The resignation drew headlines all across the globe and the press pack sought comment from Ward and Rice-Davies. Keeler sold an interview to the News of the World for £23,000 and the Sunday Mirror ran the ‘Darling’ letter. Keeler also spoke to the Express. Lord Hailsham criticised Profumo for his behaviour on the BBC’s Gallery programme.13 Calls for Macmillan’s resignation were made. On 20 June, Profumo was officially censured in the House.
For Keeler, Profumo’s resignation meant her world imploded. She says at the time of Ward’s trial, the public hated her, throwing eggs and screaming at her when she arrived, making a police escort necessary and eventually forcing her to sneak in via the judges’ car park.14
The newspapers received two separate calls that threatened to ‘destroy’ and attack her, while London police stations received similar calls. More anonymous calls came to her home phone line. The police advised her to stay indoors, posting a guard at her home and patrolling the streets outside.15
Rather than curse his own life, Profumo’s resignation had triggered the end for Ward.
Now the facts were laid bare, the potential for scandal was obvious. The government needed someone to blame and something to divert the public’s attention away from any further ministerial ineptitude. The public loved a spy story, yes, but they also loved a sex scandal. This drama combined them both!
Ward appeared on This Week and was interviewed by Desmond Wilcox the evening after Profumo’s resignation. Two days later, he was arrested and charged under the Sexual Offences Act.
Profumo’s confession and subsequent resignation also spelled trouble for Macmillan, who had just learnt Kim Philby had been discovered in Moscow. It was another spy scandal the government would have to face. Party members rightly questioned if Macmillan’s advisors, or the PM himself, had too readily accepted Profumo’s initial denial, and acted too slowly to protect the country, and the party itself. In a later June debate, Macmillan was quoted as saying: ‘On me, as head of the Administration, what has happened has inflicted a deep, bitter, and lasting wound’ and continued: ‘I could not believe that a man would be so foolish, even if so wicked, not only to lie to his colleagues in the House but be prepared to issue a writ in respect of a libel which he must know to be true.’16
And the interest in the Profumo scandal spilled over into an interest into Keeler’s love life. When she attended Gordon’s trial on 5, 6 and 7 June, the press was there to take pictures and listen to everything that was said. Gordon self-represented and mentioned both Ward and Profumo. He spoke about sex, interracial relationships and even sexually transmitted diseases. He made the fact that Ward was being investigated for pimping public (Ward appeared on This Week to deny the claim, mentioning that he had told MI5 about Profumo and Keeler early on in the sequence of events).17 The house of cards was collapsing.
Gordon was found guilty of assault and sentenced to three years, but it wasn’t the end of the impact he would go on to have upon Keeler’s life.
Chapter 13
Ward is Arrested and Put on Trial
Author Robertson says that Sir Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, initially chose Ward as a scapegoat after the affair between Keeler and Profumo was revealed and the ensuing scandal looked impossible to contain. Ward’s meeting with George Wigg at the House hadn’t gone unnoticed, and the Tory Party leaders began to worry about how Profumo’s actions might affect it, particularly if the Opposition decided to expose a Tory MP’s lies. How might Ward be silenced or discredited?
On 27 March, Brooke met with Sir Charles Cunningham (Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office), Hollis, the head of MI5, and Sir Joseph Simpson (the Met Police Commissioner). The meeting would seal the fate of Ward, and since it was established that Ward couldn’t be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, an alternative had to be found. Would living off immoral earnings stick? For a married Christian who had already made it clear he hated ‘moral laxity’, it was easy for Brooke to believe anyone that enjoyed sexual promiscuity was a sexual criminal in some way too.
According to Robertson, Brooke instructed Hollis and the Police Commissioner to target Ward – for any offence that might stick. Detective Chief Inspector Samuel Herbert and Detective Sergeant John Burrows were given the operation, working eighteen-hour days. Reports were filed every day, and copies were distributed to the PM and Harold Wilson. Permission was given for Ward’s phone to be bugged, his home and work to be put under surveillance and everyone that visited his clinic to be questioned. The police also interviewed prostitutes that Robertson says were forced to denigrate Ward and interviewed Keeler an exhausting twenty-four times.1 Between 125 and 140 people were questioned. It was essentially a witch hunt.2
The cover-up didn’t end there, though, Robertson argues. Inside the court, the Lord Chief Justice and two appeal judges made sure the jury didn’t hear evidence that might persuade the jury to acquit Ward and that the trial judge misdirected the jury.3
How and why would this happen? The simple answer is that it was a time of panic, moral and political, and something had to be shown to be done. Someone had to take the blame, and that person was Ward.
