An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (30 page)

Fleet Street in Earle’s heyday was quickened by the commercial strategies and journalistic innovations of a formidable duo, Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp, who controlled Mirror Group Newspapers. Beginning in 1958, King pursued an aggressive merger and takeover strategy in newspaper and magazine publishing: the great combine that he created was in 1963 renamed International Publishing Corporation (IPC). King and Cudlipp proved to be the proprietors who exploited the Profumo Affair most effectively for their own purposes, which were to divert the currents of political power, to install a Labour Prime Minister in Downing Street, to entrench the privileges of their allies and to command domineering influence in a new social regime which was supposedly to be characterised by salubrious modernity and merciless egalitarianism.

The
Daily Mirror
had been founded by Northcliffe in 1903 as a snobby publication for office girls who aspired to become gentlewomen. Taken over by Northcliffe’s brother Lord Rothermere, it remained until 1935 an ailing, torpid newspaper losing readers under fusty management. Thereafter, with Rothermere’s nephew King as its grey eminence and Cudlipp as its features editor, the
Daily Mirror
chased young working-class readers with politics that were left-leaning and insubordinate. In 1937, King appointed Cudlipp as editor of the
Daily Mirror
’s sister paper, the
Sunday Pictorial
. Together the two men deftly repositioned both newspapers. They became market leaders of ‘the cheap press’, as it was described in 1937, ‘that strange, crooked mirror which distorts the world for our entertainment’.
⁷

A representative issue of the
Sunday Pictorial
of March 1939 had an editorial headlined ‘The New MAN!’ It lauded its male readers with a rhetoric that was to be revived and loudened during the Macmillan years. ‘There is no smug complacency about the New Man of the New Britain. He’s awake, virile, courageous, eager to defend his hard-won freedom, resolved at all costs to remain supreme. The mind of the New Man is no longer clogged with worn-out doctrines and moral shams.’ In the same issue of 1939 there was an equally characteristic feature depicting Mayfair in terms that dived from inverted snobbery to salacity. ‘Shiny limousines glide through the quiet streets. Disdainful duchesses take pompous Pekinese on shopping expeditions. Ducal mansions look down their noses at £10,000 cottages. Butlers buttle; head-waiters pocket £5 tips; and smart page boys scurry across the roads laden with the merchandise of Hartnell and Molyneux.’ However, the backstreets behind ‘skyscraper hotels and blocks of luxury flats’ were ‘honeycombed with flatlets kept by ladies of easy virtue’.
⁸

In 1945, King’s newspapers helped Labour to win a swingeing victory in the general election. ‘You must remember,’ Churchill’s daughter warned of the impending Conservative defeat, ‘the
Daily Mirror
is
widely
read by all Ranks and especially the Other Ranks.’ Its tone was youthful, demotic and irreverent. King and Cudlipp subjected the secrets of sex and power to the same levelling demystification. They identified sexual candour with modernity, cheeriness and populism. Their democratic openness hit the circulation of the
News of the World
, with its sickly hypocrisies and furtive guiltiness.
⁹

Of all English newspapers, the
Sunday Pictorial
gave most coverage to the publication in 1948 of Kinsey’s American research,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. The paper then resolved to finance complementary research into English sexual attitudes by Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation network: 2,052 members of the public were interviewed, while 450 members of Mass Observation’s voluntary panel gave information. The results were published by the
Sunday Pictorial
in a five-part serial during 1949. This was a rare example of the Sunday press not displaying repressive, derogatory malice about sexual secrets, and typified the Cudlipp-King approach to explaining the riddles of political and erotic power. One-third of respondents approved of sex outside marriage, particularly among engaged couples. Two-thirds favoured birth control. A quarter of husbands and a fifth of wives admitted adultery. Forty-nine per cent of bachelors and thirty-eight per cent of spinsters claimed experience of intercourse. A quarter of men had used prostitutes; twelve per cent had experienced ‘homosexual relations’; another eight per cent admitted milder same-sex contacts. Ninety-five per cent of men and sixty-six per cent of women said they had masturbated. A Labour MP who was chairman of the
Birmingham Town Crier
denounced the articles: ‘I have a girl who is still at school, and she takes the
Pictorial
. The recent
Sunday Pictorial
articles are real “stinkers”. Who went to bed with whom and how many times, is no sort of Sunday morning breakfast reading for young girls and boys.’
¹⁰

