An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (44 page)

Profumo told his wife the truth over a Bellini cocktail before dinner. They determined to return to London, which they reached on Whit Monday. Profumo then telephoned Bligh asking for an urgent appointment with the Prime Minister. Macmillan was in Argyllshire, staying with the Duke of Atholl’s mother, so Bligh settled to meet him on Tuesday morning. Redmayne attended their meeting, either at Bligh’s request, or possibly because he had instigated Profumo’s return from Italy. Profumo confirmed to both men (of which they can have had little doubt) that his personal statement had been untrue, and that he intended to resign from Parliament and the government.

On 5 June – the Wednesday that Lucky Gordon appeared in court charged with causing actual bodily harm to Keeler – Profumo’s resignation was announced. That morning his son David had returned to Hill House preparatory school in Knightsbridge after half-term. He knew something was amiss when the headmaster’s wife, Beatrice Townend, fetched him from the classroom to their private flat, where she gave him a cup of warm milk. ‘I sat on the edge of the sofa, but simply could not look her in the eye. The thickly applied make-up appeared a clown’s face, the kindly attention a skewed version of what appeared maternal.’ He was then taken to the house off Kensington High Street belonging to his uncle Harold, Lord Balfour of Inchrye.

There in the sunlit conservatory overlooking the garden his parents, and some other relations, were perched on cane chairs. A butler dispensed sherry from a decanter. On a table there stood a thermos jug of hot consommé, with plates of chicken sandwiches – the white bread quartered into triangles, with the crusts cut off. As David Profumo sucked orangeade up a straw, his mother told him: ‘Daddy’s decided to stop being a politician. He told a lie in the House of Commons, so now we’re going to have a little holiday in the country – all together. Now, doesn’t that sound fun?’ His aunt, Lady Balfour, lit a Du Maurier cigarette, and squinted at him through the smoke.
⁶³

TEN

Show Trials

In the summer of 1963 there was a Profumo spree. Rumour-mongers were like hungry lions prowling the London streets in search of fleshy prey on which to pounce. The stuffier members of the Establishment were apoplectic; newspapers incited daily fits of hysterics; and lawyers planned vindictive ways to reassert authority. Some boisterous people enjoyed the cheerful smut flying about, but others flinched at the filth. There was little agreement on how to treat the scandal. MI5 considered that the affair between Profumo and Keeler was a private matter; Wilson’s Labour Party claimed that it was a security issue;
The Times
sermonised that it was a moral issue; lascivious newspapers dribbled over pretty girls at orgies; Hailsham bellowed that it was a question of Profumo’s integrity; Nigel Birch sniped that it was a product of Macmillan’s ineptitude; the running dogs of Mirror Newspapers barked that it was the sordid, humiliating death-throe of the Establishment.

That was the state of affairs until the end of June. Then, with the sex stories sub judice before Ward’s trial, and with a clamp on spy stories while the Law Lord, Denning, investigated espionage rumours, editors plumped for Rachman’s antics as a slum landlord as the new source of devilment. Finally, from mid-July onwards, as Ward’s show trial was staged at the Old Bailey, with solemn judicial handling of perjurers and tainted police evidence, and the Court of Criminal Appeal performed deplorable tricks, and Denning titillated himself, lawyers took the leading parts for the last act of the drama.

On the mornings of 5, 6 and 7 June, Christine Keeler arrived for Gordon’s trial at the Old Bailey in a Rolls-Royce (hired by Robin Drury, her temporary business manager). She was dressed in mauve, like a film-star ready for priceless photo opportunities. She testified – as Marylebone police officers had instructed – that Gordon had assaulted her in Paula Hamilton-Marshall’s flat on 17 April. Despite being asked by Keeler and his sister to keep away from the trial, John Hamilton-Marshall felt that Gordon should not be prosecuted for something that he had done. He appeared at the court on the first morning, and spoke to a policeman, who sent him away. Hamilton-Marshall was a voluble, gesticulating youth with criminal convictions: he was deterred from speaking out. As he had previously told the truth of what happened to Ward, Ronna Ricardo and
Sunday Pictorial
reporters, several people knew that Gordon’s was a show trial.

