An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (29 page)

Rachman died in November 1962, and in July 1963 became a national hate-figure, vilified above all by Labour MPs and the Labour-supporting
Mirror
newspapers. Flack survived him by five months; Cotton died early in 1964. In the spring of that year, a columnist on the
Financial Times
, who was a Labour supporter, noted one unifying opinion shared by every party member from Konni Zilliacus on the left to Douglas Jay on the right, which he summarised as: ‘Moneymaking is an unpleasant business. At best it is distasteful, more usually it is morally repugnant, and at worse it is close on criminal.’ Rachman’s activities intensified Labour’s hostility to both money-making and regulatory de-control. ‘Slick talk about Conservative freedom,’ wrote Marjorie Proops of the
Daily Mirror
during the 1964 general election, ‘means freedom for the Rachmans of this noble land.’
⁵⁴

Clore, Cotton and Flack, as much as Rachman, were the targets when, in the summer of 1964, shortly before the general election, a trade unionist caught a national mood by decrying the land deals of ‘super spiv tycoons’. ‘Curbing the racketeer,’ Harold Wilson promised, three weeks before he became Prime Minister, was a Labour priority: ‘the squalid property deals which merely produce vast profits and ultimately send up the prices of people’s home have no place in a New Britain.’ None of the Labour leaders, though, admitted that socialist regulation had inadvertently created the chance for this massive money-making. Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.
⁵⁵

SEVEN

Hacks

The Profumo Affair was made in Fleet Street more than in Wimpole Mews or Cliveden. It was incited, publicised and exploited by journalists. It erupted during a phase of newspaper history when editors reacted to falling circulation with aggressive pursuit of stories and scapegoats; and it was seized as a godsent chance by some newspaper proprietors to skewer targets of their own. Whereas Lord Beaverbrook’s staff at Express Newspapers paid and manipulated Christine Keeler and other Profumo Affair protagonists as a means of envenoming the old man’s feud with the Astors, the men at Mirror Group Newspapers played a bigger game. Their involvement began with a deal to buy Keeler’s story, which they hoped to run as a scandalous circulation stunt. It escalated into a campaign, with ruthlessly plotted tactics, to inflict mortal injuries not merely on the Macmillan government and the Establishment, but on ways of life which the Mirror chiefs, Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp, both envied and resented, even as they brashly emulated them. The Profumo Affair aroused a Fleet Street frenzy of ferocity. It managed to glorify what was shabby, and had an enduring influence on investigative journalism.

Already, for more than half a century, journalists had been creating a headline blizzard of sensational crimes, lewd scandals and quirky escapades. They relished dramatising the confrontations between deviance and control that were manifested in manhunts, criminal trials and judicial punishments. The burglar Alfie Hinds, who escaped three times from high security prisons during the late 1950s but was always recaptured, became the darling of the tabloids because he epitomised the breaking of bounds and the reassertion of control: his wife, and later he himself, sold their memories for lucrative serialisation. The gutter press, with its entertaining scrapes and vicarious punishment, provided a histrionic morality for its readers and frontier markers for society. Its contents were a map of moral landscaping, showing the contours of normality, the roads to right and wrong, the boundaries that must not be crossed.
¹

Popular journalism was modelled on the pillory. It was intended to make money for newspaper proprietors, to cover them in glory and to buy them influence. Sensationalism defined the product. Snobbery – increasingly it was inverted snobbery – was mixed with puritanism. The formula for Sunday newspapers was supremely punitive: they were meant to hurt. An editor, who was a self-described puritan, declared his credo to the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1910. ‘The simple faith of our forefathers in the All-Seeing Eye of God has departed from the Man in the Street. Our only modern substitute for Him is the Press. Gag the Press under whatever pretexts of prudish propriety you please, and you destroy the last remaining pillory by which it is possible to impose some restraint on the lawless lust of Man.’
²

