Profumo Affair

6 Key excerpts on "Profumo Affair"

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  Finest and Darkest Hours

  • Kevin Jefferys(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Atlantic Books

    (Publisher)

  5 ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’ The Profumo Affair

  A great party is not to be brought down because of a squalid affair by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar.

  Lord Hailsham, Tory minister, comments on BBC television, 13 June 1963

  Harold Macmillan, whose elevation was achieved by a brutality, cunning and greed for power normally met only in the conclaves of Mafia capi, said, after he had climbed the greasy pole and pushed all his rivals off (takes out handkerchief containing concealed onion) that the whole thing was Dead Sea Fruit.

  Bernard Levin, commentator, If You Want My Opinion (1992)

  O n 4 June 1963 John Profumo, the Conservative Secretary of State for War, wrote a letter of resignation to the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. In his letter Profumo admitted he had lied in the House of Commons about his relationship with a young woman named Christine Keeler. ‘To my very deep regret,’ he said, ‘I misled you, and my colleagues, and the House.’ Macmillan replied that this was ‘a great tragedy for you, your family, and your friends’, but added that ‘in the circumstances’ he had no alternative other than to accept the resignation. ‘In the circumstances’ was Macmillan’s way of referring to the storm that was about to be unleashed. For weeks to come, the Profumo episode was to exercise a stranglehold on public life in Britain. At first sight this seems difficult to explain. The post of War Minister was not important enough to merit inclusion in the Cabinet. Profumo was neither the first nor the last politician to have been ‘economical with the truth’ in Parliament, or to have committed adultery. Nor was this one of the ‘grand passions’ of history, in the manner of the affair between Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon and Elinor Glyn after the First World War. Yet throughout the summer newspapers in Britain, and many abroad, pored over the details and repercussions of Profumo’s involvement with Keeler. A lengthy inquiry conducted by a senior judge, Lord Denning, became an instant bestseller when its findings were published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) in the autumn. And before the end of the year two full-length books about the case had appeared. ‘In the end’, wrote the authors of one of these studies, the whole episode ‘transcended sanity and threatened to bring down a Prime Minister and his Government, tarred the reputation of the country . . . and left a path of shattered reputations and ruined careers . . . Only a nation harbouring a latent neurosis could have been thrown into such a spasm.’1

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  The Beatles and the 1960s

  Reception, Revolution, and Social Change

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Meanwhile, Macmillan faced calls from within his own party to resign amid displays of irreverence toward him that would have made it difficult for him to continue in office. Historians debate whether the Profumo scandal actually brought him down because Macmillan also suffered from ill health that would have soon forced him to resign anyway. Perhaps so, but the Profumo scandal could not have helped the prospects of the Conservative Party, which lost power to Harold Wilson and the Labour Party a year later. 6 44 44 The Profumo Affair has resonated in popular culture ever since, frequently used as a basis of comparison with any scandals that have since ensued, similar to the role Watergate has played in that capacity in the United States. As Frank Mort put it, the Profumo scandal became “the median against which other subsequent liaisons and sexual transgressions have been measured.” 4 British historians have sometimes downplayed the significance of the affair; Arthur Marwick, for example, calls its historical significance “negligible.” 5 However, contemporaries certainly did not perceive it this way, and, when seen against the backdrop of the social changes occurring in Britain by 1963, with the bulk of the decade still ahead, I am unconvinced by Marwick’s characterization of its importance. Mort, in fact, argues that historians have underplayed the sexual ramifications of the scandal by concentrating too exclusively on the political and foreign policy dimensions of the affair. 6 Again, that was not the case at the time; Macmillan strenuously objected to the sensationalistic treatment the press gave to sex in its coverage of the subject. The Profumo scandal brought to society’s attention flaws in the Street Offences Act and revealed that the declining number of prosecutions did not in fact mean that Britain had solved the problem of prostitution; it had merely channeled it in a different direction.

