The Plot Thickens
Chapter 14
Resignation Fallout
Clearly one of the people that suffered the consequences of Profumo’s eventual confession that he did have an affair with Keeler and had lied to the House about it was Stephen Ward. On 8 June 1963, Ward was arrested while outside a friend’s house in Watford and charged with living off immoral earnings. His bail was refused despite the charges being misdemeanours rather than felonies and Ward was promptly sent to Brixton prison. He went to trial at the Old Bailey on 22 July 1963, and it became immediately clear to him that he was being set up. He was driven to suicide by his trial and found guilty as he lay dying from an overdose in his hospital bed. By the end of his ordeal, he must have felt that all his eminent friends had deserted him and that the press and establishment hated him. The later request for an appeal to his conviction for living off immoral earnings was refused simply on the basis that he was dead and had no immediate relatives that would benefit from clearing his name (in fact, Ward’s nephew brought the court case).
After Profumo’s resignation, many vilified Keeler too. She was the woman, although some might say girl, at the centre of the scandal who was blamed and shamed for going to bed with a married man who was far older and more educated than her. It was Keeler that the court room crowds came to see, and hurl abuse at.
Keeler was let down and duped by virtually all the men in her life, and several of the women too. Even as a young child, she was abandoned by her biological father (who returned when she became well known and tried to sell his story) and likely seen as a burden and sex object by her stepfather. Her job at Murray’s cabaret was to stand absolutely still, so men could stare at her naked chest. Here she wasn’t treated like a person, she was a thing, an attractive object. It’s strange to think that a society that seemed so worried about moral behaviour allowed this to happen at all. Why was it okay to treat some people like playthings?
Was Ward Keeler’s friend and protector? Or did he groom and use her? In his speech at Keeler’s perjury trial, the barrister for the defence, Jeremy Hutchinson, said that Keeler had been the victim of wicked men, including Ward, whom he said ‘groomed and fashioned’ Keeler, adopting the persona of a ‘perverted professor Higgins’.1
And what of Profumo? Did he treat Keeler well? Clearly not. He pursued her relentlessly for sex, and dropped her as soon as it suited him, later denigrating her to anyone that asked. In fact, most of the men in Keeler’s life ended up hurting her. Keeler was the victim of grooming, rape, false imprisonment, assault and fraud at the hands of the men she opened her heart to. Some of the men, Paul Mann and Michael Eddowes, for example, may have seen Keeler simply as a cash cow. One of the West Indian men Keeler had protected by not revealing his presence at the scene of the Gordon attack even tried to later blackmail her.
But Keeler’s notoriety also gave her hope of a final rags-to-riches story. Ward’s friend Robin Drury said he wanted to write a book about Keeler and offered to become her manager. As part of their dealings, Drury supplied a lawyer called Walter Lyons who set up the Millwarren company, which he said would allow Keeler to be paid for press and other media work. It was also Drury who arranged the photoshoot that resulted in the iconic portrait of an apparently naked Keeler sitting astride a modernist-style curved chair, taken by Lewis Morley. Keeler says there were calls from Las Vegas, Hollywood and Europe that offered her potential money and fame.
The day after Ward was arrested, the News of the World ran their ‘Confessions of Christine’ story for which they paid £24,000, although the money of course went straight to Lyons to put into Millwarren.
To complete his book, Drury tape-recorded hours of him and Keeler chatting together. These tapes revealed that there had been two others present when Gordon arrived at the Hamilton-Marshall flat, a fact she had denied under oath to secure the conviction of Gordon, who had been stalking and harassing her. Eventually, when Drury and Keeler parted ways, the ‘business manager’ tried unsuccessfully to sell the tapes to the News of the World for a whopping £20,000. Instead, the tapes ended up with MP George Wigg and then the Attorney-General, Sir John Hobson. They showed that Keeler had perjured herself, albeit likely under police pressure and through fear of Gordon. This eventually allowed Gordon to appeal his conviction.
