An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (46 page)

Macmillan’s response was moving to his friends, but sounded querulous to less sympathetic listeners and gave the impression of a spavined old warhorse. ‘On me, as head of the Administration, what has happened has inflicted a deep, bitter, and lasting wound,’ he said. ‘I could not believe that a man would be so foolish, even if so wicked, not only to lie to colleagues in the House, but be prepared to issue a writ in respect of a libel which he must know to be true.’ Macmillan stated that he had not been told of the security aspect to the business, but did not give the reason: that Ward’s remark to Keeler that she should ask about atomic warheads for Germany had been a joke, which was never taken in earnest by MI5. Only low journalists pretended to take it seriously.
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Birch’s speech scorned the government for being so easily duped by Profumo: ‘He never struck me as a man at all like a cloistered monk, and Miss Keeler was a professional prostitute,’ Birch declared (although Keeler was never a professional prostitute). ‘There seems to me to be a certain basic improbability that their conduct was purely platonic.’ Humphry Berkeley was in Iraq when he was summoned by Redmayne to vote in the debate. He was incredulous to learn that Macmillan had never confronted Profumo about the rumours, and disappointed by the quavering tone of the old man’s speech. He was one of twenty-seven Tory abstentions in the vote. Several MPs only supported the government on Redmayne’s assurance that Macmillan would resign by autumn.
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Sir Peter Smithers, the wise and gentle Tory MP for Winchester, said that panic overwhelmed the Commons at this time. ‘I use the word panic, for panic it was. Every MP remembered his own transgressions, great or small, past or present.’ The panic centred on the Smoking Room, where everyone worried who was going to be denounced next, and the Press Bar, which swirled in rumours.
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Anthony Sampson watched MPs work themselves into frenzy after the Commons reassembled on 17 June. ‘Absurd rumours, involving half the Cabinet, were believed, repeated and elaborated. Plots and conspiracies to overthrow the Prime Minister were hatched around every corner. Wild stories and schemes were leaked to the Press who, in turn, built up the crisis and generated still further alarm. Members of Parliament who returned to England in the midst of the furore were astonished to find that Parliament had apparently lost its head.’ Mark Bonham Carter, after his spell as a Liberal MP, likened the Commons to a boarding school in a memorable interview for Sampson’s
Anatomy of Britain
. The parliamentary hysterics of June 1963 reminded Sampson of one of those sudden moral panics that overwhelmed boarding schools. ‘The shock vibrates through the school and so terrible is it to the splendid traditions of the place that wave upon wave of rumours emerge, each one more preposterous than the last, suggesting that the entire school has, for years past, been corrupt and obscene. The processions, Latin mottoes and founders prayers seem to have been no more than a front. Every prefect and every master has some secret vice ascribed to him, and the headmaster himself is accused of the most sinister complicity.’
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Bill Astor, with his peaceable nature, was thrown into vertigin-ous uncertainty as the Pharisees hounded him. Malise Hore-Ruthven, who had joined the Moral Rearmament movement to save the world from sin and communism, tried to bully his sister-in-law, Lady Gowrie, into forsaking Parr’s Cottage at Cliveden to protect her grandsons from Astor depravity. At Royal Ascot, during the second week of June, Astor’s supposed friends cut him dead, and boasted of it afterwards. A newspaper refused to publish a letter by him on coordinating relief to victims of natural disasters. On 19 June, just as his Ascot guests were dispersing, Chief Inspector Herbert appeared at the house with Burrows. When they told Astor that they were collecting evidence to charge him with allowing a brothel at Spring Cottage, he nearly collapsed. The Astors were ineluctably stigmatised as leaders of ‘the spiv aristocracy’, of which Nicholas Mosley had recently written: ‘foursomes in the brothels of Marseille, voyeurs and exhibitionists, the modern ways of making love’.
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Those who did not live through this period cannot imagine how the words ‘intercourse’ and ‘prostitute’ suddenly entered daily parlance. I recall, as a ten-year-old-boy, asking a racy great-aunt, who lived in a flat above the King’s Road, Chelsea, how to pronounce the word which I found on front pages of the cook’s
Daily Express
. ‘Pros-ti-tutty’ was my original shot. Lip-smacking revulsion provided an adult awakening for an observant child. My coeval Tom Utley was boarding at a preparatory school in Suffolk in June 1963. He was puzzled that the broadsheet newspapers arrayed in the school library for boys to read after breakfast were cut to tatters every morning. Only the Court and business pages seemed to evade extensive scissoring. His father, in answer to a letter asking the reason for these holes, sent a detailed account of the Profumo Affair, which the school matron confiscated.
