Profumo Affair

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Profumo Affair was a Sixties British political scandal involving then Secretary of State for War and member of the Privy Council John Profumo, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward, Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov, Mandy Rice-Davies, Lucky Gordon and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan.

1 The Affair
2 Claimed Espionage
3 Failed Cover-Up
4 Endgame
5 Traditional Tory Sleaze
6 References
7 External Links

The Affair

The then 46 year old Profumo began the affair with then 19 year old Keeler after meeting her at a party at Cliveden, the home of the influential publisher David Astor, in January 1961. The affair lasted only a few months but rumours about it circulated. Stephen Ward introduced Keeler to Profumo when she was seen splashing about naked in the swimming pool. Keeler was living with an osteopath and artist, Stephen Ward. In 1963 Ward told her to move out after the front door of his townhouse was sprayed by bullets fired by Lucky Gordon, Keeler's jilted Jamaican lover. That event drew police attention.

Claimed Espionage

Keeler asked one of Ward's patients for help, telling him that Ward had asked her to help him get atomic secrets from the Secretary of State. She then made the same claims to a journalist and a Labour MP. During their affair, and unbeknownst to Profumo, she had also been sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov. MI5 had been planning to use Ivanov's relationship with Keeler as a "honeytrap" to persuade him to defect. They had also discovered Keeelr was having an affair with Profumo and unsuccessfully warned him off.

Failed Cover-Up

Learning that Keeler had gone to the newspapers with her story, Ward tipped off the government. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan unwisely decided not to sack Profumo after being assured that his relationship with Keeler had been purely platonic. The scandal then erupted in full glory when Keeler failed to appear in court when her ex-lover was tried for her attempted murder. The rumour of the affair between Profumo and Keeler had been published in Westminster Confidential. Prime Minsiter Macmillan then asked Profumo to repeat his denials in the House of Commons. He did, stating that there had been "no impropriety whatsoever" in his "acquaintanceship" with Keeler. Keeler joined him in denying their affair.

MI5 attempted to ensure Ward's silence by threatening him with criminal charges and Mandy Rice-Davies persuaded to implicate him. Ward refused to back down and went public that Profumo was lying. Macmillan could no longer overlook the scandal and Profumo was forced to admit he had "misled" the House of Commons and resigned on June 5, 1963.

Endgame

Ward was tried on charges of living off immoral earnings, something he always denied and committed suicide before the trial was over, but not before Mandy Rice-Davies had revealed that "a number of well-known people" had been involved in the orgiastic circles in which she moved. One of them was rumoured (wrongly, the papers dutifully reported) to have been Prince Philip.

Lord Denning's subsequent report into what had gone on sold well. One of his lines of inquiry concerned the identity of a man who was photographed while being pleasured by the Duchess of Argyll. Another concerned a "slave" who was abused by party guests while wearing only a mask and apron. In the 1989 Scandal, a film about the scandal, the actor playing Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda) uses a long-stemmed rose to discipline him during an orgy. The politically weakened Prime Minister Macmillan resigned in November 1963 due to ill health and the lingering political effects of the scandal.

Keeler willingly talked to the papers and has particpated in the writing of several books. She also posed provacatively astride a chair, presumably naked, for what are today much-imitated black and white photgraphs.

John Profumo died at age 91 on March 9, 2006.

Traditional Tory Sleaze

Over the long term, the Profumo Scandal linked Britain's Conservative Party in the public mind with sexual sleaze and even contributed to the ugly crack-up of John Major's government: the evocative phrase "Tory sleaze" seemed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy as one Tory politician after ran afoul of the temptations of greed or lust.

References

Cristine Keeler. 2001. The Truth At Last. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd. ISBN: 0283072911.
Christine Keeler, Ivanov Yevgeny and Sokolov Gennady. 1992. The Naked Spy. Blake Publishing. ISBN 1857820924.
Christine Keeler and Robert Meadley. 1985. Sex Scandals. Xanadu Publications. ISBN 0947761039.
Tim Coates & Alfred Thompson Denning Denning. 2003. The Scandal of Christine Keeler and John Profumo: Lord Denning's Report, 1963. Tim Coates Books. ISBN: 1843810247.
Audrey Woods. "Profumo, At Center of 1963 Scandal, Dies." Associated press. March 10, 2006.

External Links

Scandal 1989 film

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This page was last modified 20:10, 10 March 2006 by dKosopedia user BartFraden. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.