An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (41 page)

Barbara Castle gave a supper party for Wilson on 10 March. The other guests included Wigg, Crossman and Foot. ‘George outlined the story to us,’ Crossman reported, ‘and we emphatically and unanimously repudiated it. We all felt that even if it was true that Profumo was having an affair with a call-girl, and some Russian diplomat had been mixed up in it, the Labour Party simply shouldn’t touch it.’ They took this attitude, he believed, because they were ashamed of George Brown’s recent slurs about Galbraith. Their strong advice to Wilson ‘squashed’ Wigg.
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Journalists were eager for Edgecombe’s trial to open at the Old Bailey on 14 March, for they expected Keeler to make admissions or commit indiscretions during her testimony which they could print as a report of court proceedings without risk of libel actions – and without the expense of paying her. Perhaps she might blurt that Edgecombe was jealous of her affair with Profumo? Might she mention that she had been visited in Wimpole Mews by Profumo and Ivanov? In the event, Keeler never testified, for on 8 March Paul Mann took her by car to Spain. Probably Mann realised that if she testified in court, much of her story would become available to all of Fleet Street
gratis
. By spiriting her away, and ‘minding’ her in seclusion from journalists, he raised her value in a future newspaper bidding war. In default of her testimony, Edgecombe was acquitted of wounding Gordon and of shooting with intent to do grievous bodily harm; but sentenced to seven years for possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life.

It was insinuated that Profumo, or his political allies, had spirited Keeler away: Ward later alleged to his MP, Sir Wavell Wakefield, that Lawrence Bell had been paid by the
Daily Express
,
News of the World
and
People
for the tale that she had been sent abroad by Profumo. This rumour gained such credence that Hobson asked Profumo point-blank if he had engineered her disappearance. Profumo’s denial remains entirely credible. Photographs of Keeler soon appeared in the
Daily Express
, which was a more likely instigator of her vanishing beyond the reach of its rivals. It certainly maximised her story pugnaciously.

The front page of the
Daily Express
on Friday 15 March was headlined: ‘WAR MINISTER SHOCK – Profumo: He asks to resign for personal reasons and Macmillan asks him to stay on.’ (This story was not an invention, for Profumo had indeed suggested to Redmayne that he should resign, albeit likening his offer to the resignation of Galbraith, whom everyone agreed had been unfairly victimised.) Next to it there was a photograph of Keeler headlined ‘VANISHED – Old Bailey Witness’, with another photograph showing her kneeling on a rug, apparently naked, with a skimpy towel strategically clenched to her front, and giving a sexy sideward glance. The
Express
was adamant in its later evidence to Lord Denning’s inquiry that this juxtaposition of stories was utter chance; it was a measure of Denning’s selective gullibility that he swallowed this twaddle.
³²

Of the millions of
Daily Express
readers nationally, only a few hundred London insiders recognised the warning shot that Lord Beaverbrook was firing at the government and the Astors. Beaverbrook, who had been pursuing a vendetta against the Astor family since 1951, wanted to use his newspapers to stress the Cliveden connection. Beaverbrook, an incorrigible adulterer who for years had kept Jean Norton (the mother of Astor’s first wife) as his mistress, instructed his editors to harry Astor as ‘a callous libertine’. One of Beaverbrook’s adjuncts was Marcus Lipton, an MP who, like Wigg, preferred to be known by a military prefix, in his case ‘Lieutenant Colonel’. Lipton was a self-publicist who was always ready to provide Beaverbrook’s London
Evening Standard
with a juicy quote or to help promote press stunts. On one occasion he complained to the Speaker that parliamentary privilege had been breached when it was suggested that among over 600 MPs there must be a few male homosexuals. His intervention justified the press in launching a short-lived burst of muckraking.
³³

Now, once again, he obliged the
Daily Express
, which reported the ‘Vanishing Model Case’ on its front page of 20 March: ‘Christine was last seen in the West End. Mr Marcus Lipton, Labour MP for Brixton, is to ask Home Secretary Mr Henry Brooke about the case.’ Lipton also, as the
Daily Express
reported next day, interrupted a parliamentary question about tracing the missing ex-diplomat Philby (who had fled Beirut by sea two months earlier): ‘Would it not be more in the public interest if the machinery of state were to concentrate on tracing the whereabouts in England of missing witnesses?’
³⁴
Osbert Lancaster’s front-page cartoon in the
Express
on 21 March contrasted Keeler’s flight with the incarceration of Mulholland and Foster: a pompous man resembling Dilhorne asking of Maudie Littlehampton at dinner, ‘Really, dear lady, how could we pursue this poor, defenceless girl and force her to give evidence – she’s not a journalist!’

