An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (49 page)

Ward heard all this with a quailing heart. For fifteen years he had struggled against the shackles of convention, and now revenge was being taken by conventional people. On this Tuesday evening, after hearing Marshall’s summing-up, he telephoned a Home Office assistant with a message for Denning. A few hours later, before the last day of the trial on which Marshall was to conclude his summing-up, he took thirty-five grains of barbiturate at the Chelsea flat of his stalwart ally, Noel Howard-Jones, where he had taken refuge during the trial. He was found in a deep coma by Howard-Jones on the morning of Wednesday 31 July. After the ambulance took away his friend, Howard-Jones wrestled his way upstairs to slam his front door before a scrum of photographers could tumble into the flat.

Marshall refused to halt the trial, finished his address to the jury, which he rushed into reaching verdicts while Ward remained alive. Later that Wednesday, after four and a half hours in the jury room, the jury acquitted Ward of the two pimping charges, and of the accusations involving Vickie Barrett, but found him guilty on the charges relating to Keeler and Clore, and to Rice-Davies and Savundra. Marshall suspended proceedings, stating that he hoped that Ward would be fit enough to attend court to receive his sentence on Tuesday 6 August (after a Bank Holiday weekend). Instead, Ward died three days after his conviction on Saturday 3 August. If justice had been permissible under Parker’s regime in the Court of Criminal Appeal, his conviction would have been quashed.
⁵⁰

‘The case to end all cases,’ as Cassandra of the
Daily Mirror
called it, ‘snowballed with scandal and shock and squalor and depravity into a situation that for human interest (admittedly often of a gloating and morbid kind) has never been equalled in my time.’ Those who sent flowers to the hospital as Ward lay dying were proffering garlands to depravity, Cassandra said. Magnanimity was not a Mirror Group virtue.
⁵¹

Peter Earle’s
News of the World
profile of Ward on the day after he died was frank about the dubious evidence on which the conviction rested. ‘Look at the muck the Crown had to rely on at the Old Bailey. Lying whores; frightened little scrubbers; irresponsible little tarts.’ He admitted, approvingly, that what was on trial was not so much Ward personally as ‘moral laxity and sexual decadence. Mr Justice Marshall knew it. Upon his red-cloaked shoulders fell an additional mantle of responsibility. This was a straight fight between good and evil.’ Ward was ‘a diabolical, malevolent mischief-maker’ who lived in a ‘cess-pit’ and was responsible for ‘the stealthy corruption of the innocent, the worsening of the already bad’, according to Earle: ‘quite literally my flesh crawled sometimes in his presence’. No holds were barred in belabouring a man who could not fight back. ‘If he ever did good, I swear it was but a means of doing something else far worse.’ The epithets flew from Earle: ‘that fiendish laughter of his – those strange protruding blue eyes flashing an inner fire of wicked triumph’; ‘demon’; ‘devil’; ‘depraved’; ‘disgusting perversions’. Earle even suggested that Ward’s ‘snake-like cunning’ had been behind the marriage of ‘top fashion model’ Bronwen Pugh to Lord Astor. This outpouring ended on a vile note: ‘The last and biggest crime of all of Ward in the eyes of decent men was that at the pinch – he just couldn’t take it.’
⁵²

The front-page story of the Mirror Group’s
People
was fairer than Earle’s. ‘Ward was no backstreet ponce. Nor was he at the centre of a call-girl ring serving London Society, as rumours had it. His offences in respect to Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were minor, almost technical.’ In truth he was ‘the victim’ of misrepresentation of his relations with women: ‘He did not exploit them. He did not ravish them … Ward was a “kickster”, a connoisseur of sensual experience. He would do almost anything for “kicks”.’
⁵³

The Times
refused to publish a letter from Hugh Leggatt, Ward’s art dealer, stating that he knew dozens of men who had asked him to arrange for Ward to sketch their wives or girlfriends, that Ward had never pounced on these women, and that he could not understand why these men had not volunteered to speak in Ward’s defence. Many who had known Ward were appalled by his posthumous vilification. ‘Poor Stephen,’ said Pamela Cooper, ‘became the universal scapegoat: security risk, promoter of orgies for the rich and powerful; consorter with racketeers; pimp who lived off the immoral earnings of the prostitutes he introduced to his clients. Like the medieval church, which outlawed then hunted lepers, witches, Jews and prostitutes, the press promptly set itself up as the protector of the Ordinary Decent Folk of England against the licentious aristocracy and governing classes.’
⁵⁴