On 8 June, Ward was charged with the following five offences:
That between 1 June 1961 and 31 August 1962, he knowingly lived wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution.
That between 1 September 1962 and 31 December 1962, he knowingly lived wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution.
That between 1 January 1966 and 8 June 1963, he knowingly lived wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution.
That between 1 May 1961 and 30 June 1961, he incited Christine Keeler to procure a girl then under twenty-one years to have unlawful sexual intercourse with a third person.
That on 3 January 1963, he attempted to procure a girl then under twenty-one years to have sexual intercourse with a third person.
Ward was refused bail and remained in prison for a month.
Following Ward’s arrest, the News of the World ran Keeler’s ‘Confessions’ story, which was not at all flattering to Ward, throwing up questions about both his morality and patriotism. Keeler was often referred to as a prostitute by MPs and within the media as they debated the issues. Harold Wilson openly criticised Ward, aligning him to Soviet sympathies, and Viscount Lambton said Ward had committed treason.4 Society was being shown a certain image of Ward that he was in no position to alter or dispute.
Robertson argues that the Committal Hearing that begun on 28 June allowed all the Crown’s prejudicial evidence, regardless of whether it would be admissible at the actual trial, to be heard in public and printed in the newspapers. In particular, the initial hearing included three other charges that were dropped before the case came to trial; one included being involved in the arranging of an abortion. Allowing these charges to be read out meant that despite the fact there was not enough evidence to charge Ward, they were still ‘heard’ and associated with him. Public opinion was already forming (or being formed).
Ward’s legal team then had just nineteen days to prepare for the trial proper; a request to postpone until September was rejected. It was a fast turnaround. The open criticism of Ward was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Time was short in which to form a case for the defence and few witnesses to support Ward’s good character could be found. When Ward was at his lowest, his socialite friends who had so enjoyed his company and consorts seemed to abandon him rather than be associated with scandal. Despite a later admission that Ward had been involved with MI5 in some capacity, at the time the intelligence services that could also have corroborated his evidence remained elusive.
Ward appeared at the Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey on 22 July 1963. It was a court usually reserved for crimes such as murder. Ward pleaded not guilty.
Keeler thought Ward’s trial was as a miscarriage of justice, one unrivalled in British history.5 She would know, for example, as Robertson points out in his book,6 that the dates concerning her (Count 1) coincide with when she was seeing Profumo, making it highly unlikely she was a working prostitute at that time (if indeed at any time). While her version of events is entirely different from Robertson’s, since Keeler said Ward was a Russian spy, while Robertson argues that Ward was helping MI5, clearly, they both agree very much on one thing – the charges of pimping brought against Ward were nothing more than a smokescreen.
Davenport-Hines describes Ward as a ‘scapegoat’ for the Profumo scandal and reminds us that even the night before his trial opened, tabloid newspapers painted Ward as a deviant because his pyjamas were blue and his bedroom window featured a pink curtain in a golden frame.7
Davenport-Hines believes that during just that one year of 1963, Ward was targeted by politicians, set up by the police, abandoned by his patients, betrayed by girlfriends, disparaged in court and then denigrated by Lord Denning.8
Even Ward himself was aware of the unfairness with which he was treated. MI5 files show that when he spoke to Macmillan’s Private Secretary, he felt as if he was being ‘assassinated’. When he wrote from Brixton Jail in June 1963, Ward told Harold Wilson that the claims being made about him were untrue and seriously affected him.9
After judge Sir Archie Marshall’s summing up of the case, Ward left the courts at 4.30 pm. He left with his literary agent Pelham Pound, who had resigned from his post at the News of the World to work with Ward. Pound also brought along his son Stephen, who was 15 at the time; later Stephen Pound went on to become the Labour MP for Ealing North in the 1990s. Ward was staying at the flat of one of his only loyal friends left, law student Noel Howard-Jones, who he had known since January 1960. Howard-Jones had been working in the Queensway coffee bar Brush and Palette that Ward frequented and had happily lent the law student £5 when he was down on his luck. It was a favour he never forgot.
