An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (33 page)

Most popular newspapers raised as much dirt and noise as they could during the Profumo Affair – but by unthinking reflex. They wanted to raise circulation by sensational stories and shameless stunts. Beaverbrook’s
Express
papers had a side agenda of hurting the Astors. The King-Cudlipp newspapers, by contrast, had premeditated, coherent tactics to accomplish their strategic aim of damaging the reputation and confidence of Macmillan’s government. Their newspapers were the ones that seized on the Keeler-Profumo affair not as a weapon for a general thumping of the Conservative Party, but as a poisoned stiletto which, if carefully inserted, would kill off a political class. They made the Profumo Affair into the ignition point of Britain’s modernisation crisis, which had been seething since 1958. Their strategy was facilitated by the changes in public mood that had occurred during the seven years of Macmillan affluence.

‘Ours is an acquisitive society, interested mainly in its physical wellbeing and the possession and enjoyment of luxuries,’ King summarised. ‘The cohesion of the family itself, aided by the fireside television set and the family car, is stronger than for generations.’ The fireside television proved a more powerfully levelling device even than Mirror Group Newspapers. In 1951 there were 764,000 combined television and radio licences. Stimulated by the Coronation in 1953, this figure had risen to over 4 million by 1955 – the year when ITV was inaugurated. There were 10 million television sets in 1960 (by which year seventy-two per cent of people had access to both channels) and 13 million by 1964. Each set commanded the room in which it was installed. ‘There it sits,’ wrote a television critic, ‘shouting slogans and snatches of song, and wasting your time, and grabbing your attention.’
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For years broadcasters were forbidden from discussing on air any subject that was to be debated in Parliament within the next fortnight. In 1955, for example, panellists on BBC’s
In the News
could not animadvert on the hydrogen bomb because it was soon to be discussed in the Commons. When challenged on this suppression Churchill, as Prime Minister, insisted that it would be ‘shocking’ for debates to be forestalled ‘by persons who had not the status or responsibility of Members of Parliament’. The rule became insupportable during the Suez crisis, was suspended experimentally, and abolished in July 1957.
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The BBC continued to uphold exacting standards, hierarchical authority and seemliness. It was, wrote a former programme assistant, Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force and an amateur theatrical company which wasn’t too sure where the next week’s money was coming from’. Apart from vaudeville entertainment, it produced bland, deferential programmes. Henry Fairlie in 1959 pictured the scene when a minister or trade unionist arrived for interview. As the eminent visitor is ushered into the ‘hospitality’ room, a BBC mandarin, whose eye has been fixed on the door, ‘bolts the last corner of his sandwich and advances, hand outstretched, an obsequious smile laid across a face which is sallow from days spent in fruitless committees; he breathes the ritual BBC welcome to eminent persons, “How good of you to come”, and, overcome, relapses into a bold offer of a glass of sherry; if this is the kind of programme in which the eminent person is to be questioned by a number of journalists, the next fifteen minutes are spent in introducing him to his inquisitors, with the smiling, ritual reassurance, “I don’t think you have anything to fear from Mr – ”; nor does he, for Mr – has already pointed out to him that the point of the programme is, not to put the eminent person on the spot, but to “reveal his personality”.’ If a moment arose during the broadcast when a sharp question seemed likely to pin the interviewee finally to one unambiguous statement, the chairman would save him with an interruption of amiable fatuity: ‘I think we have had enough of that question. May I ask, Sir, if it is true that your hobby is fishing?’
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ITV, by contrast, emerged after loud controversy. Its birth was marked with fanfares and fireworks. It set out to make money. Programmes grabbed attention by challenging settled notions. There was less of the balming equanimity of BBC output. Associated Television’s scriptwriter Wilfred Greatorex felt that the commercial channels brought bracing change to broadcasting. ‘As a monopoly public service, the BBC spoke with an Establishment voice and gave many of its programmes an official hand-out flavour: it was stuffy, academic, able to make cultured noises and to indulge a sickening capacity for genuflection in the presence of the mighty. There were all those safe question-masters with unquestionable degrees and calm, neutral voices. There were all those standard-English accents.’ Greatorex judged that commercial television was developing by the mid-1960s towards ‘classlessness, not surprisingly for it has grown out of the meritocracy’.
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Admittedly, the BBC’s satirical programme
That Was The Week That Was
, broadcast from November 1962 until December 1963, jeered at the men in power – sometimes for good, well-researched reasons – as it launched its stars on their route towards Mayfair flats, columns in
The Times
, ducal fathers-in-law, knighthoods and multi-millions. The satirists’ tone of voice, wrote Malcolm Bradbury in 1963, was ‘quizzical, demanding, informal, vernacular, often faintly offensive and doctrinaire’. More temperately, the BBC police series
Z-Cars
, launched in 1962, taught viewers that while it was necessary to respect authority, the people who held authority were neither better nor worse than anyone else. It seems, though, that anti-Establishment organisations and individuals were protected from irreverence. Although Tony Hancock’s television comedy scriptwriters, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, were not Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament supporters, they dropped the idea of hanging a CND banner on the wall of Hancock’s bedsit lest it bring CND into ridicule. Even progressive intellectuals recognised this bias against unfashionable authority and towards obstructive defiance. ‘Maybe,’ mused Michael Frayn in 1961, ‘we should be trying to inculcate a sense of duty, instead of exploiting the bolshie streak which runs through the otherwise orderly geology of the British character, engender a respect for authority, instead of drilling down to that layer of pure nihilism which makes people open to the suggestion that the Commanding Officer is an ass just because he is the Commanding Officer.’ It might be beneficial to remind commanding officers of the fragility of their authority, and to remind their underlings of their power, but unlimited derision of authority seemed facile, unfair and destructive to Frayn.
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‘Television,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in 1963, ‘is the greatest single factor for change in people’s lives and probably has done much to undermine English puritanism’. The goggle-box, as it was called, started to show criminals, prostitutes, and the sexually or socially marginalised being interviewed full-face without murky lighting to disguise their identities. It was abolishing shame. There were no full-frontal glimpses when Dan Farson visited a nudist camp, but several backward shots: ‘Thank goodness,’ wrote an affronted mother, speaking for the
News of the World
’s England rather than the
Sunday Mirror
’s, ‘that my son, aged twenty-four, was out playing table-tennis and thus spared the shame of watching’.
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EIGHT

