An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (40 page)

On 26 January, Detective Sergeant John Burrows called on Keeler and Rice-Davies with a routine reminder that they would be required to testify as prosecution witnesses at Edgecombe’s trial. They poured out recriminations to him. Rice-Davies resented being usurped by Ward from the Bryanston Mews flat in which she had been installed by Rachman: he had moved there after being asked to vacate the Wimpole Mews flat in the aftermath of the shooting; she regarded it as her home, and had partly furnished it herself. Keeler blamed Ward for being £800 short of the
Sunday Pictorial
payout. She was by then well-coached by journalists in saying what would have impact.

Afterwards Burrows wrote a report: ‘She said that Doctor Ward was a procurer of young women for gentlemen in high places and was sexually perverted; that he had a country house at Cliveden to which some of these women were taken to meet important men – the cottage was on the estate of Lord Astor; that he had introduced her to Mr John Profumo and that she had an association with him; that Mr Profumo had written a number of letters to her on War Office notepaper and that she was still in possession of one of these letters which were being considered for publication in the
Sunday Pictorial
to whom she had sold her life story for £1,000. She also said that on one occasion when she was going to meet Mr Profumo, Ward had asked her to discover from him the date on which certain atomic secrets were to be handed over to West Germany by the Americans, and that this was at the time of the Cuban crisis. She also said that she had been introduced by Ward to the Naval Attaché of the Soviet Embassy.’
²²
Marylebone CID considered the accusation of procuring to be absurd, and decided not to investigate further.

Rees-Davies went to Peter Rawlinson, the Solicitor-General, with a summary of what he knew on 28 January (the Attorney-General, Sir John Hobson, being occupied all day at the Vassall tribunal). There followed an intricate sequence of consultations and interviews with Profumo. Hobson began by believing the rumours linking Profumo to Keeler, and thought him capable of puerile lies about his sex life. When, however, Profumo undertook that he would issue a libel writ against any newspaper that suggested that Keeler had been his mistress, Hobson accepted his vehement denials, because he did not think the minister was a hardened perjurer who would enter the witness box and break his oath. Rawlinson doubted Profumo’s story, but loyally supported the official backing of the minister’s credibility. He felt that the private lives of ministers should remain their own business: certainly he respected Profumo’s resolve that he would not be hounded from his ministry by sleazy gossip of the sort that had assailed Galbraith.

Profumo’s solicitor, Clogg, believed his client completely. Profumo’s barrister Mark Littman was an exceptional man who had become a Queen’s Counsel at the age of forty. Born in Hackney in 1920, his life was transformed when, still an Islington schoolboy, he read Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu
. His wife was a Southern Belle who had been the confidante of Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood. As all this suggests, Littman was humane and wise. He advised that Keeler’s soliciting of £5,000 as a solace for not selling her story to Sunday newspapers provided grounds for a criminal prosecution for blackmail. With Clogg, he put this case to Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who declined to act. Littman was too inscrutable to show whether he, too, had been gulled by Profumo. It may be doubted.

On Friday 1 February 1963, Mark Chapman-Walker, former chief publicity officer at Conservative Central Office and now managing director of the
News of the World
, went to the Prime Minister’s private office to see John Wyndham, whom he had first met in the Italian theatre of war. Chapman-Walker repeated what he had been told by Peter Earle: that the story was hurtling round Fleet Street that Profumo ‘had compromised himself with a girl who was also involved with a negro in a case about attempted murder’. The ‘girl’ had sold her story, mentioning both Profumo and the Russian naval attaché, to the Mirror Group. Wyndham wrote a ‘top-secret’ minute giving a garbled summary of Chapman-Walker’s story for Macmillan to read:

According to Mr Chapman-Walker, Mr Profumo is alleged to have met this girl ‘Kolania’ through Lord Astor at Cliveden, where they chased her naked round the bathing pool … it is also alleged that:

1. ‘Kolania’ got into this company through the agency of a Mr Ward, who Mr Chapman-Walker described as a ‘psychopathic specialist’ of Wimpole Street;

2. Mr Profumo, visiting ‘Kolania’ in Mr Ward’s house, passed in the passage the Russian Naval Attaché on his way out from ‘Kolania’;

