An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (38 page)

Profumo rang young, pretty Christine Keeler – ‘common’ though she was – to arrange an assignation on the weekend after their first meeting, while his wife was visiting his Warwickshire constituency. Profumo’s subsequent line was that they met for sex on about three occasions in July and August 1961. In her accounts Keeler claimed more meetings over a longer period. On one occasion he borrowed the Bentley of his parliamentary colleague John Hare (Minister of Labour) for an outing with her. He took her for a drink with a former Cabinet minister, Geordie Ward, newly ennobled as Lord Ward of Witley, who later denied all memory of the occasion. On 3 August, while his family were holidaying on the Isle of Wight, Profumo had an evening with Keeler: she cooked sausages before they had sex in front of the television.

‘I simply thought that she was a very beautiful little girl who seemed to like sexual intercourse,’ Profumo explained two years later. ‘She told me that she had done a certain amount of modelling, and that she was now between jobs.’ He gave her £20 for her mother, a cigarette lighter and some scent. It was the same perfume as his wife used: a trick of the practised adulterer who knows that a wife will be less suspicious if she smells her own scent on her husband, but alert if she detects the different scent of another woman. Valerie Profumo told her son David, ‘he thought he could get away with it: after all, most of his friends did.’
⁸

On 8 August, Profumo met Keeler again, and made another assignation with her for the next evening. Over the preceding three weeks they had probably met half a dozen times. Meanwhile, MI5 (whose men were monitoring Ivanov) apprised the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, of the attaché’s contacts with Ward, and of Profumo’s visits to Ward’s home. Brook called Profumo to see him on 9 August. One version of this meeting suggests that Brook warned Profumo that MI5 was watching Ward’s flat, because of the Ivanov connection, but that Profumo misinterpreted Brook’s comments as a hint that MI5 knew of his affair with Keeler (MI5 did not hear of the affair until later). A more dubious notion is that Brook asked Profumo to help MI5 in compromising Ivanov, but that Profumo declined. There was no suggestion then that Ivanov was conducting an affair with Keeler.

After meeting Brook, Profumo sent Keeler a hasty, imprudent note on War Office paper – headed ‘Darling’ and signed ‘Love J’ – cancelling their meeting. Shortly afterwards he left for a holiday with his wife in Portofino. This was, according to Ward, one of five letters that Profumo sent to Keeler, which she left lying around. He claimed that he destroyed two, and that her quondam boyfriend Michael Lambton destroyed another.

Although Profumo claimed that he dropped Keeler after meeting Sir Norman Brook, his son suspects that there were sporadic assignations during the autumn – conceivably in a spirit of defiance of the Cabinet Secretary’s condescending, headmasterly guidance. The hasty, imprudent note certainly mooted a further meeting with Keeler in September. One hypothesis is that their assignations continued until the autumn, and ended after Keeler refused Profumo’s suggestion that she leave Ward’s flat so that he could set her up in a flat of her own. According to this guesswork, Profumo thought Ward was a blabbermouth, who might gossip about his dalliance with Keeler (after Brook’s warning, he certainly severed contact with Ward, whom he barely knew: the two men met only once again, by chance, in the Dorchester hotel in March 1963). The affair may have ended for a commonplace reason. The sexual fire between Keeler and Noel Howard-Jones had soon been banked: maybe the Minister tired of her as swiftly as the law student.

‘The basic difference between a liaison and a marriage,’ Sir Richard Glyn MP said in 1963, ‘is that both parties in a liaison are likely to be unfaithful to each other.’ By the early 1960s, according to Lord Annan, ‘the Establishment accepted that men in public life slept with each other’s wives or had a steady mistress, and might as a result land in the divorce courts. It did not accept that they might pick up girls casually at parties or through the network that passes on names and phone numbers. Jack Profumo when Secretary of State for War had the bad luck to have an affair with a girl who also knew a Soviet naval attaché. She claimed (although in his report Denning, the Master of the Rolls, disbelieved her) that he too was her lover. Worse still she was a girl who would say anything to hit the headlines.’
⁹

