Unholy Joy: 50 Years On - A Short History of the Profumo Affair

Including an extract from A Little White Death

John Lawton

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611859768
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Named after John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, the Profumo Affair was the biggest British political scandal of 1963. His affair with Christine Keeler, the reputed mistress of an alleged Soviet spy, followed by his lying in the House of Commons when he was questioned about it, forced the resignation of Profumo and damaged the reputation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government.

Here, John Lawton explores how the scandal evolved and the effect it had upon the population of an increasingly liberated Britain.

Unholy Joy went on to become the basis for a novel. A Little White Death has its roots in the Profumo affair, the correspondences will be apparent to the reader... but the 'buds and leaves' are Lawton's fiction.

This kindle edition includes an extract from A Little White Death.

Contents

UNHOLY JOY

Read on for an extract from A LITTLE WHITE DEATH

§ 19

§ 20

§ 21

§ 22

§ 23

§ 24

§ 25

§ 26

§ 27

§ 28

§ 29

§ 30

UNHOLY JOY

I doubt I’m alone in arguing that the 1930s lasted a lifetime – prolonged by the austerity of the war and immediate post-war years it is more culturally sound to defy the calendar and say they they finally ran their course in 1963. In 1963 Britain began to shrug off one way of life and adopt another. Shrug is an understatement… the process was loud and physical. Few things louder than the Beatles, fewer still more physical than the Profumo affair.

The world prior 1963 is not a world we lost, it’s one we threw away. This piece is about that casting off but equally it’s about the resistance to the process – as much about the moral backlash as the sexual liberation.

The title is taken from a phrase coined by Bernard Levin. I was fortunate enough to work with Bernard some twenty years after these events. I don’t think he cared much for reminiscence, but kindly agreed to an interview … quite possibly the last he ever gave on the subject of 1963.

§

“With a roar of unholy joy, the deprived flung themselves on the sated.”

Bernard Levin¹

“Even Suez was ‘clean’ – about war and politics. This was all ‘dirt’.”

Harold Macmillan²

There is an affair in the tides of men. At 11 o’clock on the evening of March 21st, towards the end of the fruitless debate on Foster and Mulholland, Colonel George Wigg, MP for Dudley, took it at the flood:

“There is not an Hon. Member in the House, nor a journalist in the press 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. This all comes about because of the Vassall tribunal. In actual fact, these great press lords, these men who control great instruments of public opinion and power, do not have the guts to discharge the duty that they are now claiming for themselves.”

Hansard is not given to including stage directions, merely the nods and shakes of assent and dissent, but you can almost hear the deep intake of breath and the performer girding his loins.

“That being the case, 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 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.”³

‘Rumour upon rumour’ was more than a familiar turn of cliché. It was an accurate description of the state of political gossip in the spring of 1963. Rumour had it, and had had it so for some nine months, that War Minister Jack Profumo had had an affair with the spectacularly beautiful, nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler, model and former nightclub showgirl. The rumour upon this rumour was that Christine had failed to appear, on March 14th, at the trial of John Edgecombe (who had discharged a revolver at her and Mandy Rice-Davies on December 12th) because someone, quite possibly – the rumour went – someone in high or very high places, had spirited Christine away in order to prevent her giving evidence that might prove embarrassing. In publicly citing the newer rumour, Wigg was also invoking the older, and with it what was known by every journalist in London, that Christine was also claiming to have had an affair with the Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, at the same time. Wigg had called the press cowards for not printing what they knew to be the truth, and had set off a line of enquiry that would lead to two parliamentary debates, countless off-cabinet (as in off-Broadway) meetings, eventually necessitate an investigation by Lord Dilhorne, a report by Lord Denning and, arguably, bring down both the Prime Minister and the government. It was a tragedy for many players, but to find all three protagonists in this first act together you have to go back to July 1961.