On 5 September 1963, Keeler and Paula Hamilton-Marshall, and their housekeeper, were arrested for perjury. Coerced by the police and the press and by those advising her, Keeler had found herself caught up in a tangle of tales. The trial opened on 8 November, and by 6 December, Keeler was sentenced to nine months in Holloway. Hamilton-Marshall received a six-month sentence. Keeler’s perjury charge meant the very man who had raped, assaulted and harassed her, which was never in dispute, walked free. Later Gordon was convicted for stabbing an ex-girlfriend with a screwdriver six times in 1973.
Keeler served six months and was aged just 22 on her release. She returned to live in her house in Linhope Street, which she had bought with the money made from selling her story to the papers. Upon her release, the Conservative tabloid the Daily Sketch, then under the editorship of Roman Catholic Howard French, which was in a circulation war with the Daily Mirror (in 1971 it was closed and merged with its former rival) released her phone number. She was deluged with abusive calls.
In the long term, Keeler seemed to gain little from her starring role in the Profumo scandal. In October 1965, Keeler married James Levermore, giving birth to a son, also called James, in June the next year. Keeler was busy working and so her son stayed with her mother, allowing her to be free to travel internationally. She was photographed by David Bailey and her memoirs were published by the News of the World. The memoir caused such a stir that ITV stations were banned from running ads that mentioned Keeler or her memoirs and both the BBC and ITV scrapped any appearances she had been booked for. In 1988, following an argument, Keeler and her mother fell out and Keeler never saw her son James again. In 1971, Keeler married again, to Anthony Platt, with whom she had her son, Seymour, later that year. But the couple separated the following year. A settled family life seemed beyond her reach.
Despite all her hard work, in 1976, while working in Brazil, Keeler discovered all her money had disappeared and the solicitors who managed her business affairs couldn’t be contacted. On their return to the UK, Keeler and her son had to move into a flat provided by the council. In fact, so desperate was Keeler to shed her past, in 1979 she changed her surname to ‘Sloane’. Much later, when writing her book, Keeler said she had to face the fact she had, however unwittingly, worked as a spy under Ward’s direction and betrayed her country.
While Keeler can no longer speak up for herself, her son Seymour Platt can. He is keen to record his mother’s life and her legacy. Keeler had an important cultural impact, she was immortalised in both artwork and, famously, in poetry by Philip Larkin, who wrote, referring to the Profumo scandal, that sex was invented in 1963.
In June 2022, Platt blogged about the friendship his mother forged with Libby Crawley when both women were inside Holloway. Crawley was the grandmother of Wes Streeting, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom at the time of writing. Platt remembers visiting Libby’s house in the East End and the fondness with which his mother spoke of her. The women both felt that a lot of the women in prison with them in the early 1960s were there because of the men in their lives. They both sensed there were sad stories and miscarriages of justice all around them.
Platt says his mother told him Libby was in prison because when the police couldn’t get her partner, they used Libby’s imprisonment to punish him instead. Libby was pregnant and went on to have her daughter in prison, and none of it felt fair to Keeler. Platt says his mother realised a great injustice had been done to her. She told the truth about being assaulted by Gordon but went to prison because of the two men who wanted to be kept out of any publicity. Keeler went on to work for the charity Release, Platt says, but found it difficult to get other jobs as, with a perjury conviction, she was forever branded a liar. She would be asked to leave jobs when they found out who she was, says Platt.
Platt believes lots of characters in Keeler’s life had their own agendas. He says there were so many newspaper articles that weren’t correct, only partially researched and so many conspiracy theories: the police, the government, gangsters, spies and even the royal family. But Platt says that he got to know his mother well, and that as well as being the 1960s icon, she was human too, and so was also sad and funny in turn. His mother once told him that discretion was the polite word for hypocrisy.
When Profumo died in 2006, it was Keeler’s residence in Tottenham that the press flocked to.
As a result of Profumo admitting his affair with Keeler, details emerged in the press linking her to Russian naval attaché Ivanov too. The potential threat to national security highlighted by Opposition politicians and the press could no longer be brushed aside. On 21 June 1963, Macmillan called in Lord Denning to investigate.
