Decades of work with poor brought rehabilitation

JOHN PROFUMO, centre of the most sensational sex and security scandal of the 20th century, did penance for parliamentary dishonour with more than 30 years of charity work among the poor in London.

Friends believe he more than made up for the ruin he brought on a brilliant political career by lying to the House of Commons over his relationship with a call girl.

In 1975 he came in from the cold with a CBE for his work at Toynbee Hall, where he began the long road to rehabilitation washing dishes and helping meths drinkers.

A searing story of sex, intrigue and espionage demolished John Profumo’s world of red-leather despatch boxes, scrambler telephones and the panoply of a Minister of the Crown.

He began 1963 as Secretary of State for War and a rising star of the Tory Party, close to Harold Macmillan, a favoured visitor at Buckingham Palace, a war hero and the dashing husband of a famous film star.

Then, seven shots fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Christine Keeler triggered Britain’s most notorious political sex scandal of modern times.

The Profumo affair convulsed Westminster for nearly six months.

Macmillan’s Cabinet was shaken by Christine Keeler’s revelations that she had sex with both Profumo and Commander Eugene Ivanov.

There were tales of organised orgies, including whipping parties at a house in Mayfair where, it was said, one of the guests became over-excited and died of a heart attack.

In March 1963, battered by parliamentary gossip, Profumo delivered a personal statement to MPs denying any “impropriety whatever” in his relationship with Christine Keeler.

His claim that a platonic affair had ended in 1961 was accepted by the Cabinet. Downing Street described the matter as closed.

But MPs and newspapers remained sceptical.

On June 4 1963, after a welter of rumour, accusation and denial that had rocked the Conservative Government, John Profumo was forced to resign when osteopath and man-about-town Dr Stephen Ward was arrested and charged with living on immoral earnings.

It was Ward, the son of a country parson, who in 1961 had brought Christine Keeler to Lord Astor’s country home at Cliveden, Berkshire, where Profumo first set eyes on the doe-eyed brunette climbing nude from the swimming pool.

She was 19 and he was 48, married to Valerie Hobson, star of classic Ealing comedies such as Kind Hearts And Coronets. Miss Hobson, who loyally stood by her husband throughout this terrible personal crisis, died aged 83 in November, 1998.

John Dennis Profumo came from a Sardinian family who had emigrated to Britain in 1885 and built their fortunes on insurance.

His father was an Italian baron and a King’s Counsel. John was born in 1915 and brought up as an English gentleman.

From Harrow he went to Oxford. He joined the Army in 1939 and ended the war as a brigadier, just the right background for a Tory MP.

He entered the Commons at only 25, winning Kettering at a by-election in 1940, to become the youngest MP in the House.