Gordon insisted upon defending himself. He was not allowed to cross-examine Keeler directly, but put questions to her designed to show the extent of her lies. To the gratification of reporters he repeatedly introduced Ward’s name, and demanded to know whether ‘she asked me to find a coloured girl for her brother Stephen so we could make up a foursome’. Keeler agreed that this was true. Later she was ejected from the court for raising a screaming brouhaha when Gordon claimed that she had infected him with venereal disease. Gordon wanted to call Profumo and Ward as defence witnesses, as well as Camacchio and Fenton, the men who had been at the Devonshire Street flat when Keeler’s telephone calls had lured him there. He added that the policeman who arrested him had said that he was investigating Ward for procuring girls for Society men.

Ward appeared on ITV’s
This Week
programme to deny that he was a procurer, and reiterated that he had told MI5 of the Profumo-Keeler entanglement early on. Burrows, the policeman handling Gordon’s prosecution, told the court on 7 June that Camacchio and Fenton could not be produced as defence witnesses because they were untraceable – an odd claim, because it transpired (too late for Gordon) that Camacchio was remanded on bail, and his whereabouts were ascertainable. The jury took ten minutes to find Gordon guilty of assault, but acquitted him of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. He was sentenced to three years.

In the hectic days following Profumo’s resignation, Wigg was ruthless in ensuring that the Labour Party emphasis was exclusively on the security issue, bogus though he knew this to be. The rhetoric of class conflict was just beneath the surface: ‘The trial of Keeler and her Negro friends must have been the biggest shock to public morality which has been known in this century,’ Crossman wrote after Gordon’s conviction. ‘I can’t think of a more humiliating and discrediting story than the Secretary of State for War’s being involved with people of this kind. It has social seediness and some fairly scabrous security background concerning Ivanov, the lying, the collusion, and the fact that Royalty and the Establishment back Profumo.’ Crossman predicted that if the Queen saw Profumo when, as was the custom for retiring ministers, he returned his seals of office, ‘this would do the Establishment enormous harm … in fact enormously undermine the Government, and so assist in creating the conditions for a Labour Party victory’.
¹

On Saturday 8 June, in an act of political revenge, Ward, wearing carpet slippers, was arrested in Hempstead Road, Watford, outside the house of his friend Pelham Pound, the features editor of
Woman’s Mirror.
He was charged with living wholly or partly on the earnings of prostitution, although there was some juggling with the indictment as the police tried to agree with prosecutors what charges had a hope of sticking. David Astor’s protégé Patrick O’Donovan wrote: ‘You only had to say, “I see they’ve arrested him,” and everyone knew whom and what you meant.’
²
Few people could be other-worldly about the Profumo Affair, although a Wykehamist who met Christine Keeler at this time, and felt he recognised the surname, asked her if she was related to the Keiller marmalade family.

The next day the
News of the World
published its scoop ‘Confessions of Christine’, for which it had paid her £24,000. It contained such squalid idiocies as the claim that Ward led her through the Marylebone streets on a lead with a dog collar encircling her neck. Peter Earle also publicised real or imaginary goings-on which had nothing to do with Ward, but were prejudicial to his case. Although the offences with which Ward was charged were misdemeanours, not felonies, he was refused bail. Accordingly he spent three weeks isolated in Brixton prison.

‘The established order went into battle against this man, whose sole offence was a nonconformity in sexual matters that met with the same kind of relentless reaction from the prosecuting authorities that characterised the persecution of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,’ wrote the jurist Louis Blom-Cooper. ‘Dr Ward’s arrest and removal to police custody, the refusal to grant him bail until the start of the committal proceedings, the refusal to allow him to organise from prison the sale of his paintings, his committal to the Old Bailey for trial rather than to Quarter Sessions, his trial before a High Court Judge rather than before the Recorder of London or the Common Sergeant – all these things betokened a sense of persecution, even if each event was by itself, but not cumulatively, explicable to those versed in legal procedure.’
³