As Ward lay dying, a Beaverbrook reporter was sent to Cliveden to pester and humiliate Bill Astor, who was depicted as a man skulking in disgrace. ‘Lord Astor cannot entirely retire behind the walls of Cliveden,’ the
Daily Express
threatened. The family that had dispensed lavish hospitality in the past was now boycotted: ‘Today, Cliveden has plenty of sightseers, but very few visitors.’ John Gordon, editor of the
Sunday Express
, brandished a quote which he attributed to Ward: ‘Bill could have spoken up for me. His silence crucified me.’ Gordon then noted that Cliveden had been given to the National Trust ‘to evade death duties in the normal way some of the abnormally rich evade them’. This gave him the pretext for nonsensical spite with which to flurry the Astors: ‘The Trust must be disturbed about the disrepute brought upon the estate it owns. What if it decided to cancel the arrangement and return the estate to Lord Astor bringing the shadow of future death duties back upon his family? That would certainly be a popular retribution.’
⁵⁵

‘In the Profumo Affair,’ wrote Wayland Kennet in 1963, ‘the political frivolity, the moral myopia and the herd credulity of latter-day Toryism led to convulsion and the sacrifice of one life, of one career and several reputations. What happened was horrible.’ A few days after Ward’s death, with the press storm abating, Macmillan (revived in optimism) wrote jauntily, ‘There is, perhaps, quite a hand to be played yet.’
⁵⁶

ELEVEN

Safety Curtain

‘The Profumo Affair did Mr Macmillan more harm than anything else in the whole of his administration,’ thought his secretary John Wyndham, ‘and it did a lasting damage to the Conservative Party.’ The Astors’s staunch friend Pamela Cooper agreed: ‘Not only was Macmillan destroyed, but the Tory Party too, as it then was. It wouldn’t be too much to say that the Profumo scandal was the necessary prelude to the new Toryism, based on meritocracy, which would eventually emerge under Margaret Thatcher.’ Certainly the scandal sounded a death-knell to the confidence of traditional hierarchical authority. ‘The whole Establishment did everything possible to rally round the Profumos, and to try to save them from their fate,’ Richard Crossman claimed. The fact that they failed was welcome proof to Anthony Wedgwood Benn that June 1963 marked ‘the decay of the old British Establishment’.
¹

Hailsham considered Denning’s appointment to enquire into the circumstances of Profumo’s resignation ‘a panic measure’ and ‘ghastly error’ which ‘should never be repeated’. For once he was right. A fortnight into the inquiry, Macmillan contemplated resignation over its repercussions: ‘If things go badly with the Denning Report, there will be no choice. I shall have been destroyed by the vices of some of my colleagues.’ By 2 August, Denning had forewarned Macmillan he had established that Ernest Marples, the Minister of Transport, had resorted to prostitutes. Denning also found that Denzil Freeth, a young MP who cut a dash as a Commons speaker and was Hailsham’s deputy at the Ministry of Science, had three years earlier enjoyed some hours of intimacy with a man whom he had met at ‘a party of a homosexual character’. Denning omitted references to Marples and Freeth on the basis that their conduct, though ‘discreditable’, did not jeopardise national security. Marples survived in government, but Freeth – who hit the bottle briefly under the strain of his solitary, precarious and secretive existence – left the government, and did not seek re-election in 1964. He became a City stockbroker and Kensington
bon viveur
, dying nearly half a century later as a respected High Churchman.
²

Radcliffe’s tribunal had found a scapegoat in Herbert Pennells, civil assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, who had died at the age of sixty-three shortly before Vassall’s arrest. Pennells was presented as an industrious but unimaginative official who proved ‘remiss’ in selecting men to serve in Russia. Denning took Radcliffe’s strictures on a man who was safely dead as a model for his report; but his investigatory methods were disgraceful, his deductions slipshod and his report-writing nastier than Radcliffe’s. He penned his report, with a copy of the Bible close to hand, in tabloid-newspaper prose with chapter titles such as ‘The Slashing and the Shooting’ and ‘The Man in the Mask’. Published on 26 September, it sold over 100,000 copies in a few days.

