John Profumo
Two letters appeared in The Times in the middle of March 2006, after
the death of John Profumo: both praised him for his 40 years service to
the poor, one saying he had erred, committed no crime and repented by
atonement, a "great human being and a fine Englishman", and
the other writer, a woman, thought he was "motivated by simple goodness."
The power that emanates from leading politicians is attractive to women, and
greater men than Profumo have been thrust into the limelight and had their careers
ruined: Parnell and Bill Clinton are two examples. Lord Nelson and Jack Kennedy
survived scandal because they did not give a damn. The story in Washington was
that when the President was told that J. Edgar Hoover had him under surveillance
and the F.B.I. had photographs of him with Marilyn Monroe, he said: "I'd
like six copies. I've just recommended her to Bobby and I'll show them to him."
If Profumo had told the House of Commons: "It is true. I could not resist
temptation. I apologise to all concerned", he would have come out of it
smelling like a rose. But he lied to the House. Shock, horror. A politician telling
lies in the House of Commons! What next? Harold Macmillan, Supermac, who could
do no wrong, pointed to the door and said: "Go."
Now, after forty years, the sackcloth has been laid aside and the ashes are scattered.
Fleet Street reporters were having a great time in the Sixties, sniping at the
rich and famous, revelling in revelations about the high and mighty, and taking
the first steps to bring the age of deference to an end. It was not long before
the television reporters like David Frost started to follow.
Divorce, a word that was banned from the Irish editions of all the British newspapers,
was very much in the air in London.
A photograph in the William Hickey office of the Daily Express showed Hugh Gaitskell,
the Prime Minister, on the beach of Goldeneye, the house of Anne Fleming, wife
of the James Bond author, and she was much sought after by men other than Gaitskell.
She had laughingly passed on to her friends the amusing story of Lord Goodman,
on one knee, proposing marriage to her and confessing that he was a virgin and
had been tied to his old Mum's apron strings all his life. Then there was Gladys
Wilson the "poet", rather fed up with Harold and his antics and his
fascination for Marcia Williams. When Hugh Gaitskell died in Hampstead, Gladys
had stood by Harold, now that he was about to become P.M. But she was not too
happy about The Daily Mail's numerous revelations from inside Downing Street,
which came straight from "between the sheets" of Marcia's bed, as she
was having a tempestuous affair with Walter "Scoop" Terry, the Mail's
political correspondent, who fathered two children by Marcia and caused Harold
to say: "Haven't they heard of condoms?"
Then there was this gorgeous piece of crumpet swimming naked in Lord Astor's
pool at Cliveden (See my description of Christine Keeler in Don't Tell My Mother
I'm a Newspaperman, Minerva Press, 2000) and poor John Profumo, smitten at the
sight of "fun-loving" Christine, as the newspapers described her, running,
dripping and squealing, into his life.
Now another politician's wife was not happy. Valerie Hobson was talking of divorce
and John Profumo sought advice from a legal eagle who was an expert in the field,
and whose firm had represented the Duchess of Argyle in her divorce. He was Derek
Clogg, and his beautiful daughter Caroline* was married to Jeremy Banks* of the
Daily Express. Clogg was the divorce specialist with the highly respected firm
of Theodore Goddard. He had a reputation for "gagging" the Fleet Street
newspapers, sometimes making them settle out of court.
It was now that John Profumo made the second biggest mistake of his life: he
asked for advice.
Then, in the House of Commons, he denied everything.
But he had neglected to tell his legal adviser that he had written a letter to
Miss Keeler beginning: "My Darling.."
There was no gagging Fleet Street now, and "Supermac" was taking the
high moral ground.
Valerie Hobson announced that she would stand by her husband. Her photograph
was in all the newspapers and there seemed to be a faint echo of the line from
Sunset Boulevard: "I'm ready for my close-up now, Mister de Mille." Lights,
action, music.
Then the rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby "retreated
into their money" and walked away leaving the others to pick up the pieces. "Bill" Astor
threw Stephen Ward out of the cottage on his estate. Ward was hurt. He was abandoned
by those he had naively thought were his "friends".