Spies

Harold Macmillan seldom lost his temper publicly. He did so, however, at an Oxford dinner of 1981 held in honour of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Sir Michael Howard, one of the official historians of wartime intelligence, had just made a jocular speech referring to the double agent codenamed Garbo. The ex-Prime Minister rose to declare that he had never heard such a shocking speech in his life: national security was no joking matter; indeed, it should seldom be mentioned. This represented the uniform view of intelligence held in Whitehall. ‘In Britain the activities of the intelligence and security services have always been regarded in much the same light as marital sex,’ as Howard explained four years later. ‘Everyone knows that it goes on and is quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it is regarded as exceedingly bad form. So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, do not exist. Intelligence is brought by the storks, and enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes. Government records bearing on intelligence activities are either industriously “weeded” or kept indefinitely closed. Members of Parliament who ask questions are heard in icy silence and choked off with the most abrupt and inexplicit of replies.’ The history of espionage, Howard lamented, was the preserve of ‘inquisitive journalists, disgruntled professionals and imaginative fiction writers – categories that confusingly overlap’.
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Perhaps it is not surprising that Macmillan’s humour failed him in 1981, for espionage cases repeatedly disrupted his exercise of power. It fell to him as Foreign Secretary in 1955 to give a tricky Commons statement on the defection of the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow. (He decided against recalling his own discussion thirty years earlier with a senior Foreign Office man about applying for a diplomatic post. ‘You will be asked lots of questions,’ he was told, ‘but there are only two that matter: What is the name of your father; Who is your boot-maker?’) The first great reverse of his premiership was the failure of the Paris summit of 1960, which Khrushchev sabotaged on the pretext of indignation over the American U-2 spy plane. The collapse of confidence in his political prescience was started by the Vassall spy case of 1962, and intensified by the stunts about national security staged by his enemies during the Profumo Affair.
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Sex, class and official secrecy were connected taboos. The uproar after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean aroused class tensions. They were public school men, Cambridge graduates, alcoholics: Burgess an outright member of the ‘Homintern’, and Maclean bisexual. They had been recruited into government service by social contacts; they had been shielded by friends; and they had proved traitors. Journalists from less privileged backgrounds, who felt socially excluded from the civil service, decried the system that had nurtured both men. Insiders lost their sacrosanct aura; outsiders felt free to express their animosity.

