An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (43 page)

The police amassed their rickety evidence by exploiting antipathies, flustering witnesses, treating loyalty as a sign of guilty affections, and threatening, framing and arresting both leading and bit-part players in the drama. On 17 April, at a flat at 33 Devonshire Street occupied by her friend Paula Hamilton-Marshall (above premises supplying catheters), Keeler had ‘a battle-royal’ with the latter’s brother John. (The siblings had an Italian father who had devised an anglicised surname for himself; their mother Ruby Milton was a sometime next-door neighbour of Lucien Freud, who painted some of the family.) Keeler accused the youth of reading or rifling her papers, and, according to his account, she challenged him to hit her – which he did. ‘We really fought: she went for me, and I went for her,’ he testified six months later. ‘I punched her in the eye, and her face split above the eyebrow.’ He also kicked her repeatedly in the backside. In one of her habitual telephone calls to Herbert’s team, Keeler told them that she was bruised with a black eye. They suggested that she should lure ‘Lucky’ Gordon to the flat, call Marylebone police station, and then accuse him of assaulting her.
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Keeler telephoned Gordon’s friends telling them where she was. Gordon duly came banging on the front door. There was a scuffle in the hallway, and Keeler, who was unsteady after smoking dope, fell over and crawled away. There is no evidence that Gordon did more than shove her. Two West Indian men, her current boyfriend Rudolph ‘Truello’ Fenton and a friend of Paula Hamilton-Marshall’s called Clarence ‘Pete’ Camacchio, were in the flat. They restrained Gordon. Keeler, having set the trap, telephoned the police. Gordon, at the suggestion of Fenton and Camacchio, scarpered. Two police cars arrived quickly under the control of Inspector Basil Mitackis, whose reputation for political deftness was such that a year later he was seconded from the Metropolitan Police to serve under United Nations auspices as an adviser to the police force in Burundi. Fenton and Camacchio, who as black men had learnt to be wary of the Metropolitan Police, hid in a bedroom at Keeler’s suggestion; but the sole interest of the officers under Inspector Mitackis’s command was in nailing Gordon. ‘Miss Keeler,’ Detective Sergeant Sidney Whitten reported, ‘had recently been assaulted on the premises by a coloured man known as Lucky Gordon.’ The story, as later adapted by the police, was that Gordon had ambushed her on the pavement, knocked her down, punched and kicked her.
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On 18 April, Gordon was arrested and charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on Keeler. Herbert led questioning of him about Ward procuring ‘girls’ for well-known Society men: if Gordon made a statement that would help secure Ward’s conviction, the assault charge might be dropped. Gordon however refused to cooperate and the police proceeded to prosecute him for assaulting Keeler, although they knew John Hamilton-Marshall was responsible. Keeler was the chief prosecution witness, acting under police direction, in Gordon’s trial, which was to prove a calamity for her.

Another arrest to coerce a witness against Ward soon followed. On 23 April, Rice-Davies went to Heathrow airport for a Madrid flight. Hitherto, she had – like Gordon – refused to make a police statement about Ward. After cavorting for the flash-photographers, she was detained as she went to board her aircraft. The pretext for her arrest was that when Rachman had given her a Jaguar car as a seventeenth birthday present, he had also provided her with a false driving licence, which she had subsequently shown when renting a car. Now she was charged with possessing a forged licence, making false statements to obtain insurance, and driving without insurance. Exceptionally on such minor charges, Rice-Davies was sent overnight to Holloway prison by magistrates who next day set bail at the exorbitant figure of £2,000. In Holloway she was told by the police that if she raised the bail, they would re-arrest her on another charge as soon as she was released – requiring yet more bail. She was subjected to body searches, her pubic hair was shaved and she was locked in her cell for twenty hours a day. After two days she was desperate to be free. Chief Inspector Herbert returned with Burrows. ‘Mandy,’ he said, ‘you don’t like it in here very much, do you? So you help us, and we’ll help you.’ She told them what they wanted to hear about Ward and his parties.