Now it was Ward's turn to make a big mistake: he threatened to blackmail the
Prime Minister, because he knew from his "friends" that moralistic
Mac had been expelled from Eton for buggery. Ward had become a danger, and M.I.5
and the police were called in to silence him. After the court case he committed
suicide, and he left his suicide note to Tom Mangold, a Daily Mifrror reporter,
his only "friend" in the world.
* Having lunch with Caroline and Jeremy in the splendid Clogg house in Trevor
Square, I watched Caroline (who, until she met Banks, had never been out with
a man who was not a Guards officer) throw frozen chicken into one pan and frozen
peas into another. "The working class don't eat like this, you know," she
said, stirring the peas. "Oh, don't they?" I asked. "What do
they eat?"
"Kippers" she replied.
Jeremy's father was Major-General Banks, head of the Ethiopian police in Addis
Ababba, and two British men had been shot by the natives. Jeremy asked me to
listen in on his call to his father. "Is that General Banks?" "Speaking" "This
is Jeremy, calling from London. I'm on the Daily Express, Daddy, and I'm calling
about the two men who have been shot." "Who do you say is calling?" "It's
Jeremy, Daddy." "Who?" "It's Jeremy, Daddy, your son." "What
do you want?" "It's about the two men who've been shot..." "Don't
know anything about it. Ring the Foreign Office," he said, and put the telephone
down. It was straight out of Evelyn Waugh.
Ah, the High and the Mighty...
How the Press had feared them in those days of deference. The mere threat
of a writ for libel from Theodore Goddard, Derek Clogg's firm who had
handled Ernest and Mrs. Simpson's divorce in 1936 and the Duke of Argyll's
divorce from his wife Margaret, made them confident they could gag the
Press in the Profumo case. Derek Clogg had helped, with the Attorney-General
and the Solicitor-General, to draft the statement for his lying client
Profumo to make to the House, his complete denial of his affair with Christine
Keeler.
Lord Denning, upon seeing photographs of Christine Keeler along with headlines
War Minister Shock and Vanished Old Bailey Witness, observed that "most
people could readily infer her calling". So what was her "calling" me
Lud? The truth is that both Ward and Keeler were skint. He needed the help of
Mandy Rice Davies and Keeler to pay his rent, and for that he was found guilty
of living off immoral earnings. Ward was not hard enough to be a ponce. He had
the moral fibre of a broken-legged grasshopper. He could have made a fortune
if he really had been running these two extremely desirable young women in the
West End. Like most (but not all) girls working as hostesses in clubs, they might
occasionally take around ten pounds to sleep with a man who propositioned them,
but that was "to pay the rent". Full time professional prostitutes
in London's West End could earn over a thousand pounds a week, and real ponces,
like the Maltese Messina brothers, amassed fortunes right under the eyes of the
West End Central police, until exposed by The People newspaper.
Fleet Street had sharpened its knives for the powerful Tory politicians in office
when the Profumo story broke, for they had an old score to pay off: two of their
well-liked and respected reporters, Reginald "Fireman" Foster of the
Sketch and Brendan Mulholland of the Mail were sent to prison for not revealing
their "sources" to the Radcliffe Tribunal investigating the homosexual
spy John Vassall's relaltionship with his boss at the Admiralty Thomas "Tam" Galbraith.
As crime reporters they could scarcely name the serving police officers who had
given them details of their enquiries (about Vassall buying ladies' underwear
in the West End), because it would have spelt the end to their careers and pensions.
Crime reporters need the police and the police occasionally need reporters, and
so they stayed silent. But journalists have long memories, and they tend to laugh
when politicians, their incompetence exposed, say "Lessons must be learnt
from this" because they know that lessons are not learnt, and they go on
making the same mistakes as before, and even today Labour politicians say Lord
Denning's report was a whitewash, and making the Press the scapegoat for their
misbehaviour is a mistake, and lessons have not been learnt, for at the time
of writing we have "Two Jowels" John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister
who was knocking off his secretary in his office, squealing that he is going
to the Press Complaints Commision to report her for telling the Mail on Sunday
all about it, making himself even more of a laughing stock than he was before.