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On 22 June, Macmillan attended a fundraising garden party in his constituency. He had a dazed air amidst the coconut shies and lucky dips. As he posed for a photograph with the daughter of a constituent, someone hissed: ‘Take your hands off that little girl. Don’t you wish it was Christine Keeler?’ It was in this fetid atmosphere that Macmillan submitted to Labour’s demand to appoint an inquiry into the rumours besmirching the integrity of public figures. He decided to have a one-man inquiry, by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, who had been a wartime divorce judge and was President of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship. Macleod, as Leader of the Commons, argued with Macmillan about this. ‘I was against it from the beginning, and believed we ought not to give an inch to all the filthmongers.’ When he went to dissuade Macmillan, he found the Prime Minister ‘in a terrible state, going on about a rumour of there having been eight High Court judges involved in some orgy. “One,” he said, “perhaps, two, conceivably; but eight – I just can’t believe it.” I said, if you don’t believe it, why bother with an inquiry? But he replied, “No, terrible things are being said. It must be cleared up.”’
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Osbert Lancaster’s front-page cartoon in the
Daily Express
of 22 June showed his heroine Maudie Littlehampton flourishing a newspaper headlined: ‘“WHIPS! WHIPS! MASKS!” SAYS MANDY.’ ‘Honestly, darling,’ she tells her husband, ‘I do really think that National Kinky Week has gone on quite long enough!’ The
Economist
that day, as
Time & Tide
had a year earlier, urged Macmillan ‘to retire to an Earldom as soon as the Party can definitely determine his successor’.
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The most devastating bombardment was directed not at Macmillan individually but at the governing class of which he was a luminary. Hugh Cudlipp engineered a devastating special issue of the
Sunday Mirror
on 23 June. Under the front-page headline, ‘Who Runs This Country, Anyhow?’ the
Sunday Mirror
declared: ‘The man who torpedoed Macmillan’s hopes of leading the Tories into the next election is not John Profumo, but a civil servant … Name: Lord Normanbrook of Chelsea.’ The Cabinet Secretary, so Cudlipp’s scribes reported, had confronted the Secretary for War about his visits to Ward’s flat in 1961, but had not informed the Prime Minister. ‘Is it safe for the Mandarins of Whitehall, who know so little of life outside their own narrow world, to wield such influence?’ Officials were, after all, ‘in no way accountable to Parliament or to the People’. The
Sunday Mirror
mercifully did not know the story of the Warden of an Oxford college recalling Normanbrook’s arrival there as an undergraduate from Wolverhampton Grammar School. ‘Very quick, Brook,’ said the Warden, ‘learned the tricks. Came up with a front pocket stuffed full of pens. Soon disappeared inside.’ The Cudlipp-King school of journalism scorned such class assimilation. Normanbrook remained a bugbear to the Labour left: ‘a real old Establishment figure’, Anthony Wedgwood Benn reckoned in 1964.
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Elsewhere in the
Sunday Mirror
, Malcolm Muggeridge was master of revels at ‘The Slow, Sure Death of the Upper Classes’. The upper class had passed away, he gloated, in the week since the Profumo parliamentary debate: ‘We who have watched their demise with enthralled interest, amusement and satisfaction certainly do not want to see them rise again.’ In forty years of journalism he had never heard such a tidal wave of slander. Yet, he warned, ‘there have been scandals in plenty before, and the Upper Classes have managed to survive them’. Muggeridge, who had a reiterated repugnance of homosexuality, recalled that during Oscar Wilde’s trials ‘the Channel Steamers were full of Top People who felt that a trip abroad would be expedient’. They were soon back practising their filthy tricks with impunity. ‘The dirty linen of Debrett is frequently given a public washing in the divorce courts. Promiscuity is more evident in stately homes than in semi-detached villas, if only because there are more bedrooms and longer corridors.’ The Profumo scandal was ‘the culmination of a series of episodes all calculated to undermine the repute, not just of Upper Class individuals and circles, but of the class system.’ Abuse was well-deserved: ‘the Upper Classes have always been given to lying, fornication, corrupt practices and, doubtless as a result of the public school system, sodomy’.