In October 1961, when Profumo’s affair with Keeler was either over or petering out, she accompanied Ward to the Rio Café in Notting Hill, perhaps with the intention of scoring cannabis. There she met Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon, who had reached England from Jamaica in 1948, enlisted as a soldier but left in disgrace after two years following an attack on an NCO. Gordon, who sometimes sang in jazz clubs, had a runtish physique, dazzling smile, weedy moustache and receding hairline. He liked to act cool, but was easily spurred to violence. The Danish authorities had deported him after a furious incident with a girlfriend, and he had an English police record for assault and shop-breaking. Keeler alleged that Gordon introduced her and Ward to cannabis, that he later raped her while wielding a knife (which he denied) and much else. It is likely that she had smoked the drug before, uncertain that Ward had more than a few experimental inhalations, and certain that he disliked her use of the drug. Indeed, he later took her to a police station for a ‘talking-to’ on its ill-effects.

Previously, during August (a month after the Cliveden weekend), Khrushchev made a bellicose broadcast threatening to amass armaments on the Soviet bloc’s western frontiers. Workmen began erecting the concrete wall, with guard towers, that encircled West Berlin and severed it from the rest of Germany. The Russians exploded a hydrogen bomb.

Doubtless at Ivanov’s prompting, Ward persuaded Astor to send a busybody letter to the Foreign Office introducing Ward as an intimate of Ivanov’s. Ward, Astor explained, could ensure that any information about Western intentions that the Foreign Office wished to reach the Soviets directly could be given to Ward for transmission to Ivanov. Any desired meeting with Ivanov could be arranged through Ward. The idea that an unstable meddler like Ward could surpass the Foreign Office in diplomatic liaison was a reversion to the worst days of Cliveden Set interference in Anglo-German relations in the 1930s. Nevertheless, Ward was invited to the Foreign Office, where he offered to act as an intermediary with Ivanov. His offer was rejected.

Ward arranged for Ivanov to dine at the House of Commons with one of his patients, a Tory backbencher called Sir Godfrey Nicholson. As a result of this meeting, Nicholson approached the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, who advised him against private initiatives involving Ivanov. Despite this, Ward asked Nicholson to introduce him to Sir Harold Caccia, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. On 5 April 1962, Nicholson held a luncheon for Ward and Caccia. Ward said that he felt anxious about Anglo-Soviet relations, and offered to open direct contacts between Caccia and Ivanov. Ward prized informality, intimacy, confidences and indiscretions, so it is easy to see why haphazard contacts between the Russian embassy and the Foreign Office appealed to him. Caccia, though, must have seen such contacts as time-consuming complications with a potential for muddle or mischief. He declined Ward’s offer. The lunch, indeed, must have been frustrating to a busy man.

On 20 June,
The Times
printed a letter that the Colonial Secretary, Reginald Maudling, had addressed to his constituents scrutinising the reasons for his party’s recent startling defeat in the Orpington by-election and offering cryptic criticism of Macmillan. It shows the uneasy, frugal sentiments in the national mood even before the publicity of the Profumo-Keeler imbroglio. ‘The 1950s have passed and taken their problems with them; unless we turn to the problems of the 1960s we may find that we have worked ourselves out as the last Labour Government did,’ Maudling warned. There was a ‘new national mood’ expressed in ‘the growing sense that material affluence is not enough’. The Macmillan ethos, with its catchphrase ‘You’ve never had it so good’, seemed cynical, mercenary and complacent. Initiatives were needed ‘to buttress prosperity with moral responsibility’ and to inculcate ‘self-discipline’ so as to restore the ‘moral purpose that is missing from the search for rising personal wellbeing’.
¹⁰

Jasper More, Tory MP for Ludlow, called publicly in June 1962 for Macmillan to take an earldom and go to the Lords, while remaining Prime Minister, on the grounds that he looked ‘periodically a man under an excessive physical and mental strain’. The Liberal-owned
Time & Tide
added on 5 July: ‘Mr Macmillan would be surprised if he knew how many Tories are saying privately that he should take his coronet – without remaining Prime Minister.’ Further bad by-election results followed in mid-July, but Macmillan did not retire with an earldom. The earldom went instead to Kilmuir, his long-serving Lord Chancellor, who, when Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet, was pushed off the Woolsack to make room for Reginald Manningham-Buller in his new guise as Lord Dilhorne. After hearing that Kilmuir had complained that his cook would have been given more notice of dismissal than he had, Macmillan quipped that Lord Chancellors were easier to find than cooks. Maudling became Chancellor of the Exchequer.
¹¹

