An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (45 page)

Jack and Valerie Profumo spent thirteen days secreted in a stone house in the Warwickshire village of Radway with his constituent, Air Commodore Victor Willis DSO, commandant of the RAF Staff College at Andover, and pioneer of blind-approach landing, signals intelligence and electronic warfare. If a few Radway villagers knew Profumo was there, none of them blabbed. ‘To them he is still “a gentleman” who had been unlucky to be dragged into the Christine Keeler affair. And some – particularly the women – wouldn’t hear a word spoken against him. They have already forgiven him – and would vote for him again in an election.’
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Two pages of the
Banbury Guardian
were devoted to
vox populi
. ‘What he does in his spare time is his own affair,’ said F. A. H. Townsend of 3 Dene Close, Kineton. Ethel Bowden, aged sixty-six, and mother to fourteen children, said: ‘This business has got nothing on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
– you could not put this affair in a book, and his wife has my sympathy.’ Mrs S. Parker, of Market Hill, Southam, thought the MP was a good man and felt grieved by his humiliation. She blamed Christine Keeler: ‘I think she ought to keep her thoughts to herself and not sell her story to the papers.’ Mrs J. Morgan of Bishops Itchington said: ‘I am a Labour Party supporter, so from my point of view this is a good thing. The best thing he could do now would be to leave the country rapidly.’

Several neighbours from Station Road in Fenny Compton gave their views. Mrs B. Spencer ‘did not think the affair should be “public property” and did not like to discuss it. But she commented: “I would love to know just what Ministers get up to, but I suppose I shall read about it in the papers”.’ Sidney Hughes felt Ministers must conduct their lives in a manner befitting their position. ‘They should keep their noses clean in the same way a policeman has to. I feel sorry for Mr Profumo now, but he must take his punishment.’ Mrs Emily Robbins sympathised with Profumo. ‘If he stood for election again, I would not hold this against him. He has always been a good Member, and I think this was just a bit of bad luck.’

Many of his Ratley constituents in South Warwickshire were polled. Gordon Leys, aged sixty-eight, had believed his MP when he made his statement in the Commons and felt let down: ‘I am surprised that after doing such a thing he could go to the races and back a winner.’ Mrs W. Halliday of 3 Town Hill Cottages was shocked by the disclosures because she had thought her MP was a good man. ‘You look up to people in the Commons and they have your respect. This was a shock and makes you wonder whether there are any more like him.’ Her son-in-law, a Ratley soldier, ‘who would not give his name because he was afraid the War Office would take action against him under the Official Secrets Act’, added: ‘I am not concerned with the War Minister’s private life but … a few people in high places will have red faces before this is finished.’ Mrs D. M. England of 1 Council Houses, Town Hill, said: ‘I expect my MP to lead a blameless life, and this is dreadful. I cannot forgive him … there is still more to come out, and I think there will be other important people involved.’
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In contrast to this compassionate tolerance, there was a much-publicised speech by the Bournemouth MP, John Cordle, while opening a church fête at Drayton, near Banbury (which raised £40). Cordle was a handsome, vaunting puritan with smug illusions about himself. Parliamentary colleagues treated him as a sickening humbug. Henry Kerby told Andrew Roth after Cordle’s adoption in Bournemouth (secured partly because he was a rip-roaring supporter of the death penalty for murderers) that local Tory women were aghast at his success claiming that he was ‘a man they dared not leave alone with their early-teen daughters’. After becoming proprietor of the
Church of England Newspaper
in 1959, Cordle vowed that it would campaign for ‘high standards of public life, discipline in the home and a decisive approach to hooliganism’. He opposed ‘easy divorce’, but his own conduct failed the standards that he set for others. When his first wife, from whom he was divorced in 1956, sought his imprisonment in 1964 for breaching a custody order, Cordle only escaped by pleading parliamentary privilege: the judge condemned his conduct as ‘utterly disgraceful’. During the collapse of his second marriage in 1971, he imposed a 7 p.m. curfew on visitors to his wife. His third and final wife, who was thirty-five years his junior, had been his children’s nanny. Cordle, who was a disciple of the American evangelical Billy Graham, felt driven to visit strip clubs in order to be able to denounce them with authority, anathematised Sir Roger Casement’s sodomitical diaries, demanded that copies of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
be dumped in the sea, and blamed venereal diseases among teenagers on ‘filthy books’. Fourteen years after denouncing Profumo, he resigned his parliamentary seat after entangling himself in venalities that also disgraced the former Home Secretary, Maudling.