3. ‘Kolania’ has two letters on War Office paper signed ‘J’ – although it is not suggested that these letters are anything more than ones of assignation.
²³

This triggered another bout of consultations. Wyndham’s Downing Street colleague, Timothy Bligh, telephoned MI5 asking Hollis, the organisation’s Director General, to come for a talk. As Hollis had left for a country weekend, his deputy, Graham Mitchell, who was being kept under twenty-four-hour surveillance as a suspected KGB agent, substituted for him: he was shadowed to the meeting by two MI5 watchers. Mitchell told Bligh and Wyndham that Profumo had been ‘in and out of Miss Keeler’s place’, and had been warned against the association. MI5 were sure that there had been no security risk. Why, the private office asked, had they had not been told this earlier? ‘This is a free country,’ Mitchell replied, ‘not a police state.’ Wyndham and his colleagues continued to hear tales about the affair. Macmillan used to refer to 10 Downing Street as Vatican City – a citadel in which he was hopelessly insulated from gossip and changes of temper. Wyndham retrospectively felt that he had been slack in regaling back-talk as a good private secretary should: perhaps his knowledge of the Boothby-Dorothy Macmillan affair made him shy of discussing adultery with a Prime Minister whom he revered. The government’s handling of the early phase of the Profumo Affair was not, Wyndham recognised, as tight as the circumstances merited.
²⁴

Bligh consulted Profumo, who asked him (in vain) not to tell the Prime Minister of the rumours. On 4 February (the day that Foster and Mulholland went to prison) Bligh and Profumo met again in the presence of Redmayne. Profumo repeated his denials, but asked Redmayne if he should resign. It is unlikely that the Chief Whip full-heartedly accepted Profumo’s denials. However, the Radcliffe tribunal had not yet exonerated Galbraith: Redmayne, who feared the damage of another ministerial resignation on a security issue, advised that he should not resign. This judgement was understandable, but had fatal consequences.

Another showy, self-mystifying, soft-living figure now intruded into the story. Thomas Corbally was an American whose grandfather had founded a private detective agency. He too had been a private investigator, and in 1963 was based in London, ostensibly as an advertising executive, although he also worked for an American firm of corporate investigators and security consultants. On 29 January, Corbally visited the US embassy to report to Alfred Wells, assistant to the US ambassador David Bruce. Ward, he said, had treated him for a knee injury, and during a subsequent lunch had confided the Keeler-Profumo affair to him. Wells made a summary of Corbally’s information, which he passed to Bruce. Probably Bruce gave the gist of this to Macmillan shortly after the Prime Minister read Wyndham’s minute. Redmayne apprised Macmillan of the Profumo rumours on 4 or 5 February.

This palaver was not what the Prime Minister wished to give his energy and thought to. ‘Harold’s a very good Prime Minister as far as taking Cabinet goes: he takes it slowly, let’s everyone have his say, and if they don’t agree he doesn’t mind calling an extra meeting,’ one of his ministers had said in 1962. ‘But as he grows older he thinks about fewer things – he’s now mainly occupied with the Common Market, the Cold War and the Atlantic Alliance.’ Sexual gossip seemed a demeaning distraction from the old man’s great priority of international settlement. In any case, Macmillan preferred cheerful rascals to solemn hypocrites.
²⁵

Ward was his own incubus. ‘If only Stephen had kept his mouth shut, Profumo would never have been disgraced,’ Corbally told Philip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy when they were researching their valuable book
Affair of State
. ‘But Stephen talked about it, and talked about it. At every dinner party he went to, and everywhere else. There was no way to shut Stephen up. And he was greatly amused by it all … He loved being the centre of attention, loved being the one to come out with all the latest gossip.’ Profumo’s embarrassments had become a topic of smart cocktail-party gossip, as Lord Lambton warned Redmayne. Keeler and her friend Paula Hamilton-Marshall freely chattered about the situation to people they knew in Marylebone and north Kensington.
²⁶

On 8 March, an American named Andrew Roth, who had left the United States during the witch-hunt of communists and had a Commons lobby pass on the basis that he was correspondent of the left-wing French
L’Observateur
, published some explicit paragraphs in his thin, mimeographed weekly newsletter
Westminster Confidential
, which had under 200 subscribers (at six guineas a year). A story had ‘run like wildfire through Parliament’, Roth revealed.

