An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (51 page)

On election night in October 1964, Paul Raymond’s Revuebar had a gimmick. After voting closed, five naked showgirls appeared on stage, each with a ribbon in their hair. The one with the blue ribbon represented the Conservatives, the pink ribbon Labour, yellow for Liberal, red for Communists and white for independents. As the result in each constituency was declared, the girl representing the victorious party took a chiffon scarf of the right colour and tied it round herself. None of the girls wanted to be the Communist, not from political scruples, but because they did not want to be shivering without a single scarf for the whole night. The pink chiffon scarves won.

Only the most partisan spirit could say that the new administration, with its mix of sincere idealists, quarrelsome intellectuals, crafty trade union time-servers, bullies and small-minded envy-ridden puritans, was more effective, or less prone to cronyism and trickery, than the preceding government, with its practitioners of noblesse oblige, Old Etonians, retired officers, glossy playboys, bullies and expense-account company directors. One network of egotists, with an intricate history of mutual obligations, murky pacts and tacit promises, was replaced by an opposing alliance, no more qualified or efficient, held together by similar bargains, ambition and vanity. The notion that the change of government in 1964 brought purity or progress was naïve.

George Wigg was rewarded by Wilson with the appointment of Postmaster General, with direct access to him on security matters. By dint of Westminster intrigues, melodramatic antics in Downing Street and hectoring late-night telephone calls, he pummelled Wilson for several years, until his harassed punchbag exiled him to the House of Lords. Subsequently he developed a senescent taste for kerb-crawling in Park Lane. In 1976 he was in the dock denying charges of insulting behaviour and endangering the peace after repeatedly accosting women from his car. Wigg protested that he had been looking for a street news vendor selling late editions.
Private Eye
photographed him getting out of a car in a dirty raincoat, with an urgent look on his face, and a bubble caption saying, ‘I’m desperate for a good
Evening Standard’
.

Cecil King’s Rolls-Royce had a flagstaff inserted behind the Silver Lady emblem so that he could fly a Red Flag, inscribed ‘Vote Labour’, during the 1964 general election. The mistrustful alliance between him and Wilson fissured after the election, when Wilson, who had previously announced that he would not recommend the Queen to create further hereditary titles, offered King a life peerage. King retorted that he wanted an earldom, so as to out-rank his uncles Northcliffe and Rothermere, to say nothing of other newspaper proprietors, Camrose, Kemsley and Southwood. Wilson reiterated that no hereditary peerages would be created at his recommendation. King then produced precedents for life earldoms (Darlington, Walsingham and Yarmouth were all granted as life earldoms in the eighteenth century), but to no avail. His applications however ended with his termagant wife being made a dame. King was the man of whom Anthony Sampson said admiringly in 1962: ‘he dislikes Eton, titles, pomposity and humbug in high places, and he loves attacking the Establishment’. His megalomania led to his expulsion from the Mirror Group in 1968. ‘I do not feel I have ever been fully stretched – and I have never been allowed to serve my country as I could have wished,’ he told me in 1972 at a time when, he complained, ‘newspapers are full of trivial news and irrelevant comment’.
¹⁷

One person to prosper from the scandals of 1963 was Samuel Herbert, whose strenuous, pitiless fixing of evidence was rewarded with promotion from chief inspector to superintendent. He died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight in 1966. His character as a shameless rascal was fortified by the posthumous discovery that he had £30,000 squirrelled away – a small fortune for a policeman at that time. This was the sum that Keeler said she had been offered by John Lewis to secure Ward’s conviction and reduce Macmillan’s government to a rubble heap.

Keeler was treated viciously after Ward’s death. On 4 August, the Mirror Group’s second Sunday family paper,
The
People
, carried the front-page headline: ‘KEELER, THE SHAMELESS SLUT’, and called her ‘an empty-headed trollop, skilled only at using her body to bewitch and betray’. ‘She smoked marijuana and loved orgies’, seldom washed (although it also claimed ‘she sat in a bath drinking champagne with a boyfriend’), had soiled underwear, and ‘boasted of picking up down-and-outs in the street and taking one of the scruffiest of them to sleep with her’. They found a man who claimed, as a butler, to have served coffee to Profumo and Keeler in bed together. The article claimed John Hamilton-Marshall was her lover – which would have been against his nature – and that they lived together in Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill. A friend had written a reference to their landlady there,
The People
pretended: ‘If you want your house turned into a brothel, with coloured layabouts all over the place, drug orgies and all that jazz, accept Miss Keeler as a tenant.’ Even Louis Blom-Cooper, a jurist who epitomised compassionate urbanity, in his damning commentary on Denning’s report, dismissed Keeler and Rice-Davies as ‘adolescent drabs, for whom little public sympathy should be wasted’.
¹⁸

On 5 September (three weeks after Ward was cremated with only six mourners daring to show their faces), Keeler and Paula Hamilton-Marshall were arrested and charged with perjury and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice by not revealing the presence of Camacchio and Fenton in their flat at the time when Gordon was put in a police frame for attacking Keeler. There were preliminary hearings at Marylebone Magistrates Court in October, a sensational trial opened in November, and on 6 December, Keeler was sentenced to nine months in Holloway prison. ‘Tales of kicks, thumps, and slaps, bribes, and sex orgies, lies and blackmail threats, kept alive the spirit of the “Ward
galère
”,’ reported the
Glasgow Herald
gleefully.
¹⁹

In order to confuse matters further, Robin Drury (who was months away from bankruptcy) was induced to testify that Keeler had told him that her bruises and black eye were inflicted by an unknown woman with whom she participated in an afterdinner orgy in the Hamilton-Marshall flat. Although John Hamilton-Marshall – bedecked in a pink candy-striped shirt, black satin waistcoat and blue collarless felt jacket – testified that he, not Gordon, had brawled with Keeler (testimony that the police had discouraged him from volunteering at Gordon’s trial), the police and prosecution case focussed on the hiding of Fenton and Camacchio. They did not disavow the false story that Gordon was her assailant, but implied that there was truth in it, for there could be no suggestion after the Ward trial that police officers coerced its prime witnesses into giving false evidence in that or related cases. Nor did Keeler’s counsel complicate or prejudice her defence by mentioning police entrapment or police-incited perjury in her original evidence about Gordon.
^fn1

What is striking about October 1963 is that while Cabinet Ministers donned homburgs, fobs and morning suits, disclaimed peerages, delivered dud perorations at Blackpool, and promised with lifeless, orotund phrases to restore normative stability, a kid pop impresario like Alex Wharton, and rootless young risk-takers such as Drury, Hamilton-Marshall and Mann – the foot-scouts of that inchoate, unruly, destabilising, protean phenomenon that was to be called ‘Swinging London’ – traipsed into the witness box. These two social spheres, distant though they seemed, had converged during the modernisation crisis of 1963.

The
Daily Sketch
marked Keeler’s release in 1964 from Holloway prison, where she suffered cruelly, by publishing her telephone number: thereafter she was deluged with abusive telephone calls. When in 1965 she married, she was ruthlessly doorstepped by photographers, who scrabbled round like crabs in a bucket snapping at her. Keeler’s life has been unpleasantly chequered since then. She has collaborated in several unreliable memoirs. In one she depicted the early 1960s a time when ‘Dukes and Ministers fought side by side by sadists, masochists, homosexuals and lesbians against the barriers of a frustrated society’. In another, she indicted Ward as ‘a spymaster’ involved in placing Moscow’s double agent, Sir Roger Hollis, as Director General of MI5. ‘My Svengali,’ she called Ward: ‘a spider with a malevolent web,’ who ‘would have killed me as easily as light my cigarette. He stitched me up, stitch after very neat stitch. He was bad.’
²⁰

Shortly before the general election of 1964, the Astors went to stay at the Cipriani in Venice, where Profumo eighteen months earlier had forfeited his bluff. Bill Astor spent some days sketching at Freya Stark’s nearby home. ‘He is such a poor little waif of a man,’ she wrote. ‘I sometimes feel it is just some rather expensive clothes walking around and no one in particular inside them. But she is rare and beautiful, and
good
, with lovely honest eyes which she never plays with. They are rather a touching couple, he always with a well-intentioned but silly value and she quietly putting it right.’ A few days later Bill Astor had a heart attack. He became a wretched invalid, and died two years later. His daughter, who was aged four at the time, later worked for Winston’s Wish, the charity that helps bereaved children.
²¹