§

Since the mid-fifties, society osteopath Stephen Ward had rented a weekend cottage on the Cliveden estate of his patient Viscount Astor. As befits an estate like Cliveden, ‘cottage’ is an understatement to describe the large Tyrolean-style villa, nestling in the beech trees on the banks of the Thames. Spring Cottage was roomy enough for Ward to have house guests and weekend parties, and on the weekend of July 8th–9th 1961 he had three or four guests, among whom was Christine Keeler – who also shared his London flat. At the same time, in the big house a mile away, Astor was entertaining more than thirty people including Lord Mountbatten, Nubar Gulbenkian, President Ayub Khan of Pakistan and Jack Profumo and his wife, the forties film star Valerie Hobson. At about ten-thirty on the Saturday evening, after a hot summer’s day, Ward and Christine drove up to the big house for a floodlit swim in Astor’s pool. Christine, either because Ward had dared her or because her borrowed costume was too big, was swimming naked as Astor’s guests began to drift out of the big house into the garden at the end of dinner. As Profumo and Astor appeared, Christine grabbed a towel and reached for her costume, but Ward tossed it into the bushes, leaving her wet and dripping and scarcely covered. There was now one of those wonderfully ludicrous moments as upper-class manners coped flawlessly with the unexpected and the absurd, and Astor introduced his disparate guests to one another – the almost naked Christine shook hands with the dinner-jacketed Minister for War and his wife. (Ward and Profumo had met before – Ward had sketched the War Minister for the Illustrated London News.) Depending on which published account you read, there was also a scene from Carry on Minister, between appearance and introduction, as Astor and Profumo chased Christine round the pool.

At the end of the evening, Astor invited Ward and his guests to a Sunday picnic lunch by the pool, and Christine set off back to London to guide more of Ward’s friends down for the Sunday – one of them was Yevgeny Ivanov, whom both Ward and Christine thought was a spy, and based on the logic of ‘who in any embassy isn’t?’ it seems only common sense to assume that he was. So, at lunchtime on the Sunday, a Soviet Spy and the British War Minister were to be found racing each other the length of the pool, and competing for the attention of a nineteen-year-old girl, watched by a member of the House of Lords and the President of Pakistan. Spy in clover? Minister in daydream? Reputation in peril? Security at risk?

Ivanov drove Christine home to Ward’s London flat in Wimpole Mews, where, according to Christine, Ivanov got drunk on vodka and they made love. Profumo asked Ward for his telephone number, and two days later, on the Tuesday, he ‘phoned and invited Christine out ‘for a drive’ around London in the chauffered ministerial Humber. Later the same week, Profumo called at the mews again in a less grand but very fashionable Mini. He took her to his house in Regent’s Park, where they made love. In the weeks that followed Profumo and Christine continued to be lovers, usually using Ward’s flat while he was out. The appeal of Christine Keeler to a man of forty-six is obvious, and for her part the affair seems to have had the buzz of risk and power – as she put it herself later, she felt as a woman might feel “fucking Marlon Brando”. Whether or not she was also fucking Marlon Ivanov during the same period isn’t wholly relevant as detail – what is, is that as a close friend of Ward’s, sharing his flat, she could scarcely avoid meeting Ivanov from time to time. A year later, long after the affair had ended, the proximity of Ivanov and Profumo via Keeler and Wimpole Mews was beginning to be the subject of gossip, and in the August 1962 issue of Queen Robin Douglas-Home (a nephew of the Foreign Secretary) put it into print for the first time in a spoof article entitled ‘Sentences I’d Like to Hear the End of’:

“…called in MI5 because every time the chauffeur-driven Zis drew up at her front door, out of the back door into a chauffeur-driven Humber slipped…” The brand names alone would indicate the status of the protagonists – even if the action of the drama seemed improbably well timed and a little too like a Brian Rix farce. Yet it was the unspecified possibility of contact between minister and diplomat that first drew the attention of the government to Profumo’s private life. On August 9th, the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, asked to see Profumo. He warned him that Ward was an inveterate gossip – things said to Ward could find their way to Ivanov – and asked for his co-operation in an ongoing MI5 attempt to entrap Ivanov into working as a double agent. At this point there arises the first of many confusions between the moral and the security aspects of this affair – a dilemma which permeated most sixties’ accounts of the matter, as well as the entire parliamentary response.

Profumo seems to have taken this chat between chaps as fair warning that those in high places knew of his affair with Christine. He left Brook, not surprisingly declining to assist MI5, and dashed off a letter to Christine before joining his wife on the Isle of Wight, where he spent most of the summer recess. The letter began “Darling” and ended “Love J”. It broke an engagement for the following day and said that he would not be able to see her again until the September. That Profumo took fright is obvious – but he seems to have fled not from the issue of his contact with a Soviet spy, but from the immediate threat of discovery in marital infidelity. Yet Brook and MI5 did not know of Profumo’s affair at this stage, simply because their source had not known at the time he tipped them off. On the Monday after the swimming party, the day before Profumo first called on Christine, (and the only time he did so in a ministerial Humber) Stephen Ward, recruited by MI5 only a month before as part of the Ivanov trap, reported to his case officer, a Mr Wagstaffe alias Woods, that Profumo and Ivanov had met. At this point Ward must certainly have had his suspicions about Profumo’s interest in Keeler, but the affair had not yet begun. Ward was only reporting the arrival of Profumo as a spanner in the works.

