A very British affair: How John Profumo and Christine Keeler brought down a Conservative government
When politician John Profumo had an affair with showgirl Christine Keeler in 1963, it brought down the Conservative government and gave rise to the tabloid press, writes
She is known to history as the tart who toppled a government of toffs. In 1963, Christine Keeler was at the centre of the Profumo Affair whose scandalous ramifications led to the resignation of the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan.
The scandal rocked the British establishment to the core, exposing rank hypocrisy and deep-rooted misogyny, and also helped to usher in the tabloid era in Fleet Street.
Christine Keeler herself would later say: “I was a 24-hours-a-day attraction before they invented rolling news.”
Born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, in 1942 in impoverished circumstances (she lived for a while in a converted railway carriage surrounded by gravel pits), she got a job at the age of 15 in a London gown showroom, and then tried modelling. But after a photograph of her appeared in Tit-bits magazine, she found a job in a nightclub.
Shortly afterwards she made the move that would change her life forever — a job as a topless showgirl in Murray’s Cabaret Club in Beak Street in Soho.
It was in a pub off Petticoat Lane, not a huge distance from that location in Soho where she had worked as a topless showgirl, that I met Christine Keeler for the first time. This was in 1989, and I had travelled to London in the hope of enticing her to Dublin to launch my novel The Taoiseach’s Mistress, a copy of which I had despatched to her a fortnight earlier.
She was 47 then and still a beautiful woman, and it was easy to see why the usually staid Sunday Telegraph, at the time of the Profumo Affair in 1963, would describe her as “that icon of the ditzy 60s ... a sultry brunette with wistful eyes and stunning legs, who raised the temperature”.
Today, two years after her death, she continues to fascinate and to be reappraised, because hers is one of the most notorious stories in British political history. This is borne out by the announcement that the BBC is to screen a six-part drama later this month entitled The Trial of Christine Keeler. The central character will be played by Sophie Cookson, who has previously starred in Kingsman: The Secret Service.
“I was always misrepresented in the media,” she told me when she came to Dublin a week after our meeting in London.
I was never a prostitute, though the papers called me a slut and a tart.
“And one of the reasons I liked your novel is that I saw something of myself in your main female character — a woman used by powerful and cynical political figures.”
During her weekend in Dublin, she appeared on RTÉ’s Kenny Live, having earlier been asked by a reporter what advice she would give to young women. “Don’t get involved with a married man,” she replied.
On the cover of her 2012 book Secrets and Lies, alongside a glamorous photo of herself, is this claim: “Now Profumo is dead, I can finally reveal the truth about the most shocking scandal in British politics.” That scandal made her one of the most talked about women in Britain and beyond.
When the news of the Profumo Affair broke in June 1963, over in Washington DC, the US president, John F Kennedy, asked for all the English papers to be delivered to the Oval Office so that he could follow the salacious revelations.
Over the weekend of July 8-9, 1961, it was the sight of Christine at the age of 19 swimming naked in an outdoor pool in a posh country house owned by Lord Astor, the proprietor of The Observer, that started John Profumo on the road to political ruin.
At the time he was secretary of state for war in the Macmillan government, and was also married to the actress Valerie Hobson. This of course was during a period when the Cold War was at its frostiest and the threat of nuclear conflagration, after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, appeared very real.
Unbeknown to Profumo, Christine Keeler was also sexually involved with Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London, a convenient cover for a KGB agent tasked with stealing Britain’s nuclear secrets.
There was alarm in MI5 circles when this became known. Here was a young woman embarking on an affair with a government minister holding a key portfolio while also sleeping with a Soviet spy.
At Murray’s Cabaret Club in Beak Street, Soho, Christine had become friendly with Mandy Rice-Davies who also worked there as a topless dancer. They both in turn were befriended by Stephen Ward, an osteopath and artist. He would be the link between Keeler, Profumo and Ivanov. Ward had patients and acquaintances in high society.
Among those who had sat for sketches by him were such pillars of the establishment as Winston Churchill, Princess Margaret, the Duke of Edinburgh, the poet John Betjeman, and comedian Terry Thomas, as well as Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus.
