An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (50 page)

Twenty years after writing his report, Denning continued his vituperative falsification. On television in 1984 he maintained that Ward was the most evil man whom he had ever met. A few years later he repeated that Ward was ‘really wicked’, ‘filthy’ and steeped in ‘vice’. Ward’s flat was a ‘corrupt, immoral set-up’ with ‘all these two-way mirrors and all that sort of thing’ (Ward’s flat had no two-way mirrors, as Marshall had conceded in his summing-up). During the 1980s, Denning still hankered after the idea that lawyers could inhibit fornication: while Master of the Rolls he rejected the appeal of a young woman who had been expelled from a teaching training course after taking her boyfriend to her bedroom, declaring that it was inconceivable that decent parents would wish their children to be taught by such a woman. He was so keen to suppress criticism of the Ward trial that he advocated changes in libel laws to enable the families of the dead lawyers to sue authors who brought them into ridicule or contempt. In retirement in 1987 he insisted in a tetchy letter to
The Times
‘that Stephen Ward was fairly and properly prosecuted, tried and convicted. He was not “framed” by the police. The charges against him were not “bogus”. The conduct of the trial was beyond reproach.’ This querulous bluster was published with perhaps intentional irony under the caption: ‘Ward case and libelling the dead’.
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Denning inflicted lasting harm on his country. His report criticised the law officers Hobson and Rawlinson, as well as Redmayne, Deedes and Macleod, for concentrating on whether Profumo had committed adultery when they confronted him. Denning maintained that their test should have been whether his conduct would lead ordinary people to believe that he had committed adultery. In doing so, he drew an analogy from divorce law, whereby a wife had just cause for leaving her husband not only if he had committed adultery, but also if she had reasonable cause to believe that he was adulterous. Lord Dilhorne advised Macmillan, apropos Denning’s conclusions: ‘It would be opening the door to McCarthyism if Ministers could be hounded from public life because an influential section of the people held a reasonable belief – based on rumour and gossip – that a Minister had misconducted himself.’ Hobson similarly wrote that
pace
Denning, ‘people, including wives, partners and colleagues, ought to be condemned, or at least disposed of, if there are reasonable grounds for believing that they have done wrong, even if you accept from them that they have not in fact erred.’ Five years later Harold Wilson’s solicitor Lord Goodman called Denning’s inquiry, with its focus on rumour, ‘the most startling invasion of privacy in recent years’. Denning’s upholding of the primacy of cheap suspicions inaug-urated a period when newspapers could publicise moronic gossip, hound and humiliate their victims by innuendo and accusation, treat paid informers as heroes, solemnify hoaxes and turn ill-fame into a lucrative commodity.
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In despoiling Ward’s memory, Denning set the tone for succeeding generations. When Keeler was tried for perjury and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice, her counsel’s rhetoric might have been taken from Denning: ‘Dr Ward was a man of charm, he had great artistic flair, and he won his way into a snob world of power, taking with him this young girl. He groomed Keeler.’ He did not dwell on the conditions that had victimised her: reared in a railway carriage without mains water or electricity; ill-educated, malnourished; scared by her stepfather; exploited by the fathers of the children she babysat; only employed in London because of her looks. Ward had been considerate and unselfish to the feckless girl who had been exploited by the US airman who impregnated her, the ruffians who hit and screwed her, the police who manipulated and broke her, the false friends who battened on her notoriety.
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Tendentious references to the events of 1963 persist in books: journalists spread their casual inaccuracies. In 2010, the
Daily Telegraph
described Keeler as ‘procured for Lord Astor’s “Cliveden Set” by Stephen Ward, an osteopath with a sideline in high-class prostitution’. The truth, however, is that Keeler was never procured for Lord Astor or his guests, and Ward did not have an auxiliary income as a pimp. Another national newspaper, in 1999, listed ‘Christine Keeler, Call Girl’ as one of the ‘Accidental Heroes of the Twentieth Century’, though a less fortunate or inspiring heroine cannot be imagined.