Morality apart, what did it matter that a government defence minister had social contact with a spy? He was hardly likely to say – Beatles-style, ‘listen, do you want to know a secret?’ – nor, whatever the subsequent press speculation, was he likely to utter involuntary details of national security at point of orgasm, which his mistress might then pass to her other lover the spy. What then was at issue both in Norman Brook’s warning and in Douglas-Home’s exaggerated report?

I asked political journalist Andrew Roth: “It was still very largely a closed society in which there were received opinions about everything – the world was kept ‘safe’ by the Americans and Nato. Until the end of the fifties and the early-sixties the Establishment had things very much its own way – it was a conformist society, very much like pre-war society. In the period we’re talking about it was broken up, and the Profumo case had a very big impact because it showed that these people who were laying down the law for the rest of us were much worse than people had thought – they had no morality, no decency. Everybody had been told it was the worst thing in the world to have any contact with a Russian, and here he [Profumo] was sleeping with the same girl as a Russian and laying himself open to blackmail – all the things you’re supposed to avoid if you’re a sergeant in the armed forces. Here was the War Secretary doing the ‘worst possible thing’. Of course there was a security risk as defined by the security people and the armed forces, of which he [Profumo] was head. A lance-corporal, a private would not have been allowed to do this. It was about as bad as you could get. Anyone who’d been in the armed forces would recognize that.”⁴

It’s worth emphasizing that in 1962-3 most adult males had been in the armed forces and would understand the context Roth is defining. Macmillan had abolished National Service only in 1960, and the last conscripts would not be demobbed until 1963. The security risk Profumo’s private life engendered isn’t objectively quantifiable, but even if it could be proved to be, as I suspect, virtually minute, Roth’s point stands – Profumo was flouting the written and unwritten rules which every Tom, Dick or Harry lower down the chain of command would have been expected to follow. At the bottom of this slippery snake Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton was expected to get his hair cut like a private, at the top Jack Profumo had all the obligations that went with his ‘rank’. It could all look unfortunately like double standards.

The August note was not the end of the affair, merely a cooling off. Keeler herself has said that Profumo sought a solution to the problem by offering to set her up in a place of her own later in the year. (With or without Profumo’s help, she moved to Dolphin Square in the December of 1961, where she would, unwittingly, have been a neighbour of John Vassall.) However, the evidence that Profumo did see Keeler right up to the December is his own, as it figures in the statement he made to the Commons the day after Wigg’s speech.

Between the Queen ‘story’ and the shooting at Wimpole Mews, to which Wigg referred, the rumours about Keeler and Profumo circulated in Fleet Street. In November 1962 an anonymous informant called Wigg to tell him that he was wasting his time looking into the Vassall case and that he should look at Profumo instead. Wigg had no reason to heed such advice. He was on good terms with Profumo. Profumo and he had the common interest of the army, and although Profumo had had the difficult task of presiding over the change from a conscript army to a volunteer force, with all the problems of maintaining standards, until this point at least Wigg, as the Opposition’s self-appointed barrack-room lawyer, had been more ally than opponent. No matter was closer to the heart of George Wigg than the lot of the fighting man. He’d joined the army as a teenager and risen through the ranks between the wars to end the Second World War as a colonel. Ten days later their friendship ended forever when Profumo departed in the House from a line agreed between himself and Wigg over the supply of British troops landed in Kuwait. Wigg felt he’d been made to look a fool, worse he felt a fellow army man had betrayed him. The anonymous ’phone call, which Wigg had been inclined to regard as the work of a crank, suddenly became of great interest. He was out to get Profumo.

Whatever the source of the gossip about Profumo, Christine and Ivanov (and the most likely source was Ward himself) it was hardly a story the press was about to use while Macmillan’s Radcliffe tribunal on the Vassall case was still looking at the role of the press. So, when a former boyfriend of Keeler’s, West Indian Johnny Edgecombe, rolled up outside the Wimpole Mews flat on December 12th and fired bullets at the...