An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (42 page)

On 25 March, Keeler surfaced in Madrid. Mann arranged a £2,000 exclusive deal with the
Daily Express
, which next day carried a photograph of her in calf-length black boots, short skirt and tight sweater. She was wearing the same boots, as well as false eyelashes (and sipping whisky), when Roger Hall of the
News of the World
interviewed her. ‘I am still utterly bemused and bewildered and astonished at the hue and cry which started when I left the country,’ she supposedly told Hall. ‘I have many friends who hold important positions in Britain, but I see nothing to be ashamed of in that. I was astonished that Mr Profumo should have been mentioned. Certainly both he and his wife were friends of mine. But it was a friendship no one can criticise.’ She was, she suggested, the target of envious killjoys. ‘The trouble is I am twenty-one, and many people consider me photogenic. I have lived in the West End of London and frequently been to parties with well-known people present. Presumably if I had been fifty-two and a housewife in Surbiton there would have been none of this trouble.’
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Apart from Profumo and Clore, Keeler knew no one of significance, but journalists eagerly spread their fib that Keeler had important friends. ‘Leggy, red-headed Christine Keeler managed to move in Mayfair’s smartest circles and numbered among her wide range of gentlemen acquaintances top names in London’s political, social, diplomatic and show business worlds,’ reported
Time
magazine on 29 March. ‘A social gad-about named Stephen Ward’ was the sponsor,
Time
continued, of the ‘one-time waitress and full-time play-girl’.
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The
Daily Express
interviewed Rice-Davies. Their questions duly elicited her claim that she had gone to bed with Bill Astor. When challenged three months later, while testifying in Marylebone Magistrates Court, with the fact that Astor had denied her claim, she retorted: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ One of the cruellest details of the Profumo Affair is that this slick evasion has become Bill Astor’s popular epitaph. It is still recycled by the lazy, unscrupulous and prim.

On the evening of 25 March, hours after Keeler was found in Spain, George Wigg was interviewed on BBC television’s
Panorama
programme. His Commons intervention, like those of Castle and Crossman, had been ill-received in the parliamentary party, which, unlike certain newspapers, disliked mudslinging. On
Panorama
he therefore concentrated on security issues. He peppered his remarks with disparagement of Ivanov whom, he said, drove a sports car, was tailored in Savile Row, and haunted nightclubs – all of which seemed objectionably decadent to his brand of MP.

Ward, who for three months had been stimulated and talkative at being at the centre of commotion, made the capital error of telephoning Wigg to correct these mistakes about Ivanov: the Russian drove an Austin A40 or Humber Snipe, he protested, not a sports car; Ivanov bought his suits from John Barker’s department store in Kensington High Street, not Savile Row; he was not a nightclub habitué. Wigg, who had a journalist named Wilfred Sendall eavesdropping on their conversation, agreed to meet Ward. Their long meeting on Tuesday 26 March began in the Harcourt Room of the House of Commons, which Ward insisted on leaving abruptly when an ex-minister whom he knew, Sir Robin Turton, entered the room. They retreated to an interview room to resume their discussion. It was typical of Ward that he exaggerated by calling Turton ‘an ex-Cabinet Minister’, which Turton, as an unsuccessful Minister of Health whom Macmillan had sacked, was not.