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On 8 October 1963, a fortnight after publication of Denning’s report, Macmillan was admitted to hospital with inflammation of the prostate gland. The stress of recent months had shaken his health. Always prone to anxieties about those ailments that Turgenev named the calling-cards of death, he reacted badly when told that he had a benign or malignant tumour. Next day, drugged, suffering physical pain and mental distress, convinced that he had cancer, he wrote a resignation letter to the Queen, and drafted a letter to be read by Home to the imminent party conference at Blackpool explaining that he was too weak to lead the Tories into the next general election. This impulsive haste was unnecessary. Within a day, Macmillan’s physicians had confirmed that he neither had cancer nor must retire through poor health. Minimal reflection showed that such an announcement was bound to throw the conference into disarray. When Home visited the hospital, Macmillan told him of the intended resignation and urged him to become a prime ministerial candidate. Home made no kindly effort to dissuade the sick, muddled man from quick resignation: there were no calming or temporising suggestions from the Foreign Secretary. Instead, Home made a ruthless killing of the Macmillan premiership. He started the train of events whereby he reached Downing Street by hastening to Blackpool, where he wrecked the conference by reading out the resignation message before the Prime Minister could be dissuaded by wiser heads.

Home’s was the act neither of a disinterested friend nor of a man indifferent to the succession. He later claimed that he was surprised when Macmillan urged him to disclaim his earldom and contest the leadership; but Macmillan had mooted Home’s succession to him a few days earlier. Other insiders had foreseen it as a possibility. In 1961, Normanbrook, the Cabinet Secretary whom the
Daily Mirror
decried, had been asked who should succeed as Prime Minister if some ill befell Macmillan. ‘Alec Home,’ replied Normanbrook: ‘he is the only one who would do it well.’ A year later, after the Cuban crisis, Macmillan had warned Rab Butler, who saw himself as the likeliest next Prime Minister: ‘There is only one Minister now who could displace me, and that is Alec Home … Alec had some special genius, probably from his Lambton mother.’ Home’s succession seemed impossible in November 1962, for a peer had not held the premiership for sixty years. However, legislation which came into force on 31 July 1963 enabled members of the House of Lords to disclaim their peerages and stand for the Commons. This enabled Hailsham, after Home’s announcement at Blackpool, to declare his candidature for the premiership and renunciation of his viscountcy. Macleod, the Tory minister whom Wilson most feared, was too tarnished by his part in the late-night ministerial conclave that weakly quizzed Profumo to be
papabile
. Hailsham, like Maudling, spoiled his hopes by an ill-judged speech: Hailsham brayed and Maudling baulked like two mismatched mules hitched together on their way to market. Butler’s interventions, too, were stumbling. When John Boyd-Carpenter dined with Colonel ‘Juby’ Lancaster MP, his host interrupted a discussion of leadership prospects. Didn’t they know, he asked, that Home would be chosen: ‘It’s all arranged,’ he said. Nigel Birch, asked about the succession, replied: ‘I’m an Alec Home man. There aren’t any other possibilities. He’s going to get it.’
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Dilhorne, his haunches perched uncomfortably on a creaking chair besides an unmade bed in his small, stuffy room in the Imperial hotel, interviewed Cabinet members, and noted their preference as Macmillan’s successor. His manner was correct, but it was evident that he did not share Boyd-Carpenter’s choice, Maudling. Elsewhere, Redmayne polled other ministers. Reginald Bevins, the self-styled Tory democrat who was Postmaster General, recalled giving his preferences: ‘Maudling and Butler in that order. Long pause. We looked at each other. “What about the peers – Alec and the other one?” No pause. I said: “Not at any bloody price.” That was an unfortunate answer, all carefully recorded on Martin Redmayne’s foolscap.’ After Home had won, and the other candidates were bested, a young backbencher, Paul Channon, tried to console Butler. ‘This last cruel blow brought about by Nigel Birch and Macmillan relations when you were ahead in every poll will merely show how decadent the Tory Government and Party had become in 1963 and how extraordinary Mr Macmillan’s decisions had become in his last few months of office.’
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Home’s elderly mother, who was a Labour voter, told a television interviewer that he had been a very ordinary child, and that Butler should have bested him. His aunt, Lady Ellesmere, said he was an
extraordinary
choice; his uncle Lord Durham said it was a disaster. Sir Alec Douglas-Home (as he became after disclaiming his earldom) was Prime Minister for a year: he proved to have more resolve and resilience than Butler, Hailsham and Maudling could have mustered, and lost the general election of October 1964 by only four seats. David Butler’s masterful study of the election concluded: ‘It was the
Daily Mirror
rather than Mr Wilson which sustained the Labour campaign to a polling day climax.’ The Cudlipp-King newspapers ran stories about Rachmanism, stop-go economics, underspending in schools and hospitals, defence muddles, impoverished pensioners, and Tory tiredness. Supremely, they capitalised on the message that they had instilled during the Profumo scandal: that Britain faced a modernisation crisis which was class-bound; that the Establishment, headed by a disclaimed fourteenth earl with expansive grouse-moors, was a travesty of power; that the old order must be hurried away in tumbrils.