But Macmillan and his government’s attempts to downplay the scandal couldn’t stop the inevitable and the PM resigned in October 1963. Some have suggested that Macmillan knew the truth about Profumo long before it was publicly accepted, and that he turned a blind eye to the carrying on of his ministers. It’s not unlikely in that era, and in some circles, that adultery (at least by the husband) was not that big a deal. Or it is possible that it was thought as unseemly to discuss the private lives of a ‘respectable’ gentleman. It’s also likely that the affair, the salacious details that came with it and the possibility of a spy ring were too damaging to reveal. If Macmillan was unaware of how his ministers were carrying on, and the risks they may have been taking, not just in their personal lives, but in their professional lives too, then that also called into question his fitness to lead.
Knightley and Kennedy’s research discovered that Macmillan had asked one of his closest friends, the American Ambassador David Bruce, to discreetly investigate the rumours surrounding Profumo. He may have suspected his own advisors were keeping what they knew about the affair from him. Bruce enlisted the help of an American businessman named Thomas Corbally, who Bruce knew was friendly with Ward, to arrange a lunch at Simpson’s in Piccadilly. Ward attended, meeting Corbally and his Secretary Alfred Wells, and Bruce’s nephew Billy Hitchcock. Ward told the group everything. Back at the office, everything was written down in a report, which eventually ended up in FBI files held in Washington. The details were passed to Bruce and on to Macmillan.2 Supermac either assumed these details were incorrect, or he pretended to himself or to others they were.
Opinion on Macmillan’s knowledge that his minister was lying versus him being naïve enough to believe Profumo’s lies was divided at the time and remains so. Lord Denning, himself appointed by Macmillan, said that he couldn’t find any suggestion that Macmillan knew Profumo was lying. And David Profumo also writes in his book that his father never mentioned that the PM knew he wasn’t telling the truth ahead of his confession,3 although he also admits that Macmillan saw what he wanted to, and that he should have asked Profumo directly about the affair.4 In fact, David Profumo even believes that Macmillan himself never forgave his father for the ‘body-blow’ he dealt to the Conservatives’ reputation.5
But this reluctance to accept his ministers might be misbehaving, the failure to do to do anything about it if it was known and the possibility that he remained completely in the dark about what was going on, were all problematic. Was the PM stupid, ineffective or did he condone immorality?
David Profumo points to the health concerns of Macmillan, rather than a sex scandal, as the real reason behind his resignation.6 On 9 October 1963, a fortnight after the publication of the Denning Report, Macmillan was admitted to hospital with prostate problems. Fearing the worst, he wrote a resignation letter from his hospital bed, and one for his colleagues at the upcoming Tory Party conference. Macmillan was visited by Alec Douglas-Home, who was Foreign Secretary at the time. Fearing his demise, the PM advised his visitor to run for Tory leadership, and Douglas-Home headed off to Blackpool to read out Macmillan’s resignation letter and claim the title. Douglas-Home served as PM from October 1963 to October 1964, when the Conservative Party lost the general election by four seats. Douglas-Home was notable because to take up his role he renounced his earldom. However, since the manner of his appointment was controversial, two of Macmillan’s Cabinet ministers refused to take office under him. Later Macmillan learnt he did not have cancer and he lived on for another twenty-three years.
But Macmillan’s beloved party didn’t fare as well, and perhaps that was Supermac’s greatest pain. John Wyndham, Macmillan’s Private Secretary, knew the PM well, having served in various appointments for him. He certainly thought the Profumo Affair was the worst thing to happen to the PM during his administration and that it forever affected the Conservative Party. The Astors’ staunch friend Pamela Cooper agreed. She wrote in her 1993 memoir, A Cloud of Forgetting, that the Tory Party was destroyed alongside Macmillan.7
Ivanov agreed, as he considered the Labour Party and Harold Wilson the only victors in the situation.8
And what of the Russian attaché/spy himself who may, or may not, have orchestrated the entire set-up? Ivanov returned to Russia, seemingly, at the first hint of the Profumo scandal breaking. If his job was to remain under the radar for him to collect information without detection, he failed spectacularly. But if he was tasked with making a fool of the British establishment, he did rather well. It has been reported that Ivanov was given the Order of Lenin, but, as with all Soviet ‘intelligence’, it’s hard to sort fact from fiction. We can only guess if Ivanov’s government was pleased with him.