Macmillan was vexed when, in a
Panorama
television discussion of the Cabinet reshuffle, the insubordinate backbench MP Lord Lambton likened him to Macbeth. Antony Lambton was responsible for the glossy magazine
Queen
publishing a fortnight later, on 31 July, a theatrical spoof entitled ‘Supermacbeth, a tragedy in three shuffles’, in which the cast included John Wyndham as Lady Macbeth; Lord Beaverbrook as Hecate; Nigel Birch and Lords Hinchingbrooke and Lambton as the three witches; Profumo, Dilhorne, Hugh Fraser, Julian Amery, Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell as Supermacbeth’s servants; and Macleod, Redmayne and Christopher Soames as murderers. It was preceded by Lambton’s remonstrance addressed to the Prime Minister, in which he hectored Macmillan with the sentiments of his party’s irreconcilable right-wing: ‘You have been clever once too often, for in the last six years you have stripped the Conservative Party of all its tradition, and its beliefs, and given a continental twist to our politics … now you find yourself naked and friendless’. He urged Supermac to retire so as to give his party a chance of winning the next election: ‘Don’t you think that now is the time to go, as we can’t afford to have a Prime Minister at this time whose genius and spark have gone, and who is now the tired and discredited symbol of Conservative decline?’
¹²

This same issue of
Queen
contained a feature by its associate editor, Robin Douglas-Home, entitled ‘Sentences I’d Like To Hear The End Of’. It contained a series of incomplete sentences by which Douglas-Home hinted at choice London gossip involving people like Clore, Lady Pamela Berry (wife of the chairman of the
Daily
and
Sunday Telegraphs
) and David Frost: ‘… she said next on Charlie’s takeover list is …’; ‘… so completely innocently I said, “Lady Pamela, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine who writes the Medicine column in the Q …”’; ‘… overheard David saying that
he
still thought Michael Frayn funny because …’. One of the cryptic hints read: ‘called in MI5 because every time the chauffeur-driven Zis drew up at her
front
door, out of the
back
door into a chauffeur-driven Humber slipped …’. Fleet Street realised that the Humber indicated a government minister, and the Zis a Soviet bloc diplomat.
¹³

After a successful Conservative Party conference in October, Macmillan, in consultation with other ministers, began framing a new policy initiative which he called ‘The Modernisation of Britain’. Then, on 22 October, the Cuban missile crisis erupted. The imminence of nuclear war provided Ward with the excuse for a new phase of otiose meddling. Ivanov used him to instigate Astor and Nicholson to urge the Foreign Office to advise that Macmillan’s government should call an international peace conference. Ward was infatuated enough to believe that his interventions might prove momentous: they were, however, futile, and proved his naïveté. He was a tool of the Soviet tactics to make mischief in the Atlantic Alliance and create diversionary confusion by appealing to Macmillan’s hankering for British leadership of world summitry. The Soviets wished, Home wrote in June 1963, ‘to drive a wedge between ourselves and our American allies’, and ‘to test our resolve and lay a bait for our vanity’.
¹⁴

On 25 October, during the Cuban crisis, Ward interrupted a conversation on the subject at an adjacent table in the Kenya Coffee House in Marylebone High Street with pro-Soviet apologetics. One of the men at the other table was called William Shepherd. When Shepherd left the café, Ward was waiting on the pavement, and asked if he wished to meet a Russian attaché to hear the Soviet side of the crisis. It is unlikely that Ward would have done this if he had not known that Shepherd was a Tory backbencher, though he gave no sign of recognising his target as a politician. Both men were regulars not only at the coffee house but at Murray’s cabaret club: a waiter at either place might have identified Shepherd as an MP to Ward. It is less sure that Ward knew that Shepherd, like Henry Kerby, was an MI5 informant who regaled his handler with tales gleaned during his parliamentary duties and relayed information that MI5 wanted to be circulated in Parliament. Shepherd was also a conduit of information to and fro between the Commons and the upper echelons of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard.