A Pardon for Keeler
Chapter 22
More Lying than Spying?
Conclusion
Timeline of Events
Notes
Introduction
If people told the truth, this book simply wouldn’t exist. If those gathered at Cliveden on the weekend that started 8 July 1961 had been honest about what occurred there and thereafter, there would be no Profumo Affair and nothing to write about. Lives and governments could have been saved, friendships maintained and diplomatic relations preserved. But everybody lies, from the grandest in the land, to those from the humblest of backgrounds. Lords and ladies, politicians, the police, the media, colleagues, friends, enemies and lovers. They lie to each other, they lie about each other and they lie to themselves. They lie for money, for their job, to save face, to impress people, to protect people, sometimes they lie because they no longer know what the truth really is.
But a cast of liars also makes it difficult to tell a story. There is no one version to relay, no definitive answer for what really went on behind closed doors and when lights went out. And so, sixty years on from the trial that was to be the culmination of the Profumo Affair, we unravel the ‘he said/she said’ narrative to explore what really went on when John Profumo met Christine Keeler. This book is split into four sections to highlight the main areas of interest within the story: the people involved, what they did, what happened next and the long-term repercussions of their actions.
First, in Part I we meet the main players caught up in the scandal. This includes the ‘respectable’ politician, John Profumo, who lied about his infidelity and caused his aristocratic moniker to be forever associated with one of the most high-profile British scandals of the twentieth century. A rising star of the Tory Party, his affair ended his political career. Then there is Christine Keeler, a young girl treated as an object because of her beauty, misled and misguided by those she trusted time and time again. Keeler inadvertently became the poster girl for ‘fallen women’ when what she desired was to be truly seen. We meet too ‘Eugene’ Ivanov, a Russian spy cunningly using his role as a diplomat to satisfy his masters and yet failing to pull off his greatest long con when an explosive secret came to light, and he was sent scuttling home instead. Then there is Stephen Ward, in turns a saviour, social climber and Svengali. A promiscuous bon viveur whom the establishment used as a sacrificial lamb when the hangover from the party lifestyle they enjoyed proved too much to bear. We meet Mandy Rice-Davies, a savvy businesswoman trapped in a man’s world and wrapped in such a cute package that no one suspected her talent for self-preservation. And there’s Bill Astor, born with a silver spoon but given little motherly love, it seems. He latched onto Ward for the fun times but ran and hid when the hard times followed. Finally, we examine Harold Macmillan, a transformative Prime Minister and a stabilising statesman, brought low by his determination to believe in the honour of a fellow Tory above all else.
With our cast assembled, in Part II we turn to how our characters interact. We see the middle-aged lothario pursue a chaotic girl who was looking for a good time in the wrong places. It’s a fun love affair that suits them both, for a while. Then Profumo is warned off, because of the company they are keeping. The Russian spy has been burrowing deeper into high society, nobly helped by Ward, who hates the establishment but enjoys its gossipy gatherings. Our heroine stumbles on, dreaming of a career in modelling, but instead meeting more men, each one less suitable than the former. But the party keeps going; Keeler, Rice-Davies, Ward, Astor, Ivanov and Profumo all hope they can have their cake and eat it, consequences be damned. But with the lie discovered, there must be a confession and a resignation. What forced these events to happen?
Now the secret is out, heads must roll. Part III examines how Profumo and Keeler’s affair, his denial of it and the eventual outing of those involved impacted personal, professional and even public lives. This section also asks how the affair was discovered and why it became so significant. We see how the role played by an aggrieved press, the political opposition and the inducement of money compromised truth and justice. With the leadership at stake, the public needed a scapegoat. Profumo’s untameable desire for Keeler led to two criminal trials but he was never called as a witness in either of them. And the possibly toxic friendship between Ward and Keeler was shattered forever.
Finally, in Part IV we turn to the events that happened later in our timeline. We see what was called a government whitewash written by an outdated moral crusader with a ready-made agenda. Then we discuss the damage the Profumo Affair wreaked on Macmillan and the Conservative government, finally ending its thirteen years in power. The book also covers the unfinished business from the scandal’s fallout. Active campaigns exist calling for a pardon for both Ward, convicted of crimes under the Sexual Offences Act as he lay dying in a hospital bed, and for Keeler, who was very likely manipulated into giving one version, that suited many people, of being assaulted by her stalker. Here we also look at how the lies that were told cost everyone dearly.
The conclusion asks why a short-lived romance had such an impact, and if the same thing could happen today. It also examines what could have been done better to save a suicide, and to protect the reputations and livelihoods it ruined? The conclusion explains why the story isn’t over.
The sequence of events to the Profumo Affair is complex. A timeline at the back of the book will help you understand how the story unfolds, although the those involved were often unaware of what was going on around them. This is drawn from the investigative work of Keeler’s son Seymour Platt, and from files held at the National Archives in Kew.
Preface
The Not-So-Swinging 60s
Timing, as they say, is everything. And an understanding of the backdrop to the Profumo scandal is essential to see how and why a short-lived relationship between a minister and a model led to a disgraced politician and aristocrat, the fall of a government and a death by suicide.
While the 1960s are often thought of as a new, more modern decade, the lived experience of women had barely changed since that of their mothers. The pill, when it became available in 1961, was reserved for married women only, and it was uncommon to see a young woman out at night alone. Husbands still endorsed their wives’ signatures, including any that would allow them to take out a loan, and signed medical consent on behalf of their spouses.
When the Sexual Offences Act was created in 1956, and it sailed through both Houses, those involved in its making were exclusively male, since women had only been allowed access to the Lords in 1958. Stephen Ward was accused under Section 23 of the Act for the ‘procuration of a girl under twenty-one’. The Act criminalised anyone who introduced a female aged under 21 but over 16 to a male, if the two later had consensual sex.
In 1960, publishers Penguin Books were tried under the Obscene Publications Act for releasing D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. While Penguin won its defence, in his book An English Affair, Richard Davenport-Hines says that the time of the Profumo Affair, women were still sexually oppressed, crushed under the constraints society put on them via their home lives and responsibilities, assumptions about their sexuality and a sexist legal system. Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies rebelled against the gender stereotypes and were castigated because of that.1 Lady Chatterley’s Lover went on to sell two million copies in the eight months after Penguin was found not guilty.
Things were finally but slowly changing, with the help of influential people such as journalist, campaigner and agony aunt Marjorie Proops, who tackled issues such as abortion, addiction and illegitimate babies in her columns. This was not enough though to prevent Keeler being described using language such as gold-digger, common tart and whore. Misogynistic attitudes went unchecked at the time of the Profumo scandal and the Ward trial.
London was certainly changing physically. When Macmillan’s government lifted building restrictions in 1954, the relaxed planning permissions and ready loans meant that twenty-four million square feet of new office space was built in central London in the following decade.2 Davenport-Hines says the buoyant property scene was supported by a bull market from 1958 until the Flash Crash in May 1962. While in 1958, fifty property companies were listed on the London Stock Exchange, in just two years there were about 200, many of them related to the explosion of property development.3
Several high-profile property dealers were caught up in the Profumo scandal. Keeler and Rice-Davies were each the kept mistress of Polish Jew Peter Rachman at one time. Rachman’s name later became synonymous with the intimidation and exploitation of tenants. Keeler and Rice-Davies also had relationships with Charles Clore, a British financier, retail and property magnate, while Keeler may also have slept with Walter Flack, Clore’s business partner. The men were known for their hard-nosed business practices, with Clore known as the person behind the first ever hostile takeover.
The summer of 1961 was a scorcher. London was abuzz with excitement for the Soviet trade and industrial exhibition that was to open in Earl’s Court. The guest of honour was Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who was the first man to journey into outer space. Russia was trending, and so was the interest in espionage, with Ian Fleming’s Dr No selling 437,000 copies in paperback. A film of the book was released the following year and it launched a new genre of secret agent films that flourished in the 1960s.