“History is bunk” said Mr. Henry Ford. He meant that the way
history was distorted and re-written by “authorised” biographers,
journalists, film makers, politicians and school teachers made it questionable
and untrustworthy. George Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish
civil war, of the lies and propaganda and distortions of fourteen political parties
and factions, influenced him to re-write the late (d.1937) Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
book “We” set in the year 2,700 A.D., and publish “1984” which
he set (far too early) in Britain (the British “proles” lives are
full of pornography, violence and sport, wrote Orwell, and as I write this, in
2007, those words have certainly become true). Zamyatin, born
near Moscow, a naval architect specialising in ice-breakers, worked in a shipyard
in Wallsend in 1916 and lived in Newcastle upon Tyne. The industrial
nightmare in his book was drawn from the mile-long Palmer shipyard in Jarrow,
and “We” influenced Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. George
Orwell attended Zamyatin’s wife’s funeral in Newcastle in 1945, and
Professor Clarence (“CB”) Brown of Princeton University, translated
Pushkin and Zamyatin while living in my apartment in Hampstead.
The case of John Profumo, if
studied from all angles, is a good example of the distortion of facts as they
were presented to the public, and give credence to the memorable phrase of Mr.
Ford.
For when Lord Denning, who was
born with a silver whitewash brush in his mouth, saw that photograph of
Miss Christine Keeler and pronounced his damning judgement of her, he hitched
up his crinoline skirts and knew in advance the verdict of his Report of 1963. For
the most important piece of apparel in England was not the lawyers’ wig
or the Masonic apron, but the old school tie.
The mindset of the solicitors,
lawyers, policemen and politicians can be judged from the careful reading of
Lord Denning’s Report of 1963, which examines the police bungling from
the outset and the skulduggery of the solicitors engaged in the hassle over how
much money Christine Keeler would get from newspapers or, if she was “bought
off” could she be done for blackmail? She had wanted to make £5,000
for her story so that she could buy a house for her mother for between two and
three thousand pounds. A quote from the Denning Report: “Stephen
Ward had been turned out of his house because he could not pay the rent.”
There is no doubt that Ward
had connections with the Russians in London, who were all too keen to use anyone
who might give them information, and they knew that Ward had connections with
the Cliveden inhabitants and the War Minister.
When I had lunch with Ward (steak
and kidney pie, mashed potatoes and a pint of beer) in a pub, he offered to get
me an exclusive interview with Kruschev in Moscow. He had sketched K. at
the Embassy. There was no question of my paying my own fare: that would be paid
for me. Any journalist visiting the Russian Embassy was watched through
a Judas eye in the door, and told that the person he wanted to see would be in
after four p.m. Of course the Embassy closed at 4 pm. A
dastardly communist trick! I took to sticking a piece of chewing
gum over the spy-hole and then asking for the Military Attache, enjoying hearing
the scuffling sound of panic and confusion of the functionaries behind the door.
Kruschev, an affable but extremely
dangerous clown, had been banned from Claridges for ordering a spittoon (see
Vol. II of my memoirs “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m a Newspaperman”)
and Dick West of the Guardian had once witnessed him challenge Bulganin to a
wresting match in the snow in Moscow as they waited for their limo., rolling
around in the drifts like schoolboys. Around this time the jolly wrestlers
were planning to send nuclear rockets to Cuba which could annihilate America.
In the worlds of diplomacy and
politics, a world of lies, cover-ups and hypocrisy, journalists were not liked. Noel
Coward, told by Nicholas Tomalin (killed by a rocket on the Golan Heights) that
he had had “a friendly drink” with someone, asked: “Is it possible
to have an unfriendly drink with someone?” Tomalin, writing the
William Hickey column at the time, replied that, yes, as a journalist it
was possible. Kruschev’s secret purchase of a pair of magnificent
Purdy shotguns, made to measure, at £1,000 each, which appeared in the
William Hickey column and might have annoyed the proletariat (designer shotguns
from the capitalists who could make better guns than they could make in Mother
Russia) had infuriated him. His acquisitive gaze, falling often on the
gold Omega watch worn by Lord Thompson who, with reporter David Leitch was interviewing
him in the Kremlin, caused Leitch to pass his boss notes which read: “Give
him your watch” only to have them scrunched up and pocketed by the newspaper
magnate, who told Leitch after the meeting: “Goddamn it, Leitch,
I’m not going to give my watch to that commie bastard.” And
of course Macmillan had managed to keep the fact that he was expelled from Eton
for buggery out of the Press, but Stephen Ward knew all about it from the
denizens of the New Cliveden Set.
Ward was broke. He needed
money to keep his mews flat going, and Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies paid him
some rent for their rooms. On the 6th of February he borrowed £500
from Lord Astor and “used the money to pay his rent and other personal
debts.” Stephen Ward did not even have a bank account.
But Ward had said in a statement
to the police that this whole story “might very well ‘bring down’ the
Government” and this was in a Special Branch minute: “They
believe it to be true that Profumo has told the Prime Minister of the matter
but they do not know for certain”. The Special Branch
Commander had cancelled what could have been a valuable interview with
Keeler which Lord Denning thought was “an error” for the Commander
told him he feared the Press might get on to it or that Keeler herself would
tell them. Denning refers to this as “an unfortunate decision” and “another
failure in coordination”.
The gravamen of this is: although
both Ward and Keeler were broke, there is the veiled threat by Ward to
bring down Macmillan’s Tory Government.
They had to be stopped. How
about charging her with being a prostitute and Ward with living off her immoral
earnings? Now The Establishment hitched up the crinoline skirts. These
immoral people had to be taught a lesson.
Profumo swore that he was telling
the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the Attorney General, that there
had been no adultery or sexual impropriety of any kind “with this girl” (Had
Bill Clinton taken this phrase to use in his statement of denial about Monica
Lewinsky?). Profumo added that Christine Keeler had become a drug
addict, had been sleeping with West Indians, was short of money, and was about
to sell her false story to the newspapers which would ruin him.
How curious: here was
Ward, borrowing money to pay his rent, having being evicted because of rent arrears,
without a bank account, and asking me to pay for his steak and kidney pie, and
Keeler smoking the odd spliff, shacking up with the men who also smoked it and
supplied it, and so desperate for money she would take a £200 advance
payment for her story from the Sunday Pictorial and lose the other £800 when
the editor backed out. When she fled London to avoid a court case, she
had £20 in her handbag.
The sum of £200 was what
a prostitute working the streets of London would earn in one day, or £1,200
a week with Sundays off for lack of clients who had all gone to church. The
Maltese Messina brothers were running most of the vice girls in the 50’s
and 60’s and I attended the last hearing, at Marlborough Street magistrates
court, when one of the Messina women, who looked like a small and shabby housewife
out shopping, was in the dock and gave evidence against them. Even the
police officer, Superintendent John du Rose, told me that he was shocked by her
story: seduced when young by a Messina, put on the streets and having
sex with forty men a day at £5 a time, she said she had asked for time
off as she had her period. Messina told her: “Whack a
sponge up and get on the street.”
All this took place under the
eyes of the police of West End Central and nothing was done until The People
newspaper exposed it. The girls who worked indoors in Soho, and call
girls, made even more for their ponces, who paid their rent. The
rent went mainly to the Church of England, who owned the premises.
So that was the financial situation
of Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler, both of them flat broke but sharing
expenses on the flat in Wimpole Mews, when the full force of the Law of England
was brought down upon them by the police and the Conservative government of Harold
(“Supermac”) Macmillan in 1963.
Following a speech on the 21st
of March by Labour MP Colonel George Wigg, in the House of Commons, which hinted
at a scandal about to break, onto the scene comes Boot of the Beast himself,
Bill Deedes MP, (he was the model for the incompetent journalist in “Scoop” by
Evelyn Waugh, set in Abysinnia) following a call from the Chief Whip Martin Redmayne
asking him to get out of bed, take a taxi and join the Attorney General, Sir
John Hobson and others at 2.30 a.m. in the House. Also in the illustrious
gathering of Tory Top Brass were Peter Rawlinson, the Solicitor General, Iain
Macleod, Leader of the House of Commons and Mr. Derek Clogg, the expert
at gagging the Press, to be joined by his client John Profumo.
Whiskies were served
There was a standing joke circulating
at this time: How many Irishmen does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: thirty
one. One to hold the bulb and thirty to turn the room. The Irish response
was: How many Englishmen does it take? Answer: two. One to
pour the drinks and the one to telephone for an electrician.
How many of the high and mighty
does it take to bring down a Conservative government? The answer is four: John
Profumo, the liar, and the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, and the Leader
of the House who believed every word he said.
And typing out the denial statement
Boot of the Beast with his trusty old typewriter, helping to defend dear Jack
Profumo whom he had known at both prep. school and public school, but feeling
rather sleepy at 4.30 a.m.
The police started investigating
Stephen Ward in April. In June he was arrested and refused bail. But
for his trial, 22 to 30 July (at which he had cried out: “This is
not fair!” he was allowed bail, and on the 31st, before he was found guilty
of living off immoral earnings, he killed himself in his tiny apartment in Wimpole
Mews. His farewell to the world was addressed to Daily Mirror reporter
Tom Mangold, his only “friend” amongst those high and mighty who
had abandoned him to his fate.
The Attorney-General, John Hobson
felt he had been struck a grievous blow from which he never recovered and he
died soon afterwards. He had been at Harrow, at university and in
the Yeomanry with Profumo in the war, and he had accepted Profumo’s word
of honour.
The Solicitor-General, Peter
Rawlinson, told friends that his life had been shattered by Profumo’s
lies and deceit, and a year later he gave up his work at the Bar.
Christine Keeler has always
said, forcibly, that she was never a prostitute and that Stephen Ward was never
a pimp. Ward gained kudos with the society people he liked to mix with
by introducing girls to men, and he had introduced Keeler to Jack Profumo and
Lord “Bill” Astor. He had also introduced the beautiful Bronwen
Pugh, London’s top model, to Lord Astor who married her.
As for the melee of solicitors,
lawyers and barristers and an agent, who were scrabbling around the payment to
Keeler by newspapers for her story, or the possibility of charging her with blackmailing
Profumo, she describes them in The Truth at Last (written with Douglas Thompson)
as a “conniving bunch”, and the trumped up charges by the police
that Ward was a pimp living off immoral earnings as “just a weapon”.
Commenting on the invitation
of Profumo to Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday celebrations in 1995 and
to the Queen Mother’s centenary celebrations, she wrote: “It
made me think again of those men from the past who, on the surface, always shone
with propriety. As we have found out, the polish was often a thin veneer. Many
of the men of the Macmillan era were of the old school in look and manner but
they have nearly all gone.”
Have they? The minions
who swarm around the famous and protect them, like those who defended Richard
Nixon until he faced impeachment, and those who claimed Macmillan was not told
about Profumo, will always be there. Thomas Corbally, an American friend
of Ward, thought to be an agent, said in declassified American documents that
Harold Macmillan had been told about Keeler and Profumo on 28 January 1963; but
British cabinet papers released in 1994 indicated that he was told three days
later, on 1 February. Lawyer Michael Eddowes who owned Bistro Vino
restaurant chain, and had offered to set up Keeler in a flat in Regent’s
Park (she refused) wrote to Macmillan telling him about Ivanov and Profumo “because
the security people had ignored me.” A Labour MP, Maurice Edelman, said
he had written to the PM with full details of the affair. Macmillan’s
private secretary, Harold Evans, knew the PM’s worries. Keeler
wrote: “There was one big thing which was concentrating the Prime
Minister’s mind. Had I slept with another Tory minister? I
hadn’t...” Assured of that, it was then that Macmillan
called in Lord Denning, on 21 June, 1963.
Macmillan knew how to cover
his back. An astute politician, the last thing he wanted was scandal. As
Foreign secretary he had cleared Kim Philby, in the House of Commons, of being
a spy, and may have influenced his being reinstated with the Secret Intelligence
Service and his employment as a reporter in Beirut for the Observer newspaper,
owned by the Astor family. 1963 had not started well for Supermac when
Philby defected from Beirut to Moscow in January on the Soviet freighter Dolmatova. It
was reported that the PM, told that another Russian spy had been detected, called
out: “Oh, no, that’s the last thing we want.” Never
mind the security of the country, the main thing for the Conservatives was to
avoid more scandal and stay in power.
Did Macmillan advise Profumo
to lie to the House? Did any of his legal advisers? That has always
been and still is the question. Most journalists believe that the
PM had advised Profumo to bluff it out, as he was desperate to avoid more
scandal after the Vassall Tribunal. Macmillan
sacked one third of his Cabinet on 13 July after a sizeable defeat at Orpington
by-election, but he kept on Jack Profumo.
Did Profumo have a private meeting
with Macmillan when he was advised to face it out in the House to avoid more
scandal and sleaze? If so he never revealed it, not even to his own son,
David, a talented writer who has published a memoir of the affair, and tried
in vain to pump his father for information. In his book David Profumo
recounts the story Ivanov told in print about visiting his mother, bringing her
bottles of vodka, while he photographed secret papers. Bringing the House
Down, young David’s title, could refer to his laughter at the idea of Ivanov
stealing plans for Polaris missile bases in his Dad’s office while his
Mum boiled the kettle. Even funnier was the idea that the elegant
Valerie Hobson, surrounded by servants in her magnificent home in Chester Terrace
would make tea for the Russian. It seems doubtful that she even knew where
the kitchen was located.
But this clever woman was annoyed
at the scurrilous memoirs, and sued Andrew Neil, the Sunday Times editor, for
publishing them, and they printed “a grudging retraction”.
The very last words of his brilliant
book of memories Dear Bill by Bill “Boot of the Beast” Deedes are: “I
believe there is a future life, but I do not let that discourage me from trying
to get the most out of this one” He
also says he believes in Christian forgiveness, and would not want to live in
a world where it did not exist.
Did Stephen Ward have a “future
life” ? Was he haunting Spring Cottage on Lord Astor’s
estate, suffering from the insult of being evicted by his “friend” and
wandering the rooms he had decorated (Lord Astor compensated him for the expense)
where he had enjoyed happy days ? If it were he, then he is no longer
earth-bound, for Bronwen, Lady Astor had the cottage exorcised by Dom Robert
Pettipierre, a Benedictine monk, asking him to “clean up” Cliveden
before she left. Cliveden had been a rendezvous for the British ruling
class before WW II when it had become a nest of appeasers, some of them pro Hitler
and the Nazi ideals. After he had finished in the big house with
his holy water and salt (the accoutrements of Catholic exorcism) he confided
to her Ladyship that he had never before experienced such an evil atmosphere,
and added: “There were a lot of accumulations from the past, some
of them quite sticky.”
Of “Christian forgiveness”,
lauded by Bill Deedes: Christine Keeler had experienced it. When
the headmistress of the school where she was working as a dinner lady found out “who
she really was” she was sacked on the spot.
The bullying, supercilious politicians
and lawyers and policemen are the ones who need forgiveness, not Christine Keeler,
who was honest about herself and “owned up” (how many politicians
and lawyers are capable of that?). The kill-joys and anti-life gang could not
bear the fact that she actually enjoyed sexual intercourse with men and was not
ashamed to admit it in public. They called her “a sinner” when the
only sin is stupidity.
Anyone reading this might be
inclined to think that I scorn Harold Macmillan because of his hypocrisy. Leaving
church one Sunday morning, he asked my colleague on the William Hickey column,
Colonel James “Jimmy” Horrocks: “Why does Lord Beaverbrook
not like me?” The reason was his failure to save the British
Empire, a subject dear to The Beaver’s heart. Had I been asked
why I disliked him my reply would have been: “Because you are a publisher,
and your family fortune comes from publishing, yet you offered one of England’s
great writers, Evelyn Waugh, a CBE. You humiliated him and insulted
him, and he refused the honour. So much for a publisher’s contempt
for authors.”
Let the last word go to the
long-suffering wife of Profumo, also humiliated by her husband, not only because
he had taken Keeler into the family home and had a fling in their double bed,
but when she learnt that he had bought Christine the same perfume as the
one she habitually used. She
did not understand, believing it was a gesture of contempt, but the “English
gentleman” was of Italian descent, and Latin lovers know the old trick
of buying the mistress the same scent as the wife, so that the latter will not
detect a different odour on him when he comes home, or a different perfume adhering
to the sheets of the matrimonial bed.
Valerie Hobson stood by her
husband until death parted them. She knew he was a philanderer with a roving
eye, even on the dance-floor, casing , as she said, every woman when he did,
occasionally, dance with her..
About John Profumo’s lies
to the House of Commons she said:
“He thought he could
get away with it. After all, most of his friends did...”