An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (36 page)

Seven years earlier, in 1955, Arthur Christiansen, editor of the
Daily Express
, had told Beaverbrook that he had identified a ‘notorious homosexual’ on the Foreign Office Selection Board.
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Now an adapted version of this fantasy emerged for the Admiralty. The
Sunday Express
on 28 October – the Sunday when Kennedy won the Cuban missile crisis – insinuated that Vassall had been too close to the luckless Galbraith. Galbraith had sent a few brief, banal notes to Vassall, some discussing office carpets and crockery. ‘My dear Vassall,’ Galbraith had written in one message, ‘Goodness knows what you will think of me for having taken so long to write. We were both delighted to receive your charming card of congratulation and I would have thanked you ages ago except for the fact that the Scottish Office, when Parliament is sitting, keeps me more busy than the Admiralty.’ To some drab minds the words ‘charming’ and ‘My dear Vassall’ suggested sodomy. A further attraction of Galbraith as a target for pillorying was that he was heir to a peerage: it was a recent title, but sounded sonorous – Strathclyde.

In order to pay for his defence, Vassall sold his memoirs to the
Sunday Pictorial
for £7,000. The first instalment appeared on the first Sunday after his conviction, 28 October. The Mirror Group required arch sexiness, salacious guilt and inverted snobbery for its money. One passage described Vassall’s consolations when he went to board at Monmouth School away from his mother: ‘I experienced a terrible loneliness without her. My need of companionship was obvious to some of the other boys. An older boy from the rugby fifteen made approaches to me while I was playing the piano. And one night, after lights out in the dormitory, a boy crept into my bed to comfort me in my loneliness. I never forgave myself for these incidents. To help me forget I buried myself in work.’ The
Sunday Pictorial
highlighted Vassall’s bracing lack of snobbery in Moscow, and the stifling class discrimination of others: ‘Soon I was on first-name terms with senior diplomats from many European countries and America. “John,” they used to tell me, “you are so much less reserved than the average Englishman we meet.” I suppose I was. My mother had always encouraged me to mix freely with barons and barrow-boys alike. But it was being whispered at the British Embassy that I was living way above my social standing. They branded me as a social climber. I ignored their gossip. My foreign friends reassured me that I was the perfect Englishman. I was proud of that.’ The second instalment on 4 November – headlined ‘HOW THE RUSSIAN SPY MASTERS BROKE ME DOWN’ – was illustrated by a photo of Vassall reclining on his back wearing nothing but a tight white bathing costume and sporting an impressive bulge.
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Under the front-page headline ‘SPY CATCHERS NAME “SEX RISK” MEN’, Norman Lucas had the lead story in the issue of the
Sunday Pictorial
carrying the first instalment of Vassall’s memoirs. ‘Civil servants with homosexual tendencies were especially vulnerable as security risks,’ Lucas explained. ‘Several groups of these men have been traced and broken up in Whitehall,’ he added mendaciously. ‘A secret list prepared by detectives names homosexuals who hold top Government posts.’ A week later, under the front-page headline ‘THE LETTERS IN VASSALL’S FLAT’, the
Pictorial
of 4 November reported that ‘before Vassall was sentenced for spying he talked of the urgent need for an inquiry into sex blackmail of people who work in Government departments … he warned that such an inquiry – to weed out homosexuals and bi-sexuals in high office – would be unlikely to succeed: “Many of the types who would be vetted in such an investigation are respectable married men holding senior posts. No one would suspect them of abnormal sexual practices,” he said.’

