by A. N. Wilson
‘PARTIES’
One of Miss Funloving’s close ‘friends’, Dr Spook of Harley Street, revealed last night that he could add nothing to what had already been insinuated.
Dr Spook is believed to have ‘more than half the Cabinet on his list of patients’. He also has a ‘weekend’ cottage on the Berkshire estate of Lord——, and is believed to have attended many ‘parties’ in the neighbourhood.
Among those it is believed have also attended ‘parties’ of this type are Mr Vladimir Bolokhov, the well-known Soviet spy attached to the Russian Embassy, and a well-known Cabinet Minister.
RESIGNATION?
Mr James Montesi, a well-known Cabinet Minister, was last night reported to have proffered his ‘resignation’ to the Prime Minister, on ‘personal grounds’.
It is alleged that the Prime Minister refused to accept his alleged ‘resignation’. Mr Montesi today denied the allegations that he had ever allegedly offered his alleged ‘resignation’ to the alleged ‘Prime Minister’.5
Then, on the evening this story was printed, Colonel George Wigg (1900–83) rose in the House of Commons. Wigg was an old soldier, the eldest of six children of a dairyman from Ealing, west London. His appearance, elephantine ears, huge nose, bright, intelligent eyes, made him a gift to cartoonists. Poverty made it impossible to take up scholarships won in boyhood and he left school at fourteen, joined the Hampshire Regiment at eighteen and served in the regular army as a private soldier. The odious braying Tory MPs, when he was elected for Labour for the seat of Dudley, in 1945, liked to mock Wigg’s struggles. ‘Has not the time come,’ asked Sir David Renton on one occasion, ‘for the Hon. Member to be sent back to his regiment?’6 It was a cruelly snobbish remark since in the Hampshire Regiment Wigg had never been promoted above the ranks. Only after war broke out did he become a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army Education Corps. He had got on reasonably well with Profumo until 1962, when he began asking awkward questions about a British Army operation in Kuwait, to repel an invasion for Iraq. Though puffed as a ‘model’ operation, Wigg knew this was a lie. As many as 10 percent of the troops were out of action through heat exhaustion. The replies given to Wigg by the Defence Minister were revealed by a subsequent Parliamentary Select Committee to be untrue. He used his questions as a launch pad for a wholesale criticism, quite justified, of the state of the British Army. He never forgave Profumo for trying to lie to him over Kuwait. When a cleric in the Admiralty called John Vassall was blackmailed by the Russians for homosexuality and subsequently exposed as an agent, Wigg received a mysterious anonymous telephone call–not to his own home but to the house of a friend he happened to be visiting.
‘Forget about Vassall,’ said the voice. ‘You want to look at Profumo.’
So it was that Wigg could act the role of Profumo’s nemesis in the Commons:
There is not an Hon. Member in the House, nor a journalist in the Press Gallery, nor do I believe there is a person in the Public Gallery who in the last few days has not heard rumour upon rumour involving a member of the Government Front Bench. The Press has got as near as it can–it has shown itself willing to wound but afraid to strike…
I rightly use the privilege of the House of Commons–that is what it is given to me for–to ask the Home Secretary, who is the senior member of the Government on the Treasury Bench now, to go to the Dispatch Box–he knows that the rumour to which I refer relates to Miss Christine Keeler and Miss Davies and a shooting by a West Indian–and, on behalf of the Government, categorically deny the truth of these rumours. On the other hand, if there is anything in them, I urge him to ask the Prime Minister to do what was not done in the Vassall case–set up a Select Committee so that these things can be dissipated, and the honour of the Minister concerned freed from the imputations and innuendoes that are being spread at the present time.7
Profumo came to the House of Commons and made a statement which was transparently false. Private Eye printed on its cover a picture of him sitting on a bed, with a balloon saying: ‘And if Private Eye prints a picture of me on a bed, I’ll sue them.’ Profumo had told the Commons, ‘there was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler’. Then he had left the House and together with his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson (she had played the lead in The King and I), and the Queen Mother, had gone to the races. But the matter was not going to go away. Lucky Gordon came up for trial at the Old Bailey, charged with wounding Keeler in the street. Ward gave the Home Secretary evidence that Keeler and Profumo had been lovers. Profumo resigned.8
The Establishment exacted a grisly revenge upon Ward, the initiator of the disaster. The osteopath was himself put on trial, on 22 July 1963, for living off the immoral earnings of prostitutes; for procuring girls under the age of twenty-one to have illicit sexual intercourse; for procuring abortions; and for conspiring to keep a brothel. Ward was acquitted of procuring, but the jury, persuaded by the prosecution counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones, found him guilty of poncing for Christine and Mandy–even though Christine denied being a prostitute. By then, Ward was in St Stephen’s Hospital, having taken an overdose of Nembutal tablets. He died at 3.50 p.m. on 3 August. Six days later, the funeral took place at Mortlake Crematorium. Apart from a solitary wreath of roses from his family, there was one wreath made up of a hundred white carnations. It was from Kenneth Tynan; John Osborne; his wife, Penelope Gilliat; Annie Ross, the jazz singer; Dominic Elwes, who had stood bail for Ward; Arnold Wesker; and Joe Orton. Their card read simply
To Stephen Ward
Victim of Hypocrisy.