On the same day as the ‘Vanishing Model’ front page, a fearless champion of the People’s Right to Know burgled Astor’s house in Upper Grosvenor Street, and abstracted a file of letters. An accomplice broke into lockers at the school of Astor’s eleven-year-old son, looking for heaven-knows-what. The boys thought the intruder was working on behalf of the
Daily Mirror
, but it might as easily have been the
Daily Express
. On 21 March, Spring Cottage was ransacked. A
News of the World
reporter admitted entering the cottage with a photographer, once the door or window had been broken open, but no one took responsibility for the break-ins.

Shortly before the Commons debate on the imprisonment of the Vassall reporters, Foster and Mulholland, scheduled for 21 March, Wigg tabled a parliamentary motion calling for ‘severe financial penalties on the principal proprietors of newspapers which constantly indulge in adventurous sensationalism with little regard to truth’. In this he chimed with the view of many voters that journalists over-relied on ‘that old enemy, the anonymous informer’, and that the press, with its confusion of fact and inference, was ‘one of the most corruptive influences in society today’.
³⁵

During the night of 21/22 March, Profumo became the victim, in Lord Hailsham’s words, partly of his own poor judgement, but mostly ‘of a really foul conspiracy between the late Dick Crossman (utterly unscrupulous) and the late George Wigg (positively evil), and some shockingly bad advice from friends’. After the Labour leadership had quashed Wigg at Barbara Castle’s supper, and agreed not to exploit the rumours, Castle was briefed by the Labour-supporting
Daily Herald
to break the story during the Foster-Mulholland debate. Wigg and Crossman, disbelieving that a mere woman could be trusted to do an effective job, pre-empted her speech with interventions of their own. Wigg issued a challenge to Brooke, the Home Secretary, to deny the rumours implicating a government minister with ‘Miss Christine Keeler and Miss Davies and a shooting by a West Indian’, or else appoint a parliamentary investigation ‘so that these things can be dissipated, and the honour of the Minister concerned freed from the imputations and innuendoes that are being spread’. Crossman followed Wigg in pursuit of a select committee to ferret out the truth of the rumours. The barrister-MP Reginald Paget interrupted Crossman, trying to nullify the impact of the allegation, but only made the story clearer to newspaper readers: ‘What do the rumours amount to? They amount to the fact that a Minister is said to be acquainted with an extremely pretty girl. As far as I am concerned, I should have thought that was a matter for congratulation rather than enquiry.’
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Further into the debate Barbara Castle – primed by the
Daily Herald
as Lipton had been by the
Daily Express –
referred to ‘the missing call-girl, the vanished witness’, and went further in trying to implicate (unnamed) Profumo in a cover-up: ‘What if it is a question of the perversion of justice?’ she asked. ‘If accusations are made that there are people in high places who
do
know [Keeler’s whereabouts], and who are not informing the police, is it not a matter of public interest?’
³⁷

The Profumo Affair burst through the sound barrier of gossip. Valerie Profumo returned from the theatre that evening to find the Chester Terrace house surrounded by a loud, jostling rabble armed with notepads and cameras. The debate finished at 1.22 a.m. on Friday 22 March; afterwards Redmayne, Hobson and Rawlinson conferred with Iain Macleod, the Leader of the House of Commons and Chairman of the Conservative Party, and William Deedes, the ex-
Daily Telegraph
journalist who sat in the Cabinet as its public relations adviser. They decided to summon Profumo. Woozy from a sleeping-draught taken to obliterate the din of journalists besieging his house and banging on its door, Profumo hastened back to the Commons just before three that morning. In the Chief Whip’s room, flanked by his solicitor, Clogg, he found the law officers with Redmayne, Deedes and Macleod. They confronted him with the choice of resignation or an immediate statement in the Commons denying the allegations. ‘Look, Jack,’ Macleod asked bluntly. ‘The basic question is: did you fuck her?’
³⁸

