenced at the Old Bailey to twenty-four years’ Preventive Detention for being in possession of an offensive water pistol.

The chief ‘witness’ in the case, gay fun-loving Miss Gaye Funloving, a twenty-one-year-old ‘model’, was not actually present in Court. She has, in fact, disappeared. It is believed that normally, in cases of this type, a Warrant is issued for the arrest of the missing witness.

‘PARTIES’

One of Miss Funloving’s close ‘friends’, Dr Spook of Harley Street, revealed last night that he could add nothing to what had already been insinuated.

Dr Spook is believed to have ‘more than half the Cabinet on his list of patients’. He also has a ‘weekend’ cottage on the Berkshire estate of Lord——, and is believed to have attended many ‘parties’ in the neighbourhood.

Among those it is believed have also attended ‘parties’ of this type are Mr Vladimir Bolokhov, the well-known Soviet spy attached to the Russian Embassy, and a well-known Cabinet Minister.

RESIGNATION?

Mr James Montesi, a well-known Cabinet Minister, was last night reported to have proffered his ‘resignation’ to the Prime Minister, on ‘personal grounds’.

It is alleged that the Prime Minister refused to accept his alleged ‘resignation’. Mr Montesi today denied the allegations that he had ever allegedly offered his alleged ‘resignation’ to the alleged ‘Prime Minister’.⁵

Then, on the evening this story was printed, Colonel George Wigg (1900–83) rose in the House of Commons. Wigg was an old soldier, the eldest of six children of a dairyman from Ealing, west London. His appearance, elephantine ears, huge nose, bright, intelligent eyes, made him a gift to cartoonists. Poverty made it impossible to take up scholarships won in boyhood and he left school at fourteen, joined the Hampshire Regiment at eighteen and served in the regular army as a private soldier. The odious braying Tory MPs, when he was elected for Labour for the seat of Dudley, in 1945, liked to mock Wigg’s struggles. ‘Has not the time come,’ asked Sir David Renton on one occasion, ‘for the Hon. Member to be sent back to his regiment?’⁶ It was a cruelly snobbish remark since in the Hampshire Regiment Wigg had never been promoted above the ranks. Only after war broke out did he become a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army Education Corps. He had got on reasonably well with Profumo until 1962, when he began asking awkward questions about a British Army operation in Kuwait, to repel an invasion for Iraq. Though puffed as a ‘model’ operation, Wigg knew this was a lie. As many as 10 percent of the troops were out of action through heat exhaustion. The replies given to Wigg by the Defence Minister were revealed by a subsequent Parliamentary Select Committee to be untrue. He used his questions as a launch pad for a wholesale criticism, quite justified, of the state of the British Army. He never forgave Profumo for trying to lie to him over Kuwait. When a cleric in the Admiralty called John Vassall was blackmailed by the Russians for homosexuality and subsequently exposed as an agent, Wigg received a mysterious anonymous telephone call–not to his own home but to the house of a friend he happened to be visiting.

‘Forget about Vassall,’ said the voice. ‘You want to look at Profumo.’

So it was that Wigg could act the role of Profumo’s nemesis in the Commons:

There is not an Hon. Member in the House, nor a journalist in the Press Gallery, nor do I believe there is a person in the Public Gallery who in the last few days has not heard rumour upon rumour involving a member of the Government Front Bench. The Press has got as near as it can–it has shown itself willing to wound but afraid to strike…

I rightly use the privilege of the House of Commons–that is what it is given to me for–to ask the Home Secretary, who is the senior member of the Government on the Treasury Bench now, to go to the Dispatch Box–he knows that the rumour to which I refer relates to Miss Christine Keeler and Miss Davies and a shooting by a West Indian–and, on behalf of the Government, categorically deny the truth of these rumours. On the other hand, if there is anything in them, I urge him to ask the Prime Minister to do what was not done in the Vassall case–set up a Select Committee so that these things can be dissipated, and the honour of the Minister concerned freed from the imputations and innuendoes that are being spread at the present time.⁷