For his own part, Ivanov has recorded that he felt his personal involvement with Christine Keeler was frowned upon by his masters at GRU, and while he didn’t think he was exactly blamed for the situation, no one congratulated him on the events that unfolded either.9 He resigned from the GRU as soon as he could, feeling like an outsider and that he had wasted his years in the organisation. He admits he began drinking heavily.10 With talk of his womanising, and his drinking, Ivanov’s wife left him, and he never remarried.
How did the scandal affect Bill Astor, whose country pile was the party location where Profumo and Keeler collided? His son, William Astor, writing for The Spectator in January 2014, as Andrew Lloyd Webber released his musical Stephen Ward, says that his father was under Ward’s spell. But he also maintains that the two were not great friends, and that the relationship was more one of a doctor and patient. Perhaps rather contradictorily, though, William Astor says that his father paid all Ward’s legal fees and didn’t desert Ward at the time of his trial. It was Ward’s own counsel who decided not to call the lord, his son says. After the scandal, Astor says his father struggled with his health and died a few years later. While, he says, some in society turned their backs on his father, most ‘rallied’ round and his family was closer because of it.11
Mandy Rice-Davies lived until December 2014, when she died, aged 70, from lung cancer. By then she enjoyed a suburban life, married with children, in Virginia Water, Surrey. Arguably it is Rice-Davies who fared the best after the scandal, going on to have a successful career both on and off the stage. In 2013, it was Rice-Davies who attended the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward musical when it opened at Aldwych Theatre. After the Profumo scandal, she made what she called ‘a slow descent into respectability’.
And Profumo? Externally, the ex-war minister was forgiven by Macmillan. In his memoirs, Macmillan said Profumo had paid a terrible price for his actions and thought his charity work was both brave and noble. But his biographer Alistair Horne says that Macmillan remained resentful and struggled to forgive Profumo for how his behaviour had affected the government, believing that if Profumo had resigned earlier, the minister may even have been able to return to politics.12
Known for what those sympathetic to the scandal that bears his name might call his ‘dignified silence’, Profumo did at least seem to express regret. Jim Thomson, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who was a friend of the disgraced minister, said that Profumo judged himself more harshly than anyone else did. And that the minister had experienced shame every day since the event.13
He also had the unwavering support of his ever-loyal wife, who said of her errant husband and his life after he resigned ‘it isn’t what happens to a man, it’s what he does with it that matters’. Although I think it’s important to point out that the affair, at least, was of his own making and didn’t exactly ‘happen’ to him.
Unfortunately, in hindsight, Profumo at several points in his political career failed to make the right choice, not least by continuing to deny his sexual relationship with Keeler when given plenty of opportunities to confess. Profumo’s solicitor, Lord Goodman, says that the disgraced minister always refused to talk about the scandal because of the ‘terrible pain’ it caused him.14 But, with an OBE for his charity work, the family finances to fall back on and a loyal wife, it seems perhaps he was the least affected by the scandal that bears his name.
Chapter 15
A Time of Spies
One reason the Profumo scandal caught and held the public’s attention so very firmly was the added ingredient of espionage mixed in with the revelations. At the time, there had been some very public spy scandals, and popular culture had re-imagined these to be the ultimate fantasy lifestyle of James Bond. Think black-tie dinners, gentlemen’s clubs, fancy cars, cocktails, exotic locations and, of course, the tantalising Bond girls. It’s no accident that at the time Profumo was chasing Keeler, Ian Fleming’s books were riding high after From Russia with Love was reported as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favourite books in Life magazine.
In 1955, Harold Macmillan was Foreign Secretary when diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to Russia. The spies came from public school backgrounds and had both attended Cambridge. They were both alcoholics, Burgess was gay, while Maclean bisexual. This added to the stereotyping of gay people as being easy targets for potential blackmail since homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967. It also suggested that promiscuity was in some way aligned to the sort of lack of moral fibre that would cause someone to betray their country.
Amusingly, Davenport-Hines reminds us that Bill Astor initiated a Lords debate on Burgess and Maclean,1 in which he thought it was important to get all the government’s findings out in the open and argued that the bar for the expected behaviour of MPs and officials should set at a higher level. One had to wonder if this higher standard of personal conduct was in evidence at the parties in Cliveden, particularly around the pool, the shows at Murray, where many a statesman could be regularly found, or at the private dinners that were later described when the Profumo Affair hit the headlines.