The object of Ward’s lengthy explanations was to exculpate Ivanov, but he could scarcely have volunteered more stupidly damaging admissions, which Wigg could use as pretexts for a claim that security issues were involved. Ward said that he had been Ivanov’s intermediary in communicating Soviet messages during the Cuban crisis; that Ivanov was under surveillance; that MI5 knew about Profumo’s relations with Keeler because he, Ward, had told them; that when he had seen Profumo at the Dorchester hotel three weeks earlier, and had asked about Keeler, Profumo had given an inscrutable answer, ‘Christine Keeler? Who’s she?’ He was bitter against Paul Mann, whom he alleged was ‘a spiv’ who ‘would do anything for money and … thought that in the Keeler story he had a gold mine’. He also complained about Lawrence Bell (whom he believed to be a contact of Wigg’s) selling stories to the
Daily Express
and
The
People
.
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Wigg consulted Harold Wilson and Sir Frank Soskice, the Shadow Home Secretary. Soskice expressed ‘moral disgust at the revelations’, but Wigg was implacable that Labour spokesmen must not indulge in prissy sermonising, and ensured that Wilson confined himself to the security angle – bogus though both men knew it to be. On the last Sunday in March, Crossman had a reminder that the press were itching to damage the government while Foster and Mulholland remained in prison. He dined with Michael Berry, editor-in-chief of the
Daily Telegraph
and its Sunday sister paper launched in 1961, and his wife. Lady Pamela Berry was an able, ambitious woman who slaked her frustration at being denied formal responsibilities or power by outrushes of political malice. She praised Wigg’s muckraking, but was indignant when Crossman explained that after Profumo’s personal statement the matter was dead. ‘That’s intolerable!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can you hold back now that the whole press is waiting for you to go ahead?’ Crossman incited her by describing Ward’s meeting with Wigg, adding the untrue detail that Wigg had tape-recorded Ward. He subsequently repeated these indiscretions to the
Sunday Telegraph’
s Peregrine Worsthorne. As he calculated, his stories appeared in both Berry newspapers.
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Yet the fatal unintended consequence of Ward’s interview with Wigg involved neither Labour nor the press. Ward did not visit the Commons with his head stifled under a blanket to hide his identity. He was not a man to slink down corridors quietly. His face was recognisable to MPs like Sir Robin Turton, who were his patients, and to journalists, who read their own papers. It is likely that Tory Party managers knew of the meeting before it was over.

A conference met at the Home Office on 27 March. It was attended by Henry Brooke (the Home Secretary), Sir Charles Cunningham (Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office), Hollis of MI5 and Sir Joseph Simpson (Commissioner of Metropolitan Police). Ostensibly Brooke called the meeting to check the rumour that MI5 had in 1961 sent poison-pen letters to Valerie Profumo about her husband’s adultery with Keeler. Hollis disavowed this absurdity. Brooke reportedly then enquired about prosecuting Ward under the Official Secrets Act. Hollis, who found the meeting ‘difficult’ and the Home Secretary ‘excitable’, mentioned Keeler’s statement that Ward had asked her to quiz Profumo about nuclear warheads for Germany, but dismissed the idea of taking action. Brooke turned to Simpson, who said that there was a chance of prosecuting Ward for living off immoral earnings. Perhaps the old pimping allegations inspired by John Lewis had resurfaced from police files, although they had no more substance than the tales that Clore had been convicted of obscenity in the 1930s. Once Hollis had confirmed after this conference that there was no chance of a successful prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, Simpson authorised a Metropolitan Police investigation into Ward’s sexual influence.
⁴⁷

The launching of this investigation immediately after Ward’s conspicuous Commons colloquy with Wigg raises suspicions that Brooke wanted a criminal investigation that would either scare Ward into silence, or discredit him. It is more probable that Brooke was casting for ways to get Ward because he felt, like his Labour counterpart Soskice, ‘moral disgust at the revelations’. He was ‘a very virtuous and conscientious man’, according to an official who worked with him for years. ‘Brooke was as straight as a die, the most honest politician I have ever known,’ agreed a Cabinet colleague. ‘To him politics is not the art of the possible: it is simply doing what he considers right.’ After his appointment as Home Secretary in 1962, Brooke had declared his distaste for moral laxity. ‘At this time,’ he said in a revealing phrase, ‘when a growing number of people feel free to do anything not specifically condemned by Act, we should be slow to loosen up.’ Part of his duty at the Home Office, he told Alec Douglas-Home, was ‘helping the young of our country to grow up straight’. His wife, with whom he shared deep Christian beliefs, described Profumo as ‘a man who has sinned against our standards’.
⁴⁸

Brooke, who was the least politically adept or imaginative Home Secretary since Joynson-Hicks in the 1920s, blundered forward at his conference with Hollis and Simpson intent on keeping the young straight and punishing those who loosened national standards. He was too sure of his moral course to reflect that after Profumo’s personal statement had quelled the Commons, it was ruinous to the government’s interests to instigate police dredging of sludgy depths that might lead to sensational arrests, a flamboyant trial and months of torrid publicity. In fairness to Brooke, the notion that he instigated the police investigation of Ward, or that Ward’s prosecution was motivated by political malice, was always denied by Peter Rawlinson, who believed that the police faced a situation in which they would be suspected of shielding influential men unless they acted. Girls whom Ward knew seemed conveniently available for his male acquaintances; and it was unthinkable to the official mind that they might be sexually independent young women capable of making their own choices.