Until late in the twentieth century the overwhelming majority of the English hid what they felt, did, and thought: from childhood they were taught to conceal their desires, appetites, physical necessities; adults maintained a tacit conspiracy to keep them hidden. But the game for journalists was to trample discretion, catch people out, and pelt them with retributive publicity. Hugh Cudlipp, former editor of the
Sunday Pictorial
, wrote in 1953 of its rival the
News of the World
: ‘This is no hole-in-the-corner, nasty-minded little news-sheet. The
News of the World
is a national institution. It is a newspaper which goes into two-thirds of our homes, and to which great judges and statesmen have been happy to contribute.’ He quoted the retort of its proprietor, Lord Riddell, to someone who complained that it recorded crime: ‘No,’ said Riddell, ‘it records punishment.’
³

Victorian England abominated Sunday newspapers as radical, infidel and disreputable. When, in 1899, Lord Burnham’s
Daily Telegraph
began to publish seven days a week, and was copied by Lord Northcliffe’s
Daily Mail
, Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists censured both men, who abandoned their Sunday editions. The demand for weekend news of the Western Front in 1914–18, however, made popular Sunday newspapers irresistible. Although national press readership rose during that war, the combined circulation of nationals did not exceed the figures for local newspapers until 1923. During the next fifteen years, the habit of reading national newspapers spread from the lower-middle class to the working class. The Sunday press boomed: by 1939 almost the entire population saw a Sunday newspaper, while two-thirds saw a national daily. For millions the conscientious pleasure of Sundays was sharing the morbid indignation of its mass-market newspapers.

Circulation, which rose during the Second World War, peaked in 1950–51, when Sunday newspapers sold over 30 million copies a week, and national dailies 16.6 million a day. Thereafter, television, especially the commercial channel ITV inaugurated in 1955, drove sales downwards. In 1959 the ten national Sunday newspapers sold 27 million copies, and the eight national dailies under 16 million. Almost every household still took at least one Sunday newspaper – many households took two or three – but the
News of the World
, which sold 8 million copies weekly in 1950, dispersed only 6,665,000 weekly by 1958. Some optimists hoped that this meant that working-class sexual taboos and salacity were receding. At the end of 1961, the
News of the World
led circulation figures with 6.6 million followed by three Mirror Group Newspapers:
The People
(5.5 million);
Sunday Pictorial
(5.3 million);
Daily Mirror
(4.6 million). Lord Beaverbrook’s
Sunday Express
and
Daily Express
followed with 4.5 million and 4.3 million respectively.
The Times
,
of which Bill Astor’s uncle Lord Astor of Hever had been chief proprietor since 1922,
had a circulation of about a quarter of a million, while the Astor-edited
Observer
was approaching three-quarters of a million.

Chequebook journalism began when the
News of the World
paid the defence costs of John Haigh, ‘the Acid Bath Murderer’, in return for his exclusive memoir in 1949. Editors had long known that sex stories sold their papers. After 1955, faced with competition from ITV, they told their staff to produce sizzling stories with lots of pictures to vie with screen images. Rising newspaper production costs, keen competition for advertising revenue and the battle in the middle and lower ends of the market meant that print journalism by the late 1950s aimed to titillate more than ever – while keeping its patina of prudish rectitude. Cyril Connolly in 1963 could not imagine England without sexual inhibitions, lavatory jokes, lust murders, ‘its virgins and sadists of all ages and sexes, its squeamishness and evasions’.
⁴

The National Union of Journalists insisted that tyro journalists must serve an apprenticeship on provincial newspapers – just as a left-wing cabal in Equity tried to insist that actors must serve in provincial repertory before they could be allowed into London theatres. English reporters, wrote an American journalist in 1965, were toughies ‘with provincial accents and newspaper tea-boy educations; many of them held the old spit-and-polish, school-of-hard-knocks, learn-the-hard-way-on-the-stone, and other equally soporific philosophies for journalistic success. Public schools were never mentioned.’ Newsrooms were pugnacious and chauvinistic. Women were a tiny minority among Fleet Street journalists, excluded from the Press Clubs in London and Manchester, ritually humiliated in the rowdy Fleet Street bars, and estranged by the long hours, hard-drinking, and oafishness. Racist mentalities were also commonplace in newsrooms until late in the twentieth century, even on newspapers which campaigned against landlords’ ‘colour bars’. ‘Come in, Tom,’ beckoned Reg Payne, editor of the
Sunday Pictorial,
to Tom Mangold, a young recruit from the
Croydon Advertiser
, ‘the
Pic
wants to do a serious sociological’ – Payne garbled the six-syllabled word – ‘experiment. Go up and dress yourself as a fuckin’ nigger.’
⁵