Profumo came to the House of Commons and made a statement which was transparently false. Private Eye printed on its cover a picture of him sitting on a bed, with a balloon saying: ‘And if Private Eye prints a picture of me on a bed, I’ll sue them.’ Profumo had told the Commons, ‘there was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler’. Then he had left the House and together with his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson (she had played the lead in The King and I), and the Queen Mother, had gone to the races. But the matter was not going to go away. Lucky Gordon came up for trial at the Old Bailey, charged with wounding Keeler in the street. Ward gave the Home Secretary evidence that Keeler and Profumo had been lovers. Profumo resigned.⁸

The Establishment exacted a grisly revenge upon Ward, the initiator of the disaster. The osteopath was himself put on trial, on 22 July 1963, for living off the immoral earnings of prostitutes; for procuring girls under the age of twenty-one to have illicit sexual intercourse; for procuring abortions; and for conspiring to keep a brothel. Ward was acquitted of procuring, but the jury, persuaded by the prosecution counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones, found him guilty of poncing for Christine and Mandy–even though Christine denied being a prostitute. By then, Ward was in St Stephen’s Hospital, having taken an overdose of Nembutal tablets. He died at 3.50 p.m. on 3 August. Six days later, the funeral took place at Mortlake Crematorium. Apart from a solitary wreath of roses from his family, there was one wreath made up of a hundred white carnations. It was from Kenneth Tynan; John Osborne; his wife, Penelope Gilliat; Annie Ross, the jazz singer; Dominic Elwes, who had stood bail for Ward; Arnold Wesker; and Joe Orton. Their card read simply

 

To Stephen Ward

Victim of Hypocrisy.

 

A postscript to the Profumo affair occurred in 1976 when George Wigg was charged by police while accosting women from his motor car as he drove slowly near Marble Arch. The magistrate acquitted him, not because he believed Wigg’s denial, but because he considered that the ‘kerb crawling’ of which Wigg had accurately been accused did not amount to an offence.⁹

Profumo himself became the modern equivalent of a medieval penitent. He offered his services to Toynbee Hall, the settlement for the poor and needy in the East End, and thereafter commuted four days a week to help alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-convicts and the elderly.¹⁰

On the surface of things, it could be said that very little had happened. Some men had cheated on their wives with a number of compliant young women–even though the compliance was underwritten with cash, there was no suggestion of coercion. Despite the best endeavours of the press to say otherwise, no national security had been breached. But something had happened. Britain had changed. With their blundering, self-righteous rhetoric the politicians tried to put it into words. On television Lord Hailsham said, ‘Of course, we have all been kicked in the stomach.’ He then proceeded to kick Profumo, reminding him that he had ‘lied and lied and lied–lied to his friends, lied to his family, lied to his colleagues, lied to his solicitor, lied to the House of Commons…This is a great national moral issue.’¹¹ Quite what the issue was, the politicians found it difficult to articulate. Harold Wilson, as the newly elected leader of the Labour Party, did his best in the debate in the Commons which followed Profumo’s resignation. ‘Saturday’s paper told of an opportunist night-club proprietor who had offered Miss Christine Keeler–or should I refer to her as Christine Keeler Ltd–a night club job at a salary of £5,000 a week, and I say to the Prime Minister that there is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot twenty-five times as much as it pays its 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.’¹²

This economic approach to the question was certainly arresting, but what point did it make? As Dame Rebecca West pointed out in the next issue of the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Nobody sensible would go to a nightclub to see Members of Parliament coming down staircases dressed in sequins and tail-feathers unless there were at least 250 of them; you need a lot, as market gardeners cunningly say, to make a show.’¹³

Like the collapse of the Crown Prosecution of Lady Chatterley, the Profumo affair was one of the prime factors in making Britain a little less stuffy about sex. By the time newspaper readers had glutted themselves with the antics of Stephen Ward’s distinguished clients, there seemed less case for public legislators telling others how to conduct their sexual lives. No one could say that the Chatterley case or the Profumo affair directly caused the liberalisation of divorce laws, the facilitation of legal abortion or the growth of tolerance towards homosexuals, but they played their part. More crucial than any part they played in the sexual revolution was the decline in deference, which was definitely hastened by Profumo, and the strengthening of the power of the press–and, with it, the medium of television. The laws of libel would be invoked, as they were by a succession of well-monied rogues over the next half-century, to cloak their misdemeanours. But after the Profumo case the press would be less timid about exposing not merely the sexual peccadilloes but all other aspects of the lives of public figures.