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Cordle was an example of the soapy scum that flowed after the sluices of self-righteous scurrility were opened. ‘We have all been shocked recently by the belated disclosure of a Minister’s deceit and misconduct,’ he pronounced at the church fête. The nation required strong leadership, both moral and political, in these difficult days. ‘It is our duty as citizens to maintain the highest standards of rectitude in public life … For the sake of national wellbeing and strength, we cannot afford to have bad security risks in high office. For this reason, men who choose to live in adultery, men who are homosexuals, or men whose highest interest is against the highest interests of the nation ought not to be invited to serve our Queen and Country. Nor should they be tolerated in office if they adopt these destructive practices.’ Cordle added that he was ‘appalled to hear that our beloved Queen should be so wrongly advised to give an audience’ to the disgraced minister: ‘It seems to me surely an affront to the Christian conscience of the nation.’ As a result of Cordle’s intervention, Profumo did not return his seals of office personally to the monarch, as was customary.
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On 13 June, Lord Hailsham, venting hot air like an explosive volcano, and in such a tantrum that his head seemed to change shape on screen, gave a notorious BBC television interview denouncing Profumo for having ‘lied and lied; lied to his family, lied to his friends, lied to his solicitor, lied to the House of Commons’. In the
Daily Mirror
the columnist Cassandra commented that Hailsham’s rant seemed ‘a rather unattractive mixture of genuine rage and seemingly simulated indignation that only served to heighten the skill and patient questioning of the interviewer’. The irate Hailsham, according to another television viewer, resembled Evelyn Waugh berating a trespasser: ‘It had to be seen to be believed.’
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Hailsham accused Robert McKenzie of trying to exploit ‘a security problem’ as party politics. ‘A Secretary of State cannot have a woman shared with a spy,’ he fulminated, ‘without giving rise to a security risk.’ The security services, of course, had long before discounted the fantasy that the minister had shared a woman with a spy – a story that first surfaced six months earlier when the woman in question was trying to make £1,000 by selling her story to Peter Earle, Reg Payne and Hugh Cudlipp. When McKenzie countered by asking why, if it was not a party issue, the Tory whips had issued a three-line whip, Hailsham was cornered: like Profumo in a fix, he lied. Hailsham insisted that a three-line whip was a summons to attend Parliament, rather than a document of party discipline to ensure a strong vote.

This fib outraged MPs. In the Commons Reginald Paget decried Hailsham as a ‘lying humbug’ and ‘hysterical demagogue, with a brutal tinge’. He mocked, too, the Leader of the House of Lords as a bully and glutton: ‘From Lord Hailsham we have had a virtuoso performance in the art of kicking a fallen friend in the guts. It is easy to compound for sins we are inclined to by damning those we have no mind to. When self-indulgence has reduced a man to the shape of Lord Hailsham, sexual continence involves no more than a sense of the ridiculous.’ This was striking hard, because Hailsham liked to discuss sexual acts and bedroom etiquette with metaphors drawn from the table: ‘If you gobble your food, it’s not quite so nice. If you eat HP sauce like [Harold Wilson], it’s not so good as oysters and
Quenelles de Sole Newburg
.’ In distinguishing good sex from bad, he would say, ‘the whole difference is between
crêpes suzettes
and pigs’ trotters’.