Clore was not publicly identified as the ‘Charles’ who featured in the Ward trial until after his death in 1979. He embarked on a course of outstanding philanthropy by establishing the Clore Foundation in the general election year of 1964. Amongst its benefactions to cultural institutions and Jewish causes, the most famous is the Clore Gallery housing the Turner collection at Tate Britain.
²²

During the summer of 1963, the Territorial Army headquarters in Shropshire, where Profumo had unveiled the foundation stone during the previous winter, applied for the inscription to be re-cut with Profumo’s name erased. ‘This stone was meant to be something of an inspiration to the young fellows,’ explained Colonel Guy Thornycroft, vice-chairman of Shropshire TA. ‘Now we think it better to strike out Mr Profumo’s name. It would be a perman-ent reminder of Mr Profumo.’ Yet the Profumo legacy was not easily erased. For forty years, whenever he and his wife entered a room, all conversation stopped for a moment. He was chastened for a time, but never tamed. In his desk he stored ballpoint pens adorned with pictures of naked women. The conventional view is that he expiated his misdoings during decades of voluntary work in the East End of London. Certainly, and deservedly, he was rehabilitated. The Queen Mother remained his champion. At a dinner in her honour, sitting between her and a seventeen-year-old Guinness heiress, the old satyr whispered to the latter during the first course: ‘Ever been fucked by a seventy-year-old? No? You should try it.’
²³

The Profumo Affair was not only a body-blow to Macmillan’s government. It was the death-blow of an England that was deferential and discreet. Home said in June 1963 that he was ‘disgusted and angry’ at the way that one man’s lapse had impugned the belief that British public life was conducted ‘by men who have the highest sense of integrity and public duty’.
²⁴
That summer inaugurated the raucous period when authority figures were denied respect even when they deserved it. Denning’s recommendation that ministers should become suspicious snoopers on one another, and that rash, random rumours ought to be solemnly investigated, performed euthanasia on notions of privacy. Until 1963, newspapers protected politicians who were detected in adultery, or caught in the bushes with guardsmen. After 1963, Fleet Street’s emetic brew of guilty joys, false tears, nasty surprises and dirty surmises seemed limitless. From the moment of Profumo’s resignation, newspapers started deploying outrageous headlines for non-existent stories: ‘PRINCE PHILIP AND THE PROFUMO SCANDAL – RUMOUR UTTERLY UNFOUNDED’, boomed a
Daily Mirror
headline of June 1963, above paragraphs that failed to specify the imaginary rumour.

There were strenuous efforts after the summer of 1963 to pretend that nothing had changed. Ward had been hounded to death; Profumo was shunned; Keeler went to prison; Astor became a crumpled ruin; Rachman’s name coined an unpleasant new epithet. Villainy had been punished; transgression had been anathematised; the national morality based on newspaper pillorying had been raised to the level of auto-da-fé. Although Labour strategists kept alive the sense that the scandal had been proof of Establishment corruption, the general mood was to shrug off what had happened, as if awakening from a lurid, turbulent nightmare.

In fact the trauma had been too horrendous for the status quo to be restored. Traditional notions of deference had been weakening for years, but after June 1963 they became mortally sick. Authority – however disinterested, well-qualified and experienced – was increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust. Respect and deference, even when merited, were increasingly seen as a species of snobbery. Notoriety became a money-spinner: it became profitable to behave destructively. If Keeler had been born thirty-five years later, she would have starred on
Celebrity Big Brother
and consulted her publicist every time her footballer boyfriend knocked her about.

People’s visions were distorted forever by the outlandish novelties of the summer of 1963. Afterwards everything still looked reassuringly familiar, but was weirdly twisted. It was as if a stolid householder – one of Profumo’s Stratford constituents, say – had left his house at a summer dusk to post a letter in the red pillarbox on the corner of his neat privet-lined street; had murmured ‘Good Evening’ to the vicar out with his spaniel and sidestepped the whistling schoolboy on his Raleigh bike; and returning a few minutes later with the assurance of a woman going to
The Sound of Music
for the twentieth time and knowing every song, did not at first notice that his cosy living-room had swapped places with the living-room in the Windolene-burnished mirror hanging above the hearth; and that the air was hazy with unnameable secrets and squalid grudges.