The
News of the World
had to vie with the
Sunday Pictorial
’s exclusive serialisation as best it could. On 28 October it ran a story about Norman Rickard, a thirty-eight-year-old Admiralty victualling supply clerk, who had been strangled in his basement bedsit flat in Elgin Avenue, Maida Vale, on 19 February 1962. There is no reason to trust any assertion in the story, which showed the ugly temper of the times. ‘When he left his office in the evening he threw off his dull suit and dressed himself in a black leather jacket, tight blue jeans, a check shirt, high-heeled cowboy boots with silver buckles and thin blue leather gloves. He was a more obviously squalid character than Vassall, as wearing this fancy dress he wandered around the Marble Arch trying to make friends with other men. Nine months ago he met the wrong man. He was found naked, strangled and trussed in a cupboard in his flat.’ After this lubricious description, the
News of the World
moved into its customary mode of scare-mongering and sermonising – garnished with the mad suggestion that Guy Burgess was the spymaster who had recruited and run Vassall. ‘There are many of these low-salaried twilight people working in places where they can betray their country to indulge their perverted pleasures … There must be no more Rickards, no more Vassalls, in this kind of employment. FOR BURGESS SITS IN MOSCOW LIKE A PATIENT TOAD AWAITING HIS NEXT WILLING VICTIM.’
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A fortnight later the Mirror Group’s
People
took up the Rickard story. Its reporter Roy East alleged that Rickard had been recruited three months before his death by the Admiralty Security Department to inform on homosexuals. East suggested that Rickard had been investigating Vassall before his death – oblivious of the fact that this was two months before the authorities’ earliest inklings that there was an Admiralty spy. East scouted gay bars looking for informants who, he claimed, had seen Rickard drinking with Vassall. He stressed, though, to Lord Radcliffe’s tribunal, that he was not homosexual, but happily married with three children.

This was not the only mischief being made. William Shepherd, the Tory MP for Cheadle, who was to play a part in the Profumo Affair, had links with MI5. His loud, denunciatory voice had been clamourous during the parliamentary debates on Wolfenden. Homosexuality was acquired, not ‘congenital’, he insisted; ‘inverts’ indulged in such acts so as to seem ‘fashionable’; ‘incest is a much more natural act than homosexuality’. The male homosexual, he explained, was pitted against society. ‘His mind becomes twisted and distorted because he feels he is not as other men are … He is always beset by fears of discovery. The more sensitive ones wear a hunted look … homosexuality sets up a society within a society, and this is indeed sinister.’ Shepherd wrote in early November to Macmillan, complaining about certain ministers who, he said, were risking exposure. Macmillan replied sceptically, but asked him to consult the Chief Whip, Brigadier Martin Redmayne. At his meeting with Redmayne, Shepherd took a similar line to the
Sunday Pictorial
about ‘buggers in high places’. ‘I told Martin that he ought to know what I knew about these men,’ Shepherd recalled, ‘including one very high minister who was involved with young boys. I said he ought to have access to what they knew across the road, which was then Scotland Yard.’
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George Brown, who had penned a scurrilous attack on British diplomats when the
Sunday Pictorial
was running its campaign against ‘Foreign Office perverts’ in 1955, returned to the fray in 1962. ‘We cannot leave the Vassall case as it is,’ he thundered in a Commons debate on 5 November. ‘There are other letters in existence, copies of which I and, no doubt, others have seen, the originals of which are in the hands of what are called the “authorities”, which indicate a degree of Ministerial responsibility, which goes far beyond the ordinary business of a Minister in charge.’ This palaver was a description of Galbraith’s genial, innocu-ous letters – though no one ever called Brown amiable or harmless. Galbraith had done no more than show patient civility to a pleasant but perhaps socially pressing clerk. Brown, who was detested for his brutality by civil servants who had to work with him in the 1960s, showed harsh inverted snobbery in suggesting that Galbraith’s politeness exceeded the acceptable. Several of his front-bench colleagues felt ‘sensitive’ at his innuendos about Galbraith and Vassall: Anthony Crosland had seduced Roy Jenkins when they were Oxford undergraduates; Richard Crossman and others had had youthful episodes (‘Dick has known unnatural joys,’ wrote Maurice Bowra); Hugh Gaitskell had gallantly sided with Lord Montagu of Beaulieu when he was being insulted by brutish diners in a restaurant following his release from prison. Such men knew what sordid nonsense Brown was talking.
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A day or so after Brown’s aspersions, Redmayne, William Deedes (the Cabinet minister charged with press relations) and two of Macmillan’s private secretaries consulted together before attending a late night discussion with the Prime Minister, who had been exhausted by the Cuban missile crisis. While they wished to avoid panic reactions, they were fraught about male friendships. Reviewing Galbraith’s notes to Vassall – it is misrepresentation to call them letters – Deedes said they were ‘narcissistic’, which was a codeword for homosexual, with the implication that Galbraith was ‘almost certainly improperly involved’ with Vassall. Deedes was perennially muddleheaded about such matters: when the bill that partially decriminalised homosexuality was debated four years later, he tabled an unsuccessful amendment ‘exempting university staff and schoolmasters from any relaxation in the restrictions on buggery’.
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Most people at the Deedes-Redmayne meeting were retrospecti-vely so ashamed of their part in it that they either lied or misremembered their conduct. Although Macmillan recognised Galbraith’s missives as innocuous, he was so weary and rattled that he sent Redmayne to extract Galbraith’s resignation. On 8 November, a few hours after the full texts of Galbraith’s notes were published in the morning papers, it was announced that he had resigned from the government (the announcement was accompanied by public declarations of regret from Macmillan which constituted shameless hypocrisy given that he had forced the resignation).

With the publication of Galbraith’s missives, the sensible view was that ‘Mr George Brown and the
Daily Express
[came to] look a little foolish’. But Beaverbrook’s newspaper had already changed tack. On 8 November, Percy Hoskins, its crime reporter, effectively accused Lord Carrington of treason by suggesting that as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had known for eighteen months before Vassall’s arrest that there was a spy in his department but concealed this from Macmillan. This falsehood was followed next day by another emanating from Douglas Clark, political correspondent of the
Daily Express
, a companionable man but unscrupulous operator, who ‘revelled in the drama, intrigue and interplay of personalities at Westminster and was the complete Beaverbrook man’, according to Macmillan’s press secretary, Harold Evans. Clark’s story pretended that after Hoskins’s revelation, Carrington had received an abrupt summons to see the Prime Minister, who was minded to sack him. A photograph of the First Lord having a drink at an official dinner was published under the headline, ‘Doesn’t Lord Carrington Care?’ The Labour Party began by crying for his dismissal.
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Macmillan was incensed: he longed for the purveyors of lies to be punished and delivered in the Commons a speech of striking pugnacity. He announced the appointment of a tribunal inquiry into the Vassall case under the chairmanship of Lord Radcliffe. He inveighed, too, against the wild inaccuracies of the witch-hunting press and the innuendoes of some members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. ‘The time has come,’ he declared, ‘for men of propriety and decency not to tolerate the growth of what I can only call the spirit of Titus Oates and Senator McCarthy.’ For once he had the support of Nigel Birch, who spoke of ‘venomous libels’ and filthy slurs. Humphry Berkeley decried Brown’s ‘squalid attempt at character assassination’. There were speeches from Labour MPs who were to be at the forefront of the Profumo Affair: George Wigg, Richard Crossman. The socialist Michael Foot seethed with synthetic indignation: ‘The Prime Minister, with matchless insolence, talked of McCarthy, but he is the man who is asking the House to institute the McCarthy procedure. He is the most brazen McCarthy of the lot.’ This was a nadir in opposition politics. As Macmillan spoke, reported a lobby correspondent, ‘he seemed completely at his ease and looked as if he had just come from a stroll in his part of the country. With a resonant voice, and in a dark suit of clothes that would be a credit to the best tailor in Britain, he gave the impression that the whole affair … required a calm atmosphere, and not the realm of melodrama.’ The lobby correspondent added that ‘this unfortunate scandal is one in which the whole nation can feel nothing but a sense of shame’, but it is unclear if he included his fellow journalists in the obliquity.
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‘I have made a lot of enemies in the Press today,’ Macmillan told Evans on 11 November, ‘but I am an old man and I don’t really care.’ He thought the newspaper distortions had reached intolerable levels of cheapness. ‘How did you recognise a homosexual?’ he asked Evans. ‘It was said that women could do so more easily than men.’ He doubted if acceptance of the Wolfenden recommendations would make blackmail more difficult: ‘it was not the avowed and complete homosexual who was vulnerable, but the man who did not go quite that far, who in part had a normal sexual life and felt ashamed of his aberrations.’ Macmillan recorded in his diary on 15 November that in a week of Cabinet meetings, conferences with the Japanese Prime Minister, and ongoing tensions over Cuba and Yemen, ‘we have wasted
all
the rest of the time on the Vassall spy case. On this there has been a continual running crisis – involving (rightly or wrongly) Mr Galbraith’s resignation (he having written some foolish if innocu-ous letters to Vassall when both were in the Admiralty), and a sort of mass hysteria worked up by the Press & the less reputable members of the Opposition like Brown & Crossman & Gordon-Walker.’ This had ‘culminated in an accusation of treachery against both Galbraith & Ld Carrington (First Lord) and against the Board of the Admiralty’. His necessary response was the appointment of the Radcliffe tribunal, a manoeuvre which had caused him ‘infinite trouble to prepare. But the speech was, I think, the most impressive & successful which I have ever delivered in Parliament. Many congratulations poured in during today.’
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