Ward and the Pounds were headed to Howard-Jones’s home by taxi, when Ward asked if they could stop enroute to pick up a prescription from Boots. He asked the teen to pop out and collect the medication. It was ninety-four Nembutal tablets.
Rice-Davies says that the night after the judges’ summing up, Ward cooked a meal for himself and his girlfriend Julie Gulliver and then drove her home and then possibly spent some time thinking things over.10 Later that evening, he wrote his final words by letter to the judge, the prosecutor, to other witnesses including prostitute Vickie Barrett, and to Howard-Jones. Ward told his friend he had ‘given up all hope’ after Marshall’s summing up.
The full letter read:
Dear Noel
I am sorry I had to do this here! It is really more than I can stand – the horror, day after day at the court and in the streets.
It is not only fear, it is a wish not to let them get me. I would rather get myself, I do hope I have not let people down too much. It tried to do my stuff but after Marshall’s summing up, I’ve given up all hope. The car needs oil in the gear-box, by the way. Be happy in it.
Incidentally, it was surprisingly easy and required no guts.
I am sorry to disappoint the vultures. I only hope this has done the job. Delay resuscitation as long as possible.
The following morning, Howard-Jones discovered an unconscious Ward on the pile of mattresses on the floor that was his bed. He was taken immediately to St Stephen’s Hospital and remained unconscious for the next three days. The trial continued in his absence, and he was found not guilty on all counts except those involving Keeler and Rice-Davies, forever tarring him as someone who had lived off the immoral earnings of prostitutes.
According to Keeler, Ward died after seventy-nine hours of pain on 3 August. He was 51. Keeler says she was ‘devastated’ and cried more than she had ever done before.11
Rice-Davies said she experienced anger, remorse and sorrow, when Ward died, but that Keeler was frantic with grief because Ward had been Keeler’s closest friend.12
Despite his suicide, Ward’s voice lived on through a series of tape recordings, letters and scripts kept in a trunk by his friend Dominick Elwes. It was Elwes who had stood bail for Ward, and together they had planned a proposed TV version of his life story. The cache fell into the hands of journalist and TV researcher Caroline Kennedy, who worked with Phillip Knightley to ensure a version of the Profumo story that concentrated not on the disgraced minister but on Ward, who felt that everyone else involved was lying to serve their own ends.13
Before Ward faced the court, he apparently put his faith in the few friends that had remained loyal, the integrity of the judge and those who made up the jury.14 Clearly it was misplaced.
Robertson says there is firm evidence that Ward was recruited by the British intelligence services to encourage Ivanov to defect or to work as a double agent. He states that on 8 June 1961, MI5 sent Mr Woods of Room 393 of the War Office to meet with Ward. This person was in fact MI5 officer Keith Wagstaffe, who then returned to Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews for tea, thereby meeting Keeler, reporting back (perhaps unnecessarily for a professional report?) on her arresting beauty.15 Davenport-Hines also refers to this initial meeting between Ward and Wagstaffe, and the latter’s alias of ‘Woods’.16
Robertson also believes the reports that say Ward called Woods on the Monday after the Cliveden weekend, way back in July 1961, and arranged to meet two days later. There he reported that Ivanov and Profumo had met, that the Russian had enjoyed plenty of drinks with Keeler and that Ivanov had asked Ward to find out when the US was going to supply West Germany with nuclear weapons.17 If only steps had been taken and Profumo had ignored his impulse to bed Keeler, history would be very different.
Robertson thinks it’s highly unlikely that Ward would be working for the Russians rather than the British. A plan by Ward to use Keeler to ask Profumo when the US was going to supply weapons to West Germany would have been pointless, he argues, because the nuclear arms were already in the country. He also says such a question could never be casually asked during ‘pillow talk’ and would have immediately alerted Profumo to the plan.18 Rather, Robertson believes, the government decided to silence Ward, perhaps even punish him, for speaking to George Wigg in a House of Commons tearoom.19 After all, despite Ward’s connections, Profumo was part of the establishment and ultimately outranked him in society.
And the government didn’t want the public to think badly of any of its ministers and the institution that feted and protected them.
Part III