Most Tory MPs felt that Redmayne as Chief Whip, and Macleod as Leader of the House of Commons, who had both interrogated Profumo, had been inexcusably gullible about his replies and slack in informing Macmillan of backbench disquiet on the subject. A few blamed the Prime Minister for not easing Profumo from office: they felt his judgement had been clouded by his wish not to repeat the injustice dealt to Galbraith during the Vassall crisis. The
Sunday Telegraph
was the most hostile newspaper: Lady Pamela Berry was gunning for Macmillan; and its right-wing followers fomented trouble in the parliamentary party. The
Observer
editorialised that Profumo had blundered by denying ‘so explicitly that he had had an affair with Miss Keeler – a lie which was all the more foolish since it was widely regarded as such even before his confession’. The paper hoped (in vain) that as Labour had ‘already gained a large electoral advantage by the revelation of these scandals’, it would not ‘dress up the desire to exploit a political advantage as a concern for national security’. To drum up a panic about state secrets would add a new dimension of hypocrisy to an affair already brimming with it.
⁴

Redmayne offered his resignation to Macmillan. ‘If you resign, I shall resign,’ Macmillan replied on 9 June. ‘No man was ever better served in all these difficulties than I have been by you. All this will come right if we have courage and determination. We have nothing with which to reproach ourselves, except perhaps too great a loyalty.’ To compound his woes, Macmillan learnt that Kim Philby, who had vanished from Beirut in January, was in Moscow, and thus knew that another spy scandal was looming. He hoped that he could carry off the Profumo incident with nonchalant bluff. He announced what had been kept secret hither-to: the existence of Lord Dilhorne’s inquiry into the security aspects of the affair.
⁵

On 11 June,
The Times
published Haley’s notorious editorial, ‘It
Is
a Moral Issue’, which quoted a phrase from the
Washington Post
about ‘widespread decadence beneath the glitter of a large segment of stiff-lipped society’. The next day a Tory peer, Lord Caldecote, complained to Rab Butler that Macmillan’s mishand-ling of the scandal proved the need for a change of leadership. ‘I have been tremendously struck by the opinion of so many of my friends, all staunch Conservatives, who are utterly sick of the standard of integrity, of the lack of moral courage and of the politics of expediency. We would suffer both personally and nationally from a Socialist government,’ Caldecote continued, ‘but if this is the only way of clearing up the mess … so be it.’
⁶

Lord Poole, joint chairman with Macleod of the Conservative Party, Redmayne and officials at the party’s headquarters expected that provincial voters would prove to be more puritanical than metropolitan: ‘the main trouble is going to be in the sticks’.
⁷
This conventional wisdom was gainsaid by a survey of hundreds of people conducted by the
Banbury Guardian
, a newspaper owned by a Labour MP, Woodrow Wyatt, in the week after Profumo’s resignation. The newspaper’s catchment area included the southern edge of Profumo’s constituency. Wyatt’s survey deserves detailed consideration.

There were three issues, the
Banbury Guardian
judged: national security; the ‘private morals of a public figure’; and lying in the House of Commons (for which ninety-five per cent of
Banbury Guardian
respondents condemned Profumo). One outstanding fact emerged from the survey: that the minority who condemned his morality were mostly middle-aged or elderly. Younger people were neither offended nor condemnatory. ‘Despite assertions from the national Press and MPs that the public has been shocked and disgusted by the morality aspect, the survey showed conclusively that this was not so,’ the newspaper reported:

What may have shocked our grandfathers fifty years ago is now accepted – even if it is not condoned. Few of the people questioned were shocked by Mr Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler. They agreed that ‘this sort of thing goes on’ … As one man put it, ‘Those who are shocked by the affair are obviously out of touch with life in the twentieth century.’ …

Despite the disgrace that is obviously felt in some of the villages, there is still a tremendous feeling of loyalty to the Profumo family, especially in Kineton and Shotteswell, where members of his family still live. National newspaper reporters in Kineton last week offered up to £100 for information leading to the present whereabouts of the former War Minister. They were met with a stony silence.