Coverage of John Christie’s necrophilia in the Rillington Place murder trial of June 1953, more than the weekly Sunday circulation stunts, aroused revulsion. The General Council of the Press was launched during that summer – funded by newspaper owners and with council membership restricted to newspaper editors – to evade the threat of statutory regulation of press conduct. The Council met quarterly, and issued colourless, starchy reports of its deliberations. The second of these, in October 1953, deplored ‘the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers’, which was ‘calculated to injure public morals, especially as newspapers and periodicals are seen and read by young persons’. However, editors of populist newspapers showed a studied insolence towards the General Council, especially during its inaugural phase under the chairmanship of Lord Astor of Hever, the remote, high-minded proprietor of
The Times
. The General Council remained an organisation of lofty self-esteem but neutered powers even after its restructuring as the Press Council in 1962.
¹¹

‘Newspapers and periodicals, by their unwholesome exploitation of sex, are corrupting the moral sense of the nation,’ Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, declared in November 1953. ‘The papers in question have owners and editors, sub-editors and reporters, men with wives and families and domestic virtues. They cannot really enjoy the passage through their own minds of what they put into the minds of others. Will they not bravely face a reformation of heart, of moral judgment, of public duty, and of journalistic practice?’ The Archbishop called also for a revival of old notions of privacy, ‘which would abolish the smart, impudent and offensive ways of referring to individuals and their private concerns, which spoil so much of modern journalism’. Sir Victor Gollancz, despite publishing a mordant pen portrait of Fisher, nevertheless agreed with him about yellow journalism. ‘With the vilest of motives, to increase profit,’ Gollancz wrote in 1953, ‘the million-circulation newspapers have gone all out to titillate those sadistic and lascivious instincts that lie dormant in almost everyone; for this is the way, they think rightly or wrongly, to get more readers and down their rivals.’ C. S. Lewis similarly denounced proprietors and editors who profited from spreading ‘envy, hatred, suspicion and confusion’. The trouble was that no one hesitated to drink, joke or shake hands with journalists, any less than to read their stories. They enjoyed ‘all the sense of secret power and all the sweets of a perpetually gratified inferiority complex while at the same time having the
entrée
to honest society’.
¹²

In November 1953, Cudlipp responded to this outcry with his three-part series: ‘Sex, Crime, and the Press’. ‘The
Daily Mirror
is not a pompous newspaper,’ he declared. ‘We are flippant about flippant matters, serious about serious ones – but we try not to be a bore about anything.’ His newspapers never truckled to puritanism. ‘The whole nation laughed at the silly attempt made to agitate Shropshire Women’s Institutes into demanding a ban on pictures of girls wearing bikinis … What’s disgusting about a pretty girl – if you aren’t faded and jealous?’ His newspapers were righteous campaigners. ‘When we learn of evils it’s our job to expose them. We detest hypocrisy. We give plain meanings in plain words … Fogies object to us because we’re lively. WE think it a crime against life to be tiresome. We’re a cheeky, daring, gay newspaper. But we’re blowed if we are a dirty newspaper.’ Cudlipp’s phrases were more plausible than those of King, who argued that reports of violence in his newspapers diverted people from committing murder. ‘Crime vicariously enjoyed in print is a substitute for violent crime itself,’ he argued in 1963. ‘If some people can read about murder, their murderous instincts will be sufficiently satisfied to remove the temptation to commit an actual murder themselves.’
¹³

A paradox of the 1950s was that as the English increasingly claimed sexual acts as the private business of consenting adults, beyond the purview of clergy, magistrates and police, there was simultaneously a growing desire for the intimate details of people’s lives to be exposed to the dazzling searchlights of newspaper prurience. The collection of ‘human interest’ stories or the photographs that illustrated them was unscrupulous. It was to remedy a deteriorating situation that Lord Mancroft in 1961 introduced in the House of Lords his Right of Privacy Bill, which was intended to protect privacy and give rights of redress. It would have enabled the suing of journalists who published, without the plaintiffs’ consent, information about their personal affairs which was calculated to distress or embarrass.