A postscript to the Profumo affair occurred in 1976 when George Wigg was charged by police while accosting women from his motor car as he drove slowly near Marble Arch. The magistrate acquitted him, not because he believed Wigg’s denial, but because he considered that the ‘kerb crawling’ of which Wigg had accurately been accused did not amount to an offence.9
Profumo himself became the modern equivalent of a medieval penitent. He offered his services to Toynbee Hall, the settlement for the poor and needy in the East End, and thereafter commuted four days a week to help alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-convicts and the elderly.10
On the surface of things, it could be said that very little had happened. Some men had cheated on their wives with a number of compliant young women–even though the compliance was underwritten with cash, there was no suggestion of coercion. Despite the best endeavours of the press to say otherwise, no national security had been breached. But something had happened. Britain had changed. With their blundering, self-righteous rhetoric the politicians tried to put it into words. On television Lord Hailsham said, ‘Of course, we have all been kicked in the stomach.’ He then proceeded to kick Profumo, reminding him that he had ‘lied and lied and lied–lied to his friends, lied to his family, lied to his colleagues, lied to his solicitor, lied to the House of Commons…This is a great national moral issue.’11 Quite what the issue was, the politicians found it difficult to articulate. Harold Wilson, as the newly elected leader of the Labour Party, did his best in the debate in the Commons which followed Profumo’s resignation. ‘Saturday’s paper told of an opportunist night-club proprietor who had offered Miss Christine Keeler–or should I refer to her as Christine Keeler Ltd–a night club job at a salary of £5,000 a week, and I say to the Prime Minister that there is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot twenty-five times as much as it pays its Prime Minister, 250 times as much as it pays its Members of Parliament, and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion.’12
This economic approach to the question was certainly arresting, but what point did it make? As Dame Rebecca West pointed out in the next issue of the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Nobody sensible would go to a nightclub to see Members of Parliament coming down staircases dressed in sequins and tail-feathers unless there were at least 250 of them; you need a lot, as market gardeners cunningly say, to make a show.’13
Like the collapse of the Cro
wn Prosecution of Lady Chatterley, the Profumo affair was one of the prime factors in making Britain a little less stuffy about sex. By the time newspaper readers had glutted themselves with the antics of Stephen Ward’s distinguished clients, there seemed less case for public legislators telling others how to conduct their sexual lives. No one could say that the Chatterley case or the Profumo affair directly caused the liberalisation of divorce laws, the facilitation of legal abortion or the growth of tolerance towards homosexuals, but they played their part. More crucial than any part they played in the sexual revolution was the decline in deference, which was definitely hastened by Profumo, and the strengthening of the power of the press–and, with it, the medium of television. The laws of libel would be invoked, as they were by a succession of well-monied rogues over the next half-century, to cloak their misdemeanours. But after the Profumo case the press would be less timid about exposing not merely the sexual peccadilloes but all other aspects of the lives of public figures.
Part Three
A Fourteenth Earl and a Fourteenth Mr Wilson
10
Enemies of Promise
‘Mr Attlee had three Old Etonians in his cabinet. I have six. Things are twice as good under the Conservatives.’ So said Harold Macmillan in 1959.1 He could have added, as Anthony Sampson did in his Anatomy of Britain, that Eton had also educated eighteen out of the twenty-six dukes, and that it had produced Humphrey Lyttelton, Aldous Huxley, Lord Longford and Lord Dalton, a well-chosen list of names to indicate the Etonian range–Lyttelton a noted jazz musician and later a highly popular radio voice in a panel game called I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue; Huxley as a then modish, if now unfashionable, novelist; Longford and Dalton among other roles socialist politicians. Throughout the 1950s, Sampson showed in his Anatomy the high proportion of those entering the diplomatic service had been educated at public schools, a significant number at Eton. The same story could be replicated in the civil service, in the City and the greater financial institutions, and in the press. There was a strong Etonian mafia or Freemasonry in Britain, so much taken for granted among its members that they barely even noticed that it was there. Equally strong was resentment against it, especially among those men who were educated at other boarding schools.
Private Eye, for example, and with it a whole new school of journalism which materially changed the climate, was written largely by men educated at public schools which were not Eton. The magazine was in effect the continuation of a satirical journal begun at Shrewsbury School by Christopher Booker. He was the founder-editor of the Eye, and Richard Ingrams, who took over the editorship in an office coup only a year or so afterwards, Willie Rushton, one of the great cartoonists of the century, and the Trotskyite sage and idealist Paul Foot had all been together at Shrewsbury. Paul Foot left bruising accounts of the sadism of Anthony Chevenix-Trench, who enjoyed caning the bare buttocks of the prettier boys when they failed the ever-more-difficult Greek Unseens which he set them. Chevenix-Trench was a celebrated headmaster of Eton, who left under a cloud after the complaints made there. His behaviour at Shrewsbury quickened the hatred felt by the Private Eye Old Salopians for Eton. And when they were joined by Auberon Waugh, who had been sent by his father Evelyn to Downside Abbey, they were to encounter another yet more vitriolically anti-Etonian imagination.
Paradoxical as it may sound, however, it was the unfairness of their attacks on ‘Baillie Vass’ which made Private Eye such an effective force for good in Britain. Not since the days of the Regency when Cobbett wrote his Register had there been journalists who were prepared so frequently to risk the penalties of the law in order to tell the truth about what was going on in the country, and above all in the government. Wayland Young, author of what remains the best book on the Profumo affair, written in 1963, called Private Eye ‘the bravest and often the most accurate, organ of opinion in the British Press’.2 Whatever peculiar character traits fuelled these young men, they made the Establishment shake in its shoes. The weapons of cruelty and unfairness which they wielded would never have been so effective if they had weighed their words, or considered that a figure such as Alec Home was a decent man, whom they probably would have all liked if they had known him personally. Such feelings would have corrupted their purpose, which was a peculiarly English combination of frivolity and anger. The chief function of the magazine, from the beginning, was to make readers laugh. But it also made rogues sleep less easy in their beds, knowing that these young men were prepared to mock and unmask anyone, even if they were the Prime Minister, even if they were rich enough to sue them, and send them to prison.
From the beginning, Private Eye was a joint effort. Paul Foot was one of the very rare beings who genuinely hungered and thirsted after righteousness. A passionate atheist of the Shelley school, he had inherited enough of his Methodist West Country forebears’ temperament to need a creed as well as goodness of heart to motivate him. He found it, bizarrely, in the life and doctrines of Trotsky. In spite of the nonsensical views of politics which this sometimes inspired, it taught Foot to distrust all the major political parties in Britain, and everyone who represented them. He was the champion of victims and injustice, and was prepared to spend hours, days, months, listening to telephone calls, answering letters, visiting prisons, nagging at lawyers, to reveal miscarriages of justice. He was a great journalist.