But international politics didn’t follow a script with a happy ending. In 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of all armed forces from Berlin, including the Western armed forces in the West. The Berlin Crisis culminated in the city’s partition and the building of the Berlin Wall. In October 1961, the Soviet Union exploded a hydrogen bomb of about 58 megatons to international condemnation. The weapon was the single most physically powerful device ever deployed, the most powerful nuclear bomb tested and the largest man-made explosion in history. While it was not intended for use, it was intended as a very serious threat. It was in July 1961 that war minister Profumo was enjoying his weekend at Cliveden and began his pursuit of Keeler, clearly unaffected by all that was going on around him.
In September 1962, William John Vassall, an Admiralty clerk, was arrested for spying after being caught in a homosexual honey-trap. The latest revelation came on top of the defection of diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and the discovery of the Portland Spy Ring. To quell criticism, the Prime Minister ordered the Radcliffe Tribunal report to investigate the civil service.
Later that year, the UK became involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, a thirty-five-day confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union in October and November. It was the closest the world came to nuclear conflict during the Cold War period, with the UK the proposed launch pad for American missiles, thus making Britain an immediate target. Macmillan was in constant contact with Washington during the time. The threat of a nuclear attack caused a lot of anxiety to the British public.
By 1963, unemployment had reached a peak of 4 per cent, the highest it had ever been since the post-war year of 1947, and the shaky British economy saw disruptions and work stoppages. This period of economic uncertainty hit amid the coldest winter Europe had experienced in two centuries, with snow remaining in some parts of the UK until April.
The spy stories continued, when in January Kim Philby defected to Russian and was finally outed as a double agent. The government only admitted he was the ‘Third Man’ in the Burgess and Maclean group on 1 July via Parliamentary Privilege. Three weeks later, Ward’s trial began, while the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, opened in Leicester Square in October.
When the Profumo scandal broke, the public’s appetite for salacious gossip about the upper classes had already been whetted by the very public split of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. The duke, Ian Campbell, had married Ethel ‘Margaret’ Whigham, a glittering society figure, in 1951. Within a few years, the marriage was falling apart, in part due to the abusive behaviour of the duke, who was also an addict. The duke filed for divorce on grounds of infidelity and as evidence produced polaroid pictures stolen from his wife’s locked cabinet. The photographs showed a naked duchess engaged in sex with other men. The duke also presented a list of as many as eighty-eight men with whom he claimed his wife had consorted. At the time, the divorce judge commented that the duchess had indulged in ‘disgusting sexual activities’.
The spy and sex scandals were eagerly covered by the newspaper industry, which was facing its first serious challenge from the proliferation of TV sets. It was the era of chequebook journalism, and the tabloids were still smarting from the imprisonment of two of their number by Macmillan’s government. The establishment was caught with its pants down, the working-class voters wanted freedom from poverty, housing inequity and sexual repression. The government was seemingly inept at managing its own ministers.
The stage was set.
Part I
The Main Players
Chapter 1
John Profumo – A Man Forgiven
On 12 December 1975, Mr John Profumo attended an investiture at Buckingham Palace. The former politician, who was accompanied by his wife to the event, received a CBE from the Queen for his work at Toynbee Hall, the East End settlement for the poor. It might have been an altogether unsurprising honour if it wasn’t for the fact that just twelve years earlier, in June 1963, Profumo had been forced to resign as Secretary of State for War, from the Privy Council and as the MP for Stratford-upon-Avon because of his extra-marital affair with the 19-year-old showgirl Christine Keeler. An affair Profumo had previously denied when he was asked about it in the House of Commons.
Receiving this award was quite the comeback for someone who had lied to the House, cheated on his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, and also put himself at risk of being compromised by a Russian intelligence officer while holding the office of war minister. His involvement with Keeler, at a time when she was also thought to be dating Soviet naval attaché Captain Yevgeny (Eugene) Ivanov, and his initial refusal to admit it, was also blamed for contributing to the fall of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.