To show the need of such legislation, Mancroft cited the invasion by newsmen and photographers of the Munich hospital where the Manchester United manager Matt Busby and surviving players in his soccer team lay after their air crash of 1958, and similar intrusion when Aneurin Bevan lay mortally ill in hospital in 1960. He cited the bullying of Sir John Huggins at the time of his divorce and re-marriage in 1958; the callous, humiliating publicity given to the emigration plans of the parents of a convicted murderer; and the harrying of Colonel Christopher Hunter. At a quarter past one on the morning after his lovelorn daughter had committed suicide, Hunter’s front doorbell was rung. A voice called: ‘It’s the police.’ Colonel Hunter and his wife came down from bed, unhappy and confused, in their dressing gowns, to be caught on their front doorstep by a flashlight photographer, who then sped off in a car.
¹⁴

Reporters and photographers, wearing pork-pie hats and scruffy raincoats, had no qualms about invading their quarry’s house: clambering over a wall into the garden; entering by an open window in summertime; ringing the doorbell, shoving past whoever answered the door, and firing a fusillade of questions once they had marched inside. If their quarry left home by car, one or two of them would swerve their vehicles in front, and drive slowly on the crown of the road to prevent overtaking, while the rest followed in a phalanx behind. Reporters and photographers were proud of their deceptions: inveigling their way into houses pretending to be meter readers; equipping themselves with flowers or grapes and invading hospital rooms masquerading as relatives; waylaying children on their way home from school; threatening incessant persecution (‘I’m going to be here all day, and we’ll go on asking until you talk to us’) or harassment of loved ones (‘If you won’t tell us, we know who to ask’); breaking confidences; bribing and suborning; inventing unattributed quotes. Sir Richard Glyn had constituents whose baby had been murdered by a maniac: ‘The mother,’ Glyn complained in 1963, ‘almost unconscious from shock, was receiving medical attention when the house was invaded by a journalist and a photographer. The latter forced his way into her bedroom in order to obtain “an exclusive picture” and had to be ejected by other members of the family.’
¹⁵

The Duke of Atholl and his fellow press peers resisted Mancroft’s Bill as an unjustifiable restriction on journalists’ duty to report fearlessly; but it was the Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir, who squashed the bill on behalf of the government. His disingenuous speech implied that Lord Porter’s committee on defamation had, after conscientious thought, reported in 1948 that it was impractical to legislate to ensure privacy. In truth, Porter’s committee had reported that privacy was outside the terms of their remit. Kilmuir also objected that such cases would have to be tried before juries, who were unreliable in the amounts they awarded in damages. He did not explain why, if libel and slander actions were tried before juries, privacy cases should not be. Kilmuir denied that protection for privacy in England failed the standards set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (1950) which, he falsely insisted, applied only to interference by governments in individual privacy. Kilmuir refused to refer privacy for consideration by the Law Reform Committee.
¹⁶

Although the government was scared of confronting press abuses, Macmillan as Prime Minister was increasingly exasperated by what he saw as Fleet Street’s vulgar stupidity. ‘The only exception to the deterioration of all the Press into treating politics, economics, finance, literature with a sort of “servants’ hall gossip” technique is
The Times
,’ he wrote in 1961. ‘It is sometimes very silly; often intellectually patronising; but it is
not
corrupt.’
¹⁷
His dislike of press stunts was to lead him to confront Fleet Street exaggerations at the time of the Vassall spy case in 1962 – a confrontation that proved decisive to the development of the Profumo Affair. Moreover, despite Macmillan’s qualified praise,
The Times
did not fulfil all that its buyers wanted from their newspapers: forty-four per cent of its readers also read the
Daily Express
in 1958, and thirty-two per cent read the
Daily Mirror
.