He was renting a cottage at Cliveden, the lavish country estate owned by Lord Astor, and had invited Keeler and Rice-Davies to join him for the weekend. Profumo and his wife were guests of the Astors in the main house. The guest of honour was Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan, on his way to Washington DC to confer with the Kennedy administration. Lord Mounbatten had also been present for lunch.
A witness later said that throughout the next day, Profumo, having come across Keeler naked in the outdoor pool while going for an after-dinner stroll, “could not take his eyes off her, despite the sobering presence of his wife”.
Meanwhile Christine’s pal, Mandy, had ended up in bed with Lord Astor. When he denied this later in court, she made a reply that won her a place in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he.”
Ward was pulling the strings, working to compromise the secretary of state for war, while also encouraging Christine to report all details of the pillow talk between herself and Profumo to Ivanov.
At the time, the Soviets were desperate for any information about British and American intentions in Europe, where the divided city of Berlin (the Berlin Wall had gone up in August 1961) had become a potential flashpoint for the two superpowers.
On March 22, 1963, Profumo lied to the British House of Commons about his relationship with Keeler. But later the prime minister, advised by MI5, would know the truth.
On June 5, Profumo resigned. From that moment on the fate of the Macmillan government was sealed. In the general election that followed in 1964, the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson emerged as the victors, perhaps the only real victors of the Profumo Affair.
But in the aftermath of Profumo’s resignation the British establishment needed a scapegoat. Stephen Ward was tried on a trumped-up charge of living off immoral earnings. The trial that followed is now regarded as a travesty of justice.
While awaiting sentencing, Ward committed suicide on August 3, 1963. One commentator summed up what had happened: “If the authorities needed a fall guy, they found one in Ward, a man who was smart enough to make powerful friends but dumb enough to believe that they would ride to his aid.”
Was he, as some had alleged, a tool of the Soviets? That was never raised at his trial, though Christine herself insisted he was a “Soviet agent”. She also claimed that when Ivanov “escaped home to Moscow after being tipped off by Stephen, he was given the Order of Lenin”.
In The Naked Spy, his 1992 autobiography, Yevgeny Ivanov ends a chapter entitled ‘The Charms of Christine Keeler’ with this passage: “My amorous involvement with Christine Keeler yielded good results; the Conservative Macmillan government, which did not suit Moscow, resigned and the Labour Party took its place at the helm. The Kremlin expected to have warmer relations with it.”
As for Christine Keeler, left at the mercy of a ravening tabloid press and a corrupt police investigation, she was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison for perjury where she was cruelly treated.
Loyal to the end, Valerie Hobson died in 1999. Profumo died in 2006. On December 4, 2017, Christine Keeler died, aged 75, after living a lonely, if dignified life.
“I have not lived with a man since 1978,” she admitted in her book Secrets and Lies. “I find it impossible.
Ever since the Profumo Affair, I have never known if a man was capable of loving me for me and not for being Christine Keeler.
“They did not want to be involved with me in a romantic relationship. As a sexual scalp, I was a trophy to boast to the boys about, but not to take home to Mummy.”
I suspect another woman embroiled in a high-profile sexual and political scandal — Monica Lewinsky — has had similar feelings ever since Bill Clinton left the White House.
When news of John Profumo’s infidelity and lies first filtered through to him, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan said he was “determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts”.
But that is exactly what happened. Except Keeler and Rice-Davies were never tarts. In his 2013 book An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, Richard Davenport-Hines points out that “neither woman was a common prostitute, street-walker or call-girl”.
Later the same author deals with the fall-out from the scandal: “The Profumo Affair was not only a body-blow to Macmillan’s government. It was the death-blow of an England that was deferential and discreet... Until 1963, newspapers protected politicians who were detected in adultery, or caught in the bushes with guardsmen. After 1963, Fleet Street’s emetic brew of guilty joys, false tears, nasty surprises and dirty surmises seemed limitless.”