The best authenticated version is this: that two call-girls came into the limelight as a result of the effort of a Negro to kill them for having given him a venereal disease. This notoriety having made their calling difficult, the two girls started selling their stories to the Sunday newspapers, the
Sunday Pictorial
and
The
People …

One of the choicest bits in their stories was a letter, apparently signed ‘Jock’ on the stationery of the Secretary for W+r. The allegation by this girl was not only that this Minister, who has a famous actress as his wife, was her client, but also the Soviet military attaché, apparently a Colonel Ivanov. The famous-actress wife would, of course, sue for divorce, the scandal ran. Who was using the call-girl to ‘milk’ whom of information – the W+r Secretary or the Soviet military attaché? … It was probably know-ledge about this story as well as the scandal concerning Charles Fletcher-Cooke and his young good-looking car-borrowing friend which led the Chief Whip, Brigadier Redmayne, to tell a correspondent with resignation: ‘We have all the luck!’
²⁷

Roth’s informant, significantly, had been the corrupt backbencher Henry Kerby, MI5’s snooper. Kerby’s fellow right-wingers in Parliament distributed copies of the newsletter. Profumo was disinclined to sue. His judgement was endorsed by both Clogg and Hobson, who felt that Roth’s newsletter had too small a circulation to be worth suing, but forgot that its readership of journalists and MPs was influential. Profumo’s friend Selwyn Lloyd was the only MP who was not a minister to confront him by seeking reassurances that the gossip was untrue. ‘Selwyn had convinced himself,’ wrote Ferdinand Mount who was Lloyd’s bagman in the Conservative Research Department, ‘that the whole thing would blow over. In any case, he always said, in his unworldly way, “I don’t see how Jack could have had the time”.’ Lloyd reported Profumo’s denials to Macmillan.
²⁸

In February 1963, a few weeks after opening his dossier on Profumo, George Wigg masterminded Harold Wilson’s election as Labour Party leader by a combination of cajolery and threats to MPs about their future under Wilson. He remained Wilson’s parliamentary enforcer. On 10 March he discussed tactics in exploiting the Profumo rumours with Wilson, who began planting the Profumo story in off-the-record briefings to journalists.

Harold Wilson had been the subject of an MI5 file since the late 1940s. He paid three visits to the Soviet Union while President of the Board of Trade, and revisited the country often while employed during the 1950s as economic consultant to a company importing timber from Russia. It was to preserve the quality of his business access that he refused to sign a condemnation by other left Labour MPs of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The KGB prized his political gossip, gave him the codename ‘Olding’ and hoped to recruit him. In England, Wilson was as sly and self-conscious as Macmillan in the false image that he projected: sanctimonious frugality rather than patrician nonchalance. He would never have said, as Macmillan did, ‘it’s very important not to have a rigid distinction between what’s flippant and what is serious’.
²⁹

A journalist who interviewed Wilson during his first year as Labour leader was handed a copy of that morning’s
Daily Express
gossip column. ‘The London season is over,’ William Hickey had written. ‘The last champagne glass has been smashed, the last gate-crasher has been repelled, the last escort has roared away in his sports car from the dying party down the empty dawn streets.’ Wilson – in 1963 – professed to loathe such luxury. ‘This sort of conspicuous consumption by a small but highly regarded class,’ Wilson told his interviewer, ‘is not merely repugnant to the vast majority but it makes it harder for us to do our job. There are more important things to do. What is wrong with our society is that those who make the money are more regarded than those who earn the money.’ Wilson was adept at synthetic moral wrath. The parliamentary reporter Bernard Levin thought the jeering, hooting and barracking by Tory bullies in the Commons of their opponents was obnoxious. The Labour Party’s equivalent parliamentary vice was ‘elaborate displays of mock indignation; whenever any Minister announces a cut in a subsidy or an increase in the charge of some welfare service the Opposition explode in an imitation of fury loud enough to put an attacking band of Cherokees to shame. He who has not heard Mr Harold Wilson, with tears on his cheek and his tongue in it, accusing the Government of “taking it out of the kids” has not yet explored the lower depths of which the House of Commons is capable.’
³⁰