Whatever the reasoning, Brooke’s conference and the ensuing police investigation proved calamitous for Macmillan’s government. The inquiry was headed by Chief Inspector Samuel Herbert, who had joined the police seventeen years earlier after being demobbed from the army, in which he held the rank of sergeant. Herbert was abetted by Detective Sergeant John Burrows, and assisted by two police sergeants.

From the outset this was an exceptional investigation which deviated from usual police procedure. Usually officers are despatched when a crime has been committed. They are charged to find evidence which will secure the criminal’s conviction. Their instructions in Ward’s case were to investigate a specific individual in order to see if he could be charged with a crime. This reversal of usual detective methods suggests special instructions. Herbert set out to find, or create, evidence which he might fix on Ward to secure the conviction which his political masters sought. From 2 April to 8 June he interviewed between 125 and 140 prospective witnesses. The sergeants filed daily progress reports. Within a short time, ten copies were being circulated of each daily report. Some went to Whitehall and Westminster.

On 4 April, Herbert and Burrows first visited Keeler at the Marylebone flat where she was staying. Herbert’s interrogations were terse and overbearing, while Burrows was gently probing. They told her that she might face charges under the Official Secrets Act if she did not cooperate, for they were investigating espionage and protecting national security. On Friday 5 and Saturday 6 April, they interviewed her again – that is, on three consecutive days – at Marylebone police station. During the second interview she confirmed her affair with Profumo. Having got her to admit this, they asked if she had gone to bed with Astor. They asked the same questions about every man whom they thought she had met through Ward.

Keeler was slow to realise that Herbert aimed to charge Ward under the Sexual Offences Act. It was only when he demanded to know about abortions that she suspected something was amiss. She was asked to name each of the men with whom she had sex, or had given her money, since her first meeting with Ward. She mentioned a man called Charles, from whom she accepted a present of money (this episode with Clore was to prove fatal to Ward). She was questioned a total of twenty-four times by Herbert and Burrows before Ward’s appearance in a magistrates’ court on 28 June. Under their pressure, she was spasmodic, turbid and fitful in her stories. Keeler, who had a history of dependence on men who abused her, developed a semi-masochistic reliance on her contacts with Herbert and Burrows, with whom she spoke by telephone almost daily.
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Police investigators used the hoary technique of attrition. Witnesses were kept waiting for hours in police stations until they were too weary to resist signing inaccurate statements. On 10 April, John Hamilton-Marshall, an epicene, larcenous twenty-two-year-old who dabbled in antiques and was devoted to Ward, who had always treated him kindly, signed a police statement which implicated the osteopath in obtaining an illegal abortion for a girl of his acquaintance. He retracted this part of the statement at the Marylebone Magistrates Court hearing in June. ‘I was there,’ he explained, ‘for six hours: I skimmed through it, because I was glad to get out.’ At Ward’s Old Bailey trial, the prostitute Ronna Ricardo testified that a police statement which she had signed on 6 April contained several notions that had been implanted by the police: ‘At the police station I was kept so long I was ready to sign anything.’ She had been confined in the interview room at Harrow Road police station for four hours before the statement was read aloud to her at two in the morning, when she was tired and vulnerable. ‘I didn’t want to sign that statement. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it … I wanted the police to leave me alone.’
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The Astors were in America for six weeks until 12 April. Lord Astor was stunned when, on the thirteenth, he was asked to give a police interview. Herbert and Burrows asked for the names of women he had taken to bed; whether he had met them through Ward; and whether he had paid for sex. They elicited from Astor that he had once given Keeler and Rice-Davies a cheque to cover the rent of their flat in Barons Court. As Herbert and Burrows believed both women to have had sex in that flat with men, they decided Astor was guilty of keeping a brothel, and sought to develop a case against him. Although this line was dropped, with all fire concentrated on Ward, Astor was shattered by this minatory interrogation. He asked Ward to leave Spring Cottage forthwith.