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  Fighters and Quitters

  Great Political Resignations

  • Theo Barclay(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TWO JOHN PROFUMO

  T his was the scandal that had it all. Glamorous aristocrats, gorgeous call girls, East End gangsters, Russian spies and a rank miscarriage of justice. Above all else, the resignation of the Secretary of State for War permanently broke apart British society’s fusty and buttoned-up façade. For the first time, the public realised that behind their haughty exterior, members of the establishment were at it like rabbits.

  Scion of a dynasty of Sardinian barons that had become enmeshed in English high society, the young John Profumo was educated at Harrow and Oxford before joining the army shortly before the start of the Second World War. Having triumphantly led his men into Normandy on D-Day, he emerged from the conflict a highly decorated brigadier. He returned to the House of Commons in 1950, having already served a stint as an MP between 1940 and 1945. Intelligent, smooth and charming, Profumo moved in bohemian circles and always had an eye for the ladies. He frequently toured Soho’s topless nightclubs and remained single until the age of thirty-nine. Soon after his marriage to famous actress Valerie Hobson, he was promoted by then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and took his seat on the government front bench.

  On a hot July weekend in 1961, the year after his elevation, Profumo and his wife made the short journey to Cliveden, Lord Astor’s magnificent Buckinghamshire estate. They had been invited to spend a long weekend with Astor and other distinguished guests. On the Saturday evening, while enjoying a stroll around the grounds with his host, Profumo spied a leggy brunette standing stark naked by the swimming pool. The minister was instantly smitten with the beautiful young girl, and he and Astor chased her all around the pool, hiding her towel.

  She was Christine Keeler, a nineteen-year-old model and friend of high-society osteopath Stephen Ward, the tenant of a small cottage on Astor’s estate. Keeler has often been cast as a shameless temptress, but in truth she was a troubled and vulnerable teenager. Sexually abused by her stepfather in her youth, she had fled to London two years earlier after aborting her baby with a knitting needle. On reaching the big city, she became a topless dancer in a Soho nightclub where she met the 47-year-old Ward. Her distinctive beauty and easy charm made her the ideal girl for him to introduce to his influential clients.

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  The Pet Shop Boys and the Political

  Queerness, Culture, Identity and Society

  • Bodie A. Ashton(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Scandal serves as proof of this. The succession of events surrounding Profumo’s actions, and the subsequent impact upon Macmillan’s Conservative government, created a popular myth that still prevails well into the twenty-first century. There was something for everyone in the Profumo scandal, which included sex, politics, spies, country residences, court cases, incarceration and death.

  Australian screenwriters Michael Thomas and Joe Boyd had suggested turning the Profumo Affair into a movie throughout the 1980s and had approached both the BBC and Channel 4 with a view to the production of a mini-series recalling these events from 1963. Roy Jenkins of the SDP appeared on Radio 4 and vigorously opposed such a programme, convincing the BBC and eventually Channel 4 to withdraw their interest in the project. The Independent Broadcasting Authority, which regulates British commercial television, deemed the narrative to be ‘unsavoury’.24

  Additionally, Jenkins with Lords Hailsham, Drogheda, Carrington, Goodman and Weinstock, as well as MP James Prior, co-signed a letter to The Times in 1987 in which they expressed their ‘admiration’ of Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family, highlighting their ‘dignity and courage’ throughout the past quarter-century on the matter of the political scandal.25 Moreover, for the signatories, the letter reinforced the establishment viewpoint that ‘it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history’.26 To avoid the governmental influence over television, screenwriters Thomas and Boyd now began to consider transferring their idea to the big screen and enlisted the aid of Palace Pictures’ co-founders Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell as well as other financiers to fund the production budget.27