So, too, in a very different mould, was his friend Auberon Waugh, who began writing for Private Eye only in the early 1970s, but who deserves a mention here as one of the inspirational figures in the team. His politics would be hard to define; though he was a lifelong member of the Conservative Party, he was really an anarchist, who believed anyone who actually chose to go into politics had some psychological flaw. But the hero, and pirate king, of the Private Eye story was Richard Ingrams. Because the magazine was so entertaining, over so many years, it is easy to forget that he defied the libel laws and other intimidations to print stories which, especially in its early days, no newspaper would touch. It was entirely owing to the indomitable courage of Ingrams himself that many of these stories, about the conduct of government under Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher, ever reached the public. John Betjeman had, certainly since the war, realised that one reason for the architectural wreckage of Britain was simple corruption. Plansters bribed local governments to give planning permission for the demolition of good, old architecture, and the erection of modernist blight. At the centre of one such scandal, which had the widest possible repercussions throughout the North East and in the London Borough of Wandsworth, was a corrupt architect and developer, John Poulson, together with his partner in crime, the Labour Party chieftain in Newcastle upon Tyne, T. Dan Smith.3 They had sucked many into their maw, including the lazy old Reggie Maudling who had been in Poulson’s pay but conveniently lost the relevant papers at the time of Poulson’s bankruptcy in 1972. (Maudling’s career was ruined.4) The web of corruption was so wide and so tightly woven that no ordinary newspaper would have risked, as Ingrams did, imprisonment in order to expose it.
The villainies of Jeremy Thorpe and Robert Maxwell were first aired in Private Eye. When no newspaper protested at the killing of unarmed Irish suspects in Gibraltar under the premiership of Thatcher, it was the Eye which did so. Without an editor who was cussed and weird and downright bloody-minded, as Ingrams was, the enterprise would either have folded, under the pressure of bullies such as James Goldsmith or Robert Maxwell, or it would have become bland. Paul Foot and Ingrams were once walking across the Berkshire Downs when Goldsmith’s heaviest guns were firing. Foot said, ‘What are you going to do about this Goldsmith thing? It’s going to finish you. It’s going to get you evicted from your house, and everything.’ Ingrams just said, ‘My main problem is how I’m going to attack him next.’ This was a rare, reckless courage.
Ingrams nurtured many of the best talents in Fleet Street. Little by little, the atmosphere in Britain changed. Without deference, as has already been stated, much of the business of public life be
comes impossible; and for that, with all the concomitant lessening of talent in politics, Private Eye must bear some of the responsibility. But when one considers the lists of Ingrams’s targets and enemies, it is hard not to rejoice at all his victories and overlook the undoubted cruelty in the very nature of Private Eye, cruelty which often hit innocent targets. The other vein of the magazine, best represented when Ingrams was working in tandem with the actor and former Eton master John Wells (‘Jawn’), was in parody. Ingrams’s Wodehousian gifts were never better shown than in the ‘Dear Bill’ Letters, which he wrote with Wells, purporting to be letters from Denis Thatcher to Bill Deedes, and in the voluminous writings of that sentimental romancer Sylvie Krin, author of such Mills and Boon style accounts of the Royal Family as Love in the Saddle and Heir of Sorrows. Nor should one forget the poetical works of E. J. Thribb, aged 17. 1/2.
The enemies of Macmillan, and of his successor, were so intent upon making mischief, both at the time of Macmillan’s resignation and in subsequent years, that the unsuitability of Home to the role of a mid-twentieth-century British Prime Minister was a given doctrine, seldom examined for its plausibility. In fact, given the choice between R. A. Butler and Quintin Hogg, Macmillan (and/or the Queen) made a sensible choice in selecting Home. It was a time of a singularly delicate international situation: the Cold War threatened to turn into actual war; the colonial and post-colonial situation in Africa, especially in Rhodesia, would have benefited neither from R. A. Butler’s instinctive cowardice nor from Hogg’s impulsive folly. So, after a tumultuous Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, at which the leadership contenders made exhibitions of themselves, the Queen summoned the 14th Earl of Home and asked him to form an administration. Since 1923, it had been a received wisdom in the Conservative Party that the reason Lord Curzon, much the ablest candidate, failed to become Prime Minister was that he belonged to the Upper House. Home therefore set about renouncing his peerage, which he was able to do following Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s renunciation of his viscountcy. As Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he contested the safe Tory seat of Kinross and West Perthshire, and he took his seat in the House of Commons on 8 November 1963.