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On 1 May, when her motoring offence came to court, she was fined £42. She left immediately for Spain, but when she returned, Burrows arrested her again at Heathrow. On 16 June she was charged with stealing a television worth £82. This was a set that she had rented for the Bryanston Mews flat; but she had been excluded from the flat after Rachman’s death, and knew nothing of the set’s whereabouts. At Marylebone police station she was told she would be released if she entered into a bond of £1,000 due on 28 June, the date on which the case against Ward was to be presented at Marylebone Magistrates Court. On 28 June, she duly testified against Ward, with the threat of a second police prosecution levelled at her. The trumpery criminal charge was then dropped, ostensibly because she paid £82 to the television rental company.

Ronna Ricardo, meanwhile, was interviewed nine times by the police. Herbert pressed her to say that when she visited Bryanston Mews, Ward asked her to go to bed with men. She said that a police car stayed outside her flat to intimidate her. Threats were made that her younger sister, who was living with her, would be taken into care. When another prostitute, called Vickie Barrett, was arrested for soliciting, police found Ward’s telephone number in her handbag. Herbert went to interrogate her. She said that she had whipped Ward at his flat. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you said you whipped other men at the flat?’ Herbert suggested. ‘Why should I say that?’ she asked. According to Barrett, Herbert replied: ‘If you don’t say that you’ll never be able to show your face in Notting Hill again.’ In mid-May, Lawrence Bell, who had been a stringer with the early Keeler and Fletcher-Cooke stories in Fleet Street, was arrested, and held in prison for sixteen days ‘almost incommunicado’ before being charged in June with nine charges of homosexuality with guardsmen. He was brutalised in prison. All this gave the appearance, said his barrister in open court, of ‘political chicanery and frame-up’.
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The police put Ward under surveillance, including telephone-tapping. They found no criminal activity. Herbert and Burrows positioned themselves outside Ward’s consulting rooms, questioning patients as they arrived and left. Male patients were asked if Ward had ever introduced them to a woman. Female patients were asked if Ward had made ‘an improper suggestion’ to them. Clients naturally cancelled appointments. Ward’s friends were visited, and asked for the names of women to whom he had introduced them.
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On 7 May, Ward telephoned Timothy Bligh asking for an appointment. Bligh reported this to Macmillan and Redmayne. He also consulted Simpson, who told him that the police investigation of Ward was proceeding: ‘an arrest possible in a week or so but the case against him not at present very strong’. Bligh saw Ward later that day in the presence of an MI5 officer, Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Cumming, who secretly tape-recorded the discussion while Bligh made a show of taking notes. Ward, in a cascade of words and speaking under stress, made clear that Profumo’s personal statement in the Commons was untrue. ‘I’m being completely destroyed, enormous pressure is being brought to bear on me … I have been battered steadily into the ground.’ The ‘horrid and ghastly’ police harassment of him was politically motivated: ‘I don’t know whether you have any feelings about this, whether there is anything you can do,’ he told Bligh (according to Cumming’s tape). ‘There is a great deal of potentially extremely explosive material in what I have told you.’
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Bligh, Macmillan and later Denning interpreted this as an attempt to blackmail Downing Street into ordering Henry Brooke to halt the police investigation. It is equally possible that Ward was reminding Bligh and Cumming that MI5 had used him as an intermediary to Ivanov.

When it became clear that his overtures to Bligh and Cumming had failed, Ward made explicit in a letter of 19 May to the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, that Profumo had lied in his personal statement. Ward gave a summary of this letter to the Press Association and other news agencies, which all refused to circulate the statement to newspapers. Next day he wrote to his MP, Sir Wavell Wakefield, and to Harold Wilson. ‘It is obvious,’ Ward complained to Wakefield in large, flowing handwriting, that the Marylebone police have been ‘acting on Home Office instructions’ in harassing his visitors and other contacts. His osteopathic practice was ‘being utterly ruined because of constant police enquiries amongst my patients and friends’, he told Wilson. ‘The line of the enquiries clearly indicates that I am under suspicion among other things of living on immoral earnings. This, of course, is complete nonsense … Obviously my efforts to conceal the fact that Mr Profumo had not told the truth in Parliament have made it look as if I myself had something to hide. It is quite clear now that they must wish the facts to be known, and I shall see that they are.’
