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
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.