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In the opinion of most voters, Profumo’s resignation was mandatory because (to quote the
Economist
) it was ‘essential to insist – quite remorselessly – that no minister should ever be allowed with impunity to tell lies in the House of Commons’. They did not add that he would have been equally forced to resign if he had told the truth. Politicians, too, were indignant that he had lied to colleagues, despite themselves lying robustly on occasions. Lying is a means for politicians to prove their power: they make a resounding declaration, which their listeners know is untrue but do not dare to challenge; and by doing so they affirm their invulnerability and raise their status. Selwyn Lloyd, as Foreign Secretary, gave a flat denial to the Commons on 31 October 1956 of collusion as the Israelis invaded Egypt. Kilmuir, Lord Chancellor at the time of Suez, had the effrontery to declare in his memoirs published in 1964 that ‘the wild accusations of collusion between the British, French and Israeli governments which were hurled by the Labour Party had absolutely no foundation in fact’. The deliberate inaccuracies similarly tumbled like acrobats in Kilmuir’s parliamentary speech opposing Lord Mancroft’s Privacy Bill of 1961.
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In 1964, Nyasaland became the independent state of Malawi under the presidency of Dr Hastings Banda. Dilhorne, the Lord Chancellor, who five years earlier as Attorney-General had told the Commons that Banda had planned to massacre every European in the country, from the governor down to infants, and moreover had convinced the Tory majority to pretend to believe him and give him an ovation, represented the British government at the independence celebrations and congratulated Banda on his assumption of power. On the Labour side, Harold Wilson’s smears of Lord Poole in the Bank Rate Leak stunt of 1957 were calculated mendacity. Crossman perjured himself in a notorious libel action against the
Spectator
. George Brown, ‘half-seas-over’, lied when he appeared on television on the night of the Kennedy assassination, declaring ‘Jack Kennedy was one of my best friends’, when they had met only twice in formal interviews.
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It seemed to sober, rational minds that the Macmillan government was ‘about to be overthrown by a twenty-one-year-old trollop’. The greatest threat to him came from the restive right-wing of his party. During the previous year his most trenchant backbench critics had been Nigel Birch, Lord Lambton and Sir Harry Legge-Bourke. Birch’s parliamentary colleagues believed that he was one of the few attackers whom Supermac feared. ‘There is something about his fierce wit, his supercilious grouse-moors manner, his superior snobbery, which seems to demoralise the Prime Minister – who goes to some lengths to pacify him. Birch is the kind of man that Macmillan admires – General’s son, Etonian, brilliant businessman, first-class intellect. But Birch regards Macmillan as a sham, a played-out actor and a trickster.’ Macmillan doubtless felt dread when he heard that Birch intended to speak in the Profumo debate immediately after the Commons reconvened on Monday 17 June.
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Wilson returned from a visit to Khrushchev two days earlier, and spent the weekend mastering Wigg’s dossier and honing his indictment of the Prime Minister. ‘We’ve got him on toast,’ Wilson said when the speech was written.
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Wilson’s intervention proved formidable. ‘This is a debate,’ he declared, ‘without precedent in the annals of this House. It arises from disclosures which have shocked the moral conscience of the nation.’ He asked whether ministers – soiled by their contact with ‘a sordid underworld network’ – connived in Profumo’s lies, or were negligent in accepting them. He told MPs about Ward’s calamitous meeting with Wigg, and Wigg’s written summary of it: ‘a nauseating document taking the lid off a corner of the London underworld of vice, dope, marijuana, blackmail, counter-blackmail, violence and petty crime’. He accused Macmillan of ‘indolent nonchalance’ and reckless bluff. ‘After the Vassall case he felt that he could not stand another serious security case involving a Ministerial resignation, and he gambled desperately and hoped that nothing would ever come out. For political reasons he was gambling with national security … this is why he was at such pains to demonstrate to me his unflappability.’ Although Ward had been working with MI5, he was vilified by Wilson as ‘a tool’ of the Soviets, who exemplified a ‘sleazy sector of society’. Wilson denounced hereditary privilege and skewed pay differentials: ‘there is something utterly nauseating about a system which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays a Prime Minister, 250 times as much as it pays its Members of Parliament, and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion’. Egalitarianism, he suggested, would prove the necessary moral purgative of ‘a diseased excrescence, a corrupted and poisoned appendix of a small and unrepresentative section of society that makes no contribution to what Britain is, still less can be’.
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