The Portland Spy Ring was also discovered to be operating in England from the late 1950s to 1961. It was an example of the use of ‘resident spies’, foreign operatives that lived in a country and carried on with their ‘cover’ lives while reporting back to their own government. The Portland Spy Ring’s core members were Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee, ‘Gordon Lonsdale’ and an American couple calling themselves Peter and Helen Kroger. However, it’s possible that the subsequent investigation into the group might not have rounded up all those involved, and perhaps missed some of those involved at a top level. After all, how do you know you’ve got everyone?
This Soviet ring was brought down by a mole, complete with the tantalising codename ‘Sniper’. Sniper was a triple-agent, giving Polish and Soviet secrets to the Americans, and was able to reveal that information from an Admiralty research department and the submarine training facility HMS Osprey was being delivered to the Russians. MI5 identified a civil service clerk, Harry Houghton, as a suspect, since his spending patterns were not in line with his pay scale.
Surveillance revealed that Houghton and his mistress Ethel Gee, a filing clerk, regularly met and exchanged packages with a Canadian businessman called Gordon Lonsdale in London. In turn, Lonsdale would then travel to Ruislip in Middlesex and visit Peter and Helen Kroger, with Peter purportedly being an antiquarian bookseller. When Special Branch later arrested Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale, classified material, including details of Britain’s first nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought, were discovered in Gee’s bag. A subsequent search of the Krogers’ home revealed microdots showing the Krogers were communicating with their family back in Soviet Poland, and smuggling secrets given by Houghton and Gee via microdots hidden in the antique books. Spying equipment, money, fake passports and radio transmitters were also found. Money was also discovered in the homes of Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale. It was a complex operation carried out by experts in the field.
All five suspects were charged with espionage and found guilty at the 1961 trial. Fingerprinting revealed the Krogers to be renowned spies Morris and Lona Cohen, while the authorities ascertained Lonsdale was in reality a KGB agent called Konon Tromfinovich Molody. Molody appeared to have been selected to become an intelligence office in his childhood; his parents were both Soviet scientists. He was sent to a relative in San Francisco at age 10 in 1932, and by 1954 had established his fake identity in Canada, using a ‘dead double’, one Gordon Arnold Lonsdale who was born in Ontario but emigrated to the Soviet Union with his Finnish mother and died in 1943. The new Lonsdale travelled to the UK in 1955, enrolling as a student.
Houghton and Gee were sentenced to fifteen years in prison, while Molody was exchanged in a spy-swap. The Cohens were also exchanged in 1969, having been sentenced to twenty years. As part of the deal, the Soviets confirmed the couple were indeed spies. There really was an epidemic of ‘reds under the bed’. The events of the Portland Spy Ring so caught the popular attention, they were used as the basis for the 1964 film Ring of Spies.
Files released by the National Archives in September 2019, however, showed that Houghton could have been stopped as early as 1956, when his wife reported him as suspicious. MI5 chose to ignore these warnings and only acted after the CIA tipped the British off. Catching the spies seemed too difficult for the British authorities.
But not all spies were imported. William Marshall worked in the British Embassy in Moscow and spied for the Russians. Born in 1927, Marshall was the working-class son of a bus driver and newsagent worker from Southfields in Wandsworth. After serving in Palestine and then Egypt, when he was released from the army, he joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service in Ishmailia. From December 1950, he served for a year in Moscow, where he proved to be unhappy and introverted, later revealing that he felt very bitter about his experiences there. It was because he hadn’t fitted in and felt scorned by the upper-class diplomats while there, that he found the communist ideologies appealing.
After Moscow, Marshall was moved to the Secret Intelligence Service’s (also known as MI6) communications department at Hanslope in Buckinghamshire. Marshall then came to the attention of the British security services because of his meetings with the Second Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in London, Pavel Kuznetsov. The meetings were not carried out undercover and it was well known that the Intelligence Service kept tabs on all Russian diplomats. Why would a spy not cover his tracks? It became clear that the ‘secrets’ that Marshall could offer from his work were not high level, and it seems that his recruitment and easy detection may just have been a distraction from more serious spy rings.