It was as mismanaged a meeting as the one that forced Galbraith to resign because of his innocuous notes to Vassall. Ministers, from Macmillan downwards, were guiltily aware that they had overreacted to the Vassall press furore, and made a cowardly sacrifice of Galbraith. They were determined not to repeat the mistake, but they were exhausted men, whose talk was muddled. They neither tested Profumo’s denials nor scrutinised the text of his ‘Darling’ note to Keeler. Clogg, Hobson and Rawlinson – the three lawyers – drafted the statement that Profumo was to make in the Commons at the start of parliamentary business later that day. Rawlinson never thought that Profumo was too drowsy from the effects of his sleeping-draught to understand the statement to which he was committing himself. His scepticism of Profumo’s denials was finally quashed when Profumo made his personal statement at eleven that morning. Enoch Powell complained at a Cabinet meeting after the crisis broke in June that the ministers had been ‘very credulous’, but even Dilhorne said that he ‘would not then have been prepared to disbelieve Profumo on account of the information then available’.
³⁹

The chief purpose of the statement was to refute the allegations that national security had been jeopardised and that Profumo had instigated Keeler’s disappearance. His denial of adultery – with the uncharacteristically bloodless phrase, planted on him by the lawyers, ‘there was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler’ – seemed (to him) a side issue. The statement
sounded
definite and conclusive. Under parliamentary rules it could not be challenged or debated because the integrity of MPs making a personal statement is accepted unreservedly. In fact, the statement was artful, evasive and far from iron-clad, as became evident once it was studied in print. ‘There was hardly anybody on the Tory side who didn’t … assume that the stories were true,’ Crossman judged; but the fact that he, Castle and Wigg had ‘blown the gaff’ rallied the Tories into stalwart loyalty. ‘I left with black rage in my heart because I knew what the facts were,’ Wigg later said, ‘and I knew that … I had been trussed up and done again.’ Later that day, Stephen Ward gave an interview to Independent Television News in support of Profumo’s statement.
⁴⁰
Outside the Commons, and beyond Fleet Street, most people felt that grubby, unfair rumours had been spread about Profumo, as they had about Galbraith.

That Friday afternoon Jack and Valerie Profumo attended Sandown races with the Queen Mother, a fact which Labour MPs including Crossman saw as an objectionable gesture of support by the Royal Family towards a miscreant. In the evening the Profumos went to Quaglino’s for a fundraising dinner in aid of Hatch End Conservatives. Even the Beaverbrook press relented the next day with a front-page photograph of the Profumos ‘dancing cheek-to-cheek’ at Quaglino’s, and a lobby correspondent’s assurance: ‘Last night Whitehall made clear that Ministers regard Mr Profumo’s statement as closing the matter, and … a similar attitude prevailed among Labour front-benchers.’
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Yet the mischief-making did not abate. On Saturday 23 March the disreputable crank Michael Eddowes, in whom Keeler had confided in December, visited her mother at Wraysbury claiming to have been a friend of Ward’s for twenty-five years and protesting that he was worried Christine might be endangered. Sitting in the converted railway carriages, he insisted that there was big money to be made from the concoction that Keeler had been the lover of Ivanov as well as Profumo, and had trafficked in state secrets. Keeler should, he urged, issue a statement acknowledging Ivanov as her ‘boyfriend’, and admitting that she extracted information from Profumo which she gave to Ivanov for ‘a joke’. Eddowes added that Keeler would have to hold fast to this story once she had launched it, but that it was worth £5,000 to £10,000 for the press. ‘She would be set up nicely with nothing to worry about because they could do nothing to her because she was a child of eighteen.’ Eddowes predicted ‘that the Government would be forced to open a Select Committee, and she would state these things and turn out a little heroine’. Keeler’s mother was alarmed by the elaborate lies that Eddowes was inciting, for next day she went to report his mendacious conspiracy at her local police station.
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