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Once the general election was launched in 1964, Cudlipp sent his star interviewer Donald Zec to meet Wilson. The resulting profile, published over two days, was the market-branding of Wilson by the
Mirror
that swung the election for Labour. The message had been easier to implant since June 1963. ‘I did not get a pheasant’s eye view of him behind a twelve-bore gun nor did I face him in the Edwardian gloom of some Top People’s Club,’ Zec wrote. Wilson took him into the kitchen of his Hampstead Garden Suburb home (‘the sort of home you’d find anywhere … in Britain’), and gave him a cup of tea from a tea-pot embossed with a print of the Forth Bridge. ‘If a home reflects the man – as, say, a grouse moor might show up the marksman from the boys – then Mr Wilson’s untidy but comfortable habitat is a real give-away … Up-ended plank on wheels in overgrown garden, former property of younger son, Giles. Rain-faded note on defunct doorbell says “Please knock”.’ There was homely virtue, the Labour message seemed to say, in doorbells that did not work and an improvised go-cart hammered out of cast-off wood: none of the effete knick-knacks with which the Profumos, say, had arrayed their primrose and eau-de-nil drawing room. To emphasise Labour’s pretence of anti-materialism, Wilson told Zec: ‘We in the Labour Party absolutely reject the insulting doctrine that the British People are only interested in gambling, making money, new washing machines and the latest refrigerator. Look at the magnificent work being done by Oxfam, the “Freedom From Hunger” campaign, War on Want, and the societies for helping spastics.’ He turned on his patriotic indignation, too. ‘We are a great country,’ he said angrily. ‘Let nobody sell us short. But we could be a hell of a lot greater.’
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In the
Daily Mirror
’s next issue, Zec continued his profile interview of Wilson, ‘this former council schoolboy, born at No 4, Warneford Road, Milnsbridge, Huddersfield (twelve shillings a week, plus rates)’. Wilson believed that future battles ‘must be fought less on the playing fields of Eton – more in the science laboratory’, according to Zec. ‘He does say there is no place in politics for the gentlemanly amateur, now as obsolete as that snob game, Gentlemen versus Players.’ Wilson was earnest about re-drawing Britain’s social landscape. ‘Land racketeers, their wings severely clipped, will not be so happy in it. Those Etonians who still believe in the survival of the smuggest will want no part of it. Boardroom “Blimps” who slid into power through money and influence may gnash their gold teeth at it.
But the young, the dynamic, the brainy, the well-intentioned and the just will flourish in it. So promises Mr Harold Wilson
.’ Wilson believed that the election would be won by the votes of ‘young people, the courting and the newlyweds’ who sought affordable homes: ‘House prices have doubled in six years and land racketeering has run riot.’ A Labour priority, said Wilson, would be ‘curbing the racketeer’. A few years later he was mired in the notorious slag-heap land deal, and recommending dicey wideboys for public honours. In 1964, though, he promised the ‘young citizens’ who were
Daily Mirror
readers, ‘“
The squalid property deals which merely produce vast profits and ultimately send up the prices of people’s home have no place in a new Britain
”.’
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The
Daily Mirror
campaign message was reinforced daily. ‘Sir Alec, with his comic knickerbockers and clicking teeth peering over half a pair of glasses, is absolutely convinced that the women of Britain are going to carry him forward to victory,’ wrote Marjorie Proops in the issue
of 7 October. ‘I am sick to the bone of … Alec and all the rest of the Tories who have sat on their smug rears in Westminster for thirteen endless, weary years.’ Next day there was an array of quotes from modish reformers. ‘I will vote Labour,’ declared Alan Sillitoe, ‘because I believe in equality. Equality is a cliché, except to those who haven’t got it.’ A. J. Ayer was voting Labour because the party ‘will put science to a more intelligent use, and are more likely to bring about social reform – better than voting Conservative because I’m-all-right-Jack’. The jazz singer and club owner Annie Ross told the
Mirror
: ‘I will vote Labour because I hate class distinction.’
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