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Wilson sent a copy of Ward’s letter to Macmillan, whom he met on 27 May, with their Chief Whips, Redmayne and Herbert Bowden, in attendance. Wilson was deft in dressing-up mean insinuations with earnest concern about non-existent security risks. ‘Mr Wilson went on to say that Ward was a self-confessed intermediary,’ records the official minute of the meeting. ‘It was beyond dispute that Ward hobnobbed with Ivanov. He must be regarded as a tool of Russian communism. Ministers had frequently met Ward: indeed Mr Profumo said in his statement to the House of Commons that he had been to his flat on half a dozen occasions. Did Ministers know that Ward was a Security risk? It would seem from the amount of mingling that had gone on that Ministers had not been told.’ Macmillan replied that ‘he doubted whether Stephen Ward bore quite the character or role which Mr Wilson had suggested’. Certainly, it was ‘possible to exaggerate the role that Stephen Ward had played during the Cuban crisis’.
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Macmillan confided his own account of this meeting to his diary: ‘The case of Mr Ward (who got Profumo into trouble) is being actively pursued by Harold Wilson, Wigg and one or two of that ilk. Wilson has sent me some so-called evidence that Ward was a spy or agent of the Russians. (The security people do not believe this, but believe that he was a pimp, not a spy.) Wilson came to see me on a fishing expedition on Monday. He is clearly not going to leave this alone. He hopes, under pretence of security, to rake up a “sex” scandal, and to involve ministers, and members of “the upper classes” in a tremendous row, wh. will injure the “Establishment”. Wilson, himself a blackmailing type, is
absolutely
untrustworthy. No one has ever trusted him without being betrayed.’
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The official minute of Wilson’s discussion with Macmillan was copied to Sir Roger Hollis who, on 29 May, informed Macmillan for the first time that Keeler had in January told Detective Sergeant Burrows that Ward had suggested she ask Profumo about atomic secrets involving West Germany. Ward’s feeble joke, which the
Sunday Pictorial
had induced Keeler to take seriously as a way of grabbing attention and making money, was now incorporated into her repertoire. Hollis’s news unnerved Macmillan and his Downing Street staff. The magazine
Time & Tide
on 30 May reported the existence although not the contents of Ward’s letter to Henry Brooke, and added: ‘There is pressure for an investigation into a subject which could bring down the Government.’ Two Labour MPs tried to table questions to Brooke about the letter. Macmillan decided that he must appoint an inquiry into security breaches under the Lord Chancellor, Dilhorne. ‘I am sure in my own mind,’ he wrote to Wilson on 30 May, ‘that the security aspect of the Ward case has been fully and efficiently watched, but I think it important that you should be in no doubt about it.’
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Lord Dilhorne was flabby, myopic, gruff and irritable with the obdurate, put-upon expression of a man who was beset by urgent pressure. He crashed through life with formidable, armour-plated confidence. ‘What the ordinary careerist achieves by making himself agreeable, falsely or otherwise, Reggie achieved by making himself disagreeable,’ wrote a fellow jurist, Lord Devlin. ‘He was a bully without a bullying manner. His bludgeoning was quiet. He could be downright rude but he did not shout or bluster. Yet his disagreeableness was so pervasive, his persistence so interminable, the obstructions he manned so far flung, his objectives apparently so insignificant, that sooner or later you would be tempted to ask yourself whether the game was worth the candle: if you asked yourself that, you were finished.’ When Anthony Wedgwood Benn appeared before the Commons Privileges Committee, Dilhorne had ‘hacked at me as if I was a man who had been caught red-handed in the act of rape and was then pleading mistaken identity. He really behaved in a most unpleasant and hostile way.’
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On 31 May, the Profumos flew to Venice, and stayed at the Cipriani hotel. It had been settled that Jack Profumo would see Dilhorne on Thursday 6 June (a day after his scheduled return), but at the Cipriani he received a message that Dilhorne wished him to return for an interview on the Tuesday. Knowing Dilhorne’s character, this demand for his early return suggested that his bluff was being called. His nerve broke. The ex-premier Lord Avon heard that it was Redmayne who telephoned Profumo in Venice, warning that ‘the truth had been discovered and that he must return’. Perhaps the Chief Whip did intervene, for the news that Keeler had started a new round of taped interviews was contained in the daily police reports that were received by the Home Secretary, Brooke, and probably available to Redmayne.
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