  Ultimately, the financial support that ensured that the film went into production came from Miramax by the late 1980s. In 1979, brothers Harvey and Robert (Bob) Weinstein had established the film production and distribution company Miramax in Buffalo, in upstate New York. They became well known for adopting exploitation marketing techniques to promote their movies. A $25 million debt/equity investment from Midland Montague Ventures, a branch of the London-based Midland Bank, in 1988 helped persuade the brothers to shift their focus from buying and distributing movies to producing them. Their first in-house production would be Scandal.28 In an interview for BBC’s Moving Pictures, the now-disgraced billionaire Harvey Weinstein stated that he had been certain the project would succeed from the beginning: ‘Scandal was an obvious choice – the subject matter of sex and politics was incredibly provocative.’29

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  Their Trade is Treachery

  The full, unexpurgated truth about the Russian penetration of the world's secret defences

  • Harry Champan Pincher(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 9

  HOLLIS AND PROFUMO

  W HILE IT WAS Gaitskell’s untimely death that brought Harold Wilson to the leadership of the Labour Party, it was other factors that brought him to the premiership. One of these was the so-called Profumo Affair, a minor sex scandal that was expertly exploited by the Labour opposition and even more brilliantly manipulated by the KGB.

  History is likely to agree that the Conservative government’s apparent mishandling of the affair hastened, and perhaps occasioned, the premature retirement of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in the autumn of 1963. When Macmillan’s much less charismatic successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, went to the polls in October 1964, Wilson beat him by only four seats. Without the burden of the Profumo Affair, which in the less permissive climate of that time was ill received by many voters, the Tories might have won, especially as Macmillan might still have been at the helm.

  In Wilson’s first six years of office, the Labour Party slid progressively to the left, with leaders of trade unions, known at least to have been communists in the past, exerting increasing influence on policy. At the time of writing, this slide has resulted in the election of Michael Foot as Labour leader. Foot’s stated determination to pursue nuclear disarmament and the party’s stated intention of eliminating American defence bases in Britain have the Kremlin’s total support.

  But not even the KGB could have organised the Profumo Affair, which originated from the chance meeting of the war minister, John Profumo, with a young call girl, Christine Keeler, and the fact, unknown to the minister, that she was also on familiar terms with a senior member of Soviet intelligence, Capt. Eugene Ivanov, officially the assistant naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. But the KGB made the most of it once the intriguing situation had been brought to its attention.

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  The Peer and the Gangster

  A Very British Cover-up

  • Daniel Smith(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  16

  Another to harbour concerns about his pursuit was Lord Boothby’s cousin, Ludovic Kennedy, who published The Trial of Stephen Ward in 1964. In his preface, he wrote:

  My original intention in writing this book was, as I put it at the time, ‘to make a permanent record of the last public act of the Profumo Affair before the curtain comes down for the last time’. If on occasions the book is now rather more vehement than I had intended, that is because I had not bargained on seeing justice miscarry before my eyes.17

  Meanwhile, Dick Crossman, a Labour backbencher at the time but soon to serve in Wilson’s Cabinet, noted in his diaries: ‘One can really say that the whole Establishment did everything possible to rally round the Profumos and to try and save them from their fate.’18 But it was Mandy Rice-Davies who most effectively captured the sense that the Establishment had overreached this time. During Ward’s trial, she was being cross-examined concerning Lord Astor’s claim that he had never met her, let alone had an affair with her, when she chirpily responded: ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ It was a devastating put-down not only of an individual but of an entire class structure. He may be a lord, went the subtext, but he (and by extension, they) are no better than the rest of us and certainly not to be trusted. Under a cloud of ill health, Macmillan resigned in October 1963, and although the high-born Douglas-Home replaced him, there was an undeniable feeling that a changing of the guard was in the offing.

  Although the Conservatives had suffered the worst of the injuries from the Vassall and Profumo sagas, the extent of the political damage caused was shocking to the Labour Party, too. Among the political class, you did not need to be a Tory to feel wary of how the public might consider you. It was against this backdrop that Boothby endured his moment in the spotlight a year later.

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