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Richard Crossman was deployed to attack Whitehall officialdom. Macmillan’s explanation to the Commons had confirmed that the ‘British government and British administration – which used to be recognised as the best in the world – are fast becoming a standing example of amateurism and incompetence’. Macmillan, with his ‘indecision and personal empire-building at the top’, was culpable for the ‘incompetence and corruption’ festering beneath. The people were stuck with ‘an establishment still dominated by the mandarin mind which despises the expert and the technician and relies on a genteel amateurism out-of-date even in Edwardian Britain’, Crossman explained. This class-bound dilettantism was the cause of the successive ‘security scandals which have disgraced Macmillan’s regime’.
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The foreign correspondent James Cameron explained to
Sunday Mirror
readers ‘Why the World is Mocking Britain’. Macmillan, he wrote, was ‘scarcely a real person himself, but a kind of self-induced illusion’. Diplomats were anti-democratic conspirators in the Century of the Common Man. ‘Every man jack of our Foreign Service abroad is a creature not of the Government of the day, but of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, owing allegiance not to any popular administration but to the Machine.’ Their disinterested, non-partisan ethos was deplorable because the diplomatic service was manned by ‘gentlemen of impeccable tastes and great civility; they are always excellently educated, and usually well-born’. (One wonders if Cameron wished to have populist diplomats who were bad-mannered and ill-educated.) He recalled that when Ernie Bevin became Foreign Secretary in 1945, ‘it was claimed that the Diplomatic Service was going to be revolutionised, democratised, disinfected of its almost total adherence to the upper-class myth, purged of its insistence on the Public School and Oxbridge’. Instead Britain would be represented abroad by ‘technicians, businessmen, trade unionists’. However, ‘the great crushing irresistible weight of the Establishment overlaid the plan … and left the FO exactly as it was: the pasture of the public school, the grazing-ground of the upper-class intellectual, above all the haven of the play-safe’. Cameron then swung his diatribe towards the Profumo scandal. ‘If the Old Etonian Counsellors advise the Old Harrovian Ambassadors who advise the Old Etonian Foreign Secretary to advise or not advise the Old Etonian Premier, WHO decides what goes on in the mind of the Old Ukrainian City Scholar who runs the Soviet Union? Maybe the same people who knew all about Christine Keeler, and didn’t let on … the faceless gentlemen of unchallengeable upbringing who protect statesmen from the business of statesmanship and insulate Government from the troubles of governing, and care not that Premiers come and Premiers go, for they go on forever.’
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Throughout the summer weeks that followed, the
Sunday Mirror
had other eloquent articles instilling this post-Profumo message about ruling-class corruption, traitors and modernisation. Significantly when, in early July, Macmillan, Wilson, Redmayne and Bowden met to discuss the Denning inquiry, Wilson mooted a connection between Ward and the licentious Duchess of Argyll, who was being noisily divorced by her duke. Fourteen months later, Britain had a general election in which Labour squeaked past the Tories with a majority of four seats: a victory swung by Mirror Group newspapers deploying special features like this.
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Macmillan, when he announced the Denning inquiry in the Commons on 21 June, referred to ‘rumours … which affect the honour and integrity of public life in this country’. Tom Denning in turn used this phrase when calling witnesses to appear before him. He was a judge with a corrective spirit who did not believe that he often overreached himself. It was impossible, he felt, to demarcate crime from sin: libertines should be harried, disgraced and scourged. In 1957, during a parliamentary debate on the Wolfenden recommendations, he urged that it should be a criminal offence for a man to undergo a vasectomy which enabled him to have ‘the gratification of sexual intercourse without any of the responsibilities’. Whether heinous sexual acts were criminalised should depend on whether they were reckoned ‘morally reprehensible … in the minds of right-thinking people’, or struck ‘at the safety or wellbeing of society’, as did ‘unnatural vice’ which threatened ‘the integrity of the human race’. He continued his speech by warning that if homosexuality was no longer a criminal offence, the unthinkable might happen: a man might be charged with assault for punching another man who flirted with him. ‘In all these cases the law must either condemn or condone,’ he told his fellow peers. ‘Is it not the case that for so many people now it is the law alone which sets the standard? If you reprove such a one for his conduct, he will say “Why should I not do it? There is no law against it” … I am afraid that Hell Fire and eternal damnation hold no terrors nowadays. The law should condemn this evil, for evil it is, but the judges should be discreet in their punishment of it.’
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