Although Denning hardly mentioned Ward’s trial, he drew on the prosecution speeches. The report is awash with the spite of a lascivious, conceited old man. He cited allegations from Keeler and other ‘girls’, but either did not read the trial transcript or suppressed the rebuttals of their allegations by defence counsel. He took the verdict of the trial as unchallengeable, although it would probably have been overturned on appeal if Ward had lived. Several reputable friends of Ward volunteered to testify to Denning, but none were called. Instead, the dead man was treated as a repugnant, irredeemable wretch. The report’s third chapter is entitled ‘Stephen Ward Helping the Russians’, and gives only half the story of his work as Ivanov’s messenger. The Foreign Office asked that references to schemes to subvert foreign diplomats be underplayed. In consequence, Denning omitted MI5’s plan to use Ward in a honey-trap to decoy Ivanov into defection. This omission was desirable on security grounds, but Denning thus suppressed the facts of Ward’s cooperation with MI5 instructions and his reports to Wagstaffe (‘Woods’). In other respects, Denning regurgitated his Security Service briefings in a trusting if not gullible spirit. He also reported that MI5 knew Ward as ‘the provider of popsies for rich people’, managing ‘a call-girl racket’, although Ward did neither of these things.
³

Denning’s prurient thrill is almost audible as one reads his calumnies of Ward. Civil servants working in nearby offices when Keeler and Rice-Davies were questioned recall the
frisson
in the corridors. He sent his shorthand writers out of the room while he questioned some of the young women about their business. A dominatrix who explained that she never had intercourse with the men she flogged was asked by Denning why her clients had these tastes: he may have squirmed inwardly with tut-tutting excitement as she replied that ‘it went back to their nannies. Bus drivers and people like that who don’t have nannies don’t ask you to whip them.’ Denning was avid for salacious rumours, and sinners to pillory. When he interviewed George Wigg, he asked if he knew anything about the Duke of Argyll’s divorce, which had nothing to do with security.
⁴

Referring to a photograph published in the
News of the World
on 3 February 1963 of Keeler in a bikini (‘the slightest of swimming garbs,’ Denning called it), her languorous arms stretched behind her head, the Law Lord commented: ‘most people seeing it would readily infer the avocation of Christine Keeler’. Did he mean that all models who posed in bikinis were whores, or that all women who allowed themselves to be photographed in swimwear were sluts? It is moreover untrue that Keeler was a prostitute in 1961, when Profumo met her, or indeed in 1963 when she was photographed, or thereafter. Denning prided himself on what he called his ‘sophisticated mind’, but as Lord Annan observed, ‘the sanctimonious tone of Denning’s report suggested that, like many a judge, he was not all that aware of how men and women behave’.
⁵

Denning wrote that Ward ‘seduced girls’, as if the osteopath was a bold bad baronet with twirling moustaches called Sir Jasper, ruining simple, trusting, innocent milkmaids. ‘He used to pick up pretty girls of the age of sixteen or seventeen, often from nightclubs,’ Denning wrote, and ‘procured them to be mistresses for his influential friends.’ This assertion masked the fact that despite interviewing over a hundred witnesses, the police only brought two charges of procuring, on both of which the jury had acquitted Ward. ‘He catered also for those of his friends who had perverted tastes. There is evidence that he was ready to arrange for whipping and other sadistic performances.’ The ‘evidence’, to use Denning’s word, came from the least reliable witness at Ward’s trial, Vickie Barrett; and again the jury acquitted him on this count. Denning indicted Ward as Keeler’s exploiter in a prim, snobbish phrase: ‘He introduced her to many men, sometimes men of rank and position, with whom she had sexual intercourse.’ Denning depicted Ward almost as a white slaver who corrupted Keeler with ‘the drug Indian hemp and she became addicted to it’. The truth is that Ward deplored her use of the drug.
⁶