Two cases involving Englishmen who worked in the Moscow embassy and spied for the Russians – those of William Marshall and John Vassall – show the continuing importance of class resentment in the public presentation of espionage trials. In both cases, the explanation of motives and narrative agreement shared by prosecutors and defenders were of dubious accuracy. As the murder trial of Harvey Holford showed in 1963, there were stories that it suited the defence to advance, and the prosecution not to challenge, in order to simplify the course of trials and appease public feeling. The Vassall case was the essential prelude to the Profumo Affair. The Profumo Affair was the Vassall case prolonged by other means. Marshall’s trial, with its attendant publicity, foreshadowed them both.

William Marshall was born in December 1927. His father was a bus driver (who was disabled from work after his vehicle was hit by a wartime bomb blast) and his mother worked in a newsagents. ‘His home,’ Rebecca West reported, ‘was in a street of little brick houses down in Wandsworth, the kind of street from which ability keeps pushing up, and occasionally misses its way, if it reads the wrong books and misunderstands what it reads.’ He trained at the British School of Telegraphy, in Stockwell, before attesting for military service in 1945. He served in Palestine during 1947, and then in Egypt. When he was released from the army in 1948, his commanding officer wrote a testimonial that he was ‘of clean and sober habits’, conscientious and trustworthy. Marshall joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service, which posted him to the MI6 wireless station at the strategic Suez Canal port of Ismailia. He made persistent efforts to reach the Moscow embassy, where he spent a fraught year of service from December 1950. ‘Marshall was the perfect example of the type who should not be sent here,’ noted an embassy official. ‘He was an introvert, anti-social to a degree I have never seen before. At staff cocktail parties he would be found in a corner behind a screen, if he turned up at all … He was most difficult to draw into conversation, and he had a meanness which it would be difficult to surpass. If asked to give a cigarette to a colleague, he would ask for the cigarette back the following day.’ By the autumn of 1951 there were fears that Marshall would suffer a breakdown if he remained in Moscow. He was moved to the SIS communications department at Hanslope in Buckinghamshire. He lived in a hostel at Bletchley, but often visited his parents Ethel and Bill at 36 Elborough Road, Southfields.
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In London, the security services kept under surveillance Pavel Kuznetsov, the stocky, impassive Second Secretary at the Soviet embassy, who lived in Holland Villas Road, Kensington – ‘a fading but handsome part of West London’.
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His contacts with journalists and Labour MPs were monitored. On 25 April 1952, Kuznetsov’s shadowers saw him meet a young man, who proved to be Marshall, at the Century Elite Cinema in Kingston-upon-Thames. The pair lunched together in the Normandy restaurant of the nearby Bentall’s department store. Two other tables in the restaurant were occupied by burly secret policemen: Special Branch officers kept watch from one, as Kuznetsov must have spotted; Soviet agents from the other. Oddly for the location of a clandestine rendezvous, the restaurant had wide plate-glass windows at pavement level, so that the three tables of agents were as visible to the bus stop queues as tropical fish in a brightly lit aquarium. The surprising openness of the assignation continued: after lunching, Kuznetsov took his dupe to a riverside park where in open view Marshall showed papers and drew maps for him. It could not have been easier for Special Branch to monitor their targets. This was espionage as charade.