For five years Peter Wildeblood worked for the
Daily Mail
. He was successively general reporter, gossip columnist, assistant drama critic, and diplomatic correspondent. He covered King Farouk of Egypt’s honeymoon, Don Carlos de Beistegui’s masked costume ball in Venice, the Craig and Bentley shooting at Croydon, and the Queen’s Coronation. He delved into the Acid Bath Murderer’s boyhood in the Plymouth Brethren, hunted for Burgess and Maclean on the French Riviera, and waded through the East Coast floods. ‘Fleet Street is a hard-working, nervous community with shabby suits and nicotine-stained fingers, living on beer and sandwiches and catching the last train home to the suburbs,’ he wrote. ‘Its contacts with the great, wide, lurid world about which it writes are usually brief, disenchanting and fraught with suspicion on both sides. At one moment a reporter may be trying to gatecrash an earl’s wedding in a hired morning coat; an hour later he is in Stepney, persuading a group of stevedores that, at heart, he is one of them.’

Reporters’ nerves were always jumpy lest (unknown to them) a good story was happening round the corner. They faced hostility everywhere. They were controlled by pawky managers who ‘peddled tragedy, sensation and heartbreak as casually as though they were cartloads of cabbage’, and exploited a ‘false, over-coloured and sentimental view of life’. It was hard for Wildeblood to imagine work in which his homosexuality was more of ‘a handicap’ than journalism, for Fleet Street had the morality of the saloon bar: ‘every sexual excess was talked about and tolerated, provided it was “normal”’. When Nancy Spain was recruited as a
Daily Express
book reviewer in 1952, its editor described her to his proprietor Beaverbrook as ‘a raging Lesbian’, whose manliness made her a ‘circus freak’.
Express
journalists feared their paper might become a ‘laughing-stock’ by employing her.
⁶

Peter Earle was the
News of the World
journalist who did much to publicise the Profumo Affair. He had been investigating call-girl rings for some time, and was scampering ahead of the pack in 1963. Earle was a tall, gangly man who cultivated clandestine contacts with policemen and criminals. They would telephone him with tips, using codenames such as ‘Grey Wolf’ or ‘Fiery Horseman’. He was unfailingly ceremonious with ‘ladies’, though he called his wife Dumbo. Office colleagues were addressed as ‘old cock’ or ‘my old china’. Earle’s speech was peppered with phrases like ‘Gadzooks!’ or ‘By Jove!’ When he agreed with someone, he exclaimed: ‘Great Scot, you’re right!’ To quell office disputes he would say: ‘Let there be no murmuring.’

Earle was the archetype of the seedy Fleet Street drunk. He scarcely ate, but survived on oceans of whisky, which he called ‘the amber liquid’. He held court in the upstairs bar of the
News of the World
pub, the Tipperary in Bouverie Street, or at weekends in the Printer’s Pie in Fleet Street. ‘Hostelry’ and ‘watering-hole’ were his words for pubs. ‘Barman, replenishment for my friends,’ he would call when ordering a round. Earle had a prodigious memory for the details of old stories, talked like Samuel Johnson, and was an avid gawper at bosoms. Dressed in his Gannex raincoat, he left on investigative forays clutching a briefcase which was empty except for a whisky bottle. His doorstep technique was based on devastating effrontery; his questioning was indignant; and if rebuffed he mustered a baleful glare of wounded dignity. Either because he could not write intelligible English or because he was always drunk, his copy was unusable. He jumbled his facts and muddled their sequence. Subs had to read his incoherent copy, patiently talk him through it, and prise out a story that was fit to be printed.