The problem was a massive and disastrous overestimation of Britain’s influence in global affairs a decade after World War II. Eden, Macmillan and the other cabinet hawks had failed to notice that the world had rearranged itself: there was a new war on, a Cold one, in which the UK would be no more than a minor and subservient player. Treaty obligations threatened to draw America into the conflict on Egypt’s side: the USSR was already threatening to pile in and ‘crush the aggressors by the use of force’.52 Eisenhower finally put the kibosh on it all when he threatened to invoke oil sanctions against Britain unless they withdrew. Having already managed to stop supplies via the canal itself, the country simply would not be able to get by if it lost the rest. (As it was, petrol rationing had to be reintroduced later in the month.)
‘That finishes it!’ remarked Macmillan, finally getting the message.53 A ceasefire was announced on 6 November, by which point nearly one hundred British and French soldiers had lost their lives. When the full and humiliating British withdrawal from the canal zone was announced on 22 November, it was not Eden who broke the news to the Commons: pleading ill health, he had handed over the reins to his colleague Rab Butler and gone off to recuperate in the Jamaica home of his friend Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, whose undiplomatic adventures overseas never seemed to end like this. Eden finally resigned as prime minister the following January. Suez finished him.
He continued to lie through his teeth about his foreknowledge of the invasion,54 but the evidence was out there. Ben-Gurion and his team had insisted on each party taking away a written copy of the Sèvres protocol: the last thing the Israelis wanted was for their European allies to have second thoughts and abandon them after they had fulfilled their half of the bargain. It would not be until twenty years later that one French and one Israeli official who had helped negotiate the protocol spoke out about its existence, and not until 1996 that the Ben-Gurion archives in Israel released the only surviving copy, which had been kept under lock and key ever since.
And the British copy, that solid evidence of both Eden’s perfidy and his inherited conviction that he could do what he wanted and the world would just fall into line? It had been burned in a Downing Street fireplace forty years earlier. The ashes were left for the servants to clear away.
2
SEX LIES
Do politicians have more adventurous sex lives than the rest of us? Probably not. But there is a lot more pressure on them to pretend that they don’t. If you and I get caught in a cruising spot or bondage dungeon (I don’t mean together; you haven’t even bought me a drink yet) the only ones likely to care are our partners and gossipy friends. For our elected representatives it will always be more of an issue.
Not that it is necessarily those who elected them who are most bothered: the public typically prove themselves quite capable of separating the professional and personal lives of their MPs. The problem is the tabloid press, who seemed to have taken over the job of policing the nation’s morals from the established church at some point midway through the twentieth century. Maybe more politicians should have mimicked the brass-necked Lord Lambton, who, after being caught in bed with two prostitutes in 1973, shrugged and told the press corps that ‘people sometimes like variety’. Yet, twenty years later, romps, shame and love children did as much to bring down John Major’s government as the more serious corruption which enveloped his ministers. Tim Yeo, Robert Hughes, Rod Richards and Richard Spring all resigned from government positions after extramarital exposés, while ironically the only minister to ride out the scandal was the one with the most mistresses: Steven Norris. (He had five.)
Only in the very recent past have prime ministers become confident enough to act like grown-ups – and accept the fact that their colleagues sometimes do the same. In 2006 then opposition leader David Cameron decided that his environment spokesman Greg Barker leaving his wife for a man was not worthy of public comment, while Barker’s mother-in-law dismissed any fuss with the immortal words, ‘It’s modern life isn’t it? Men seem to think they can get away with it now.’1 Barker was re-elected at the next election with a majority of nearly thirteen thousand, and that was in Bexhill-on-Sea.
These days you need to do something really extreme – one thinks, and then rapidly wishes one hadn’t, of the ‘bizarre sex act too revolting to describe’ committed by, or rather on, Lib Dem Mark Oaten that same year – in order to shock anyone.2 But being less than honest about it can still, sometimes, do the trick.
* * * * *
‘There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler.’
John Profumo, House of Commons, 22 March 1963
There was one small problem with the ‘personal statement’ that Secretary of State for War John Profumo read out to Parliament the morning after two Labour MPs brought up the rumours which were circulating about Christine Keeler, who had recently failed to turn up as a witness in a criminal trial: it was complete nonsense.
Let’s compare his account, as solemnly delivered to the Commons,3 with her version of events:
PROFUMO: My wife and I first met Miss Keeler at a house party in July, 1961, at Cliveden [the country house owned by Conservative peer Lord Astor]. Among a number of people there was Dr. Stephen Ward, whom we already knew slightly…
Keeler told the ghostwriter of her autobiography Nothing But… that she had been taken to Cliveden by Stephen Ward, who was not only her friend and landlord but the man who had educated her about ‘the orgies that were the rage in upper-crust London’.4 Ward rented a cottage on the estate, and had free use of Lord Astor’s swimming pool – where, on the fateful night, he had dared her to swim in the nude. During this interlude two figures in evening dress – Astor and Profumo – turned up and proceeded to chase Keeler, still stark naked, around the pool. Having caught her, Profumo ‘offered to give me a conducted tour…. He started cornering me. It was only for a kiss and a little surreptitious grope and really a million middle-aged men have done it before when they’ve had a few.’5
PROFUMO: … and a Mr. Ivanov, who was an attaché at the Russian Embassy.
The only other occasion that my wife or I met Mr. Ivanov was for a moment at the official reception for Major Gagarin at the Soviet Embassy.
Keeler claimed these two men from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain spent much of the following day’s pool party ‘vying for my attention’. The Russian won out first. ‘That night Ivanov and I made marvellous, passionate love.’6
PROFUMO: My wife and I had a standing invitation to visit Dr. Ward.
Between July and December, 1961, I met Miss Keeler on about half a dozen occasions at Dr. Ward’s flat, when I called to see him and his friends.
According to Keeler, Profumo himself lost no time: he phoned her the next day and took her out in his chauffeur-driven car and showed her all the sights: ‘10 Downing Street, which I had never seen before, and the barracks he was in charge of where the War Ministry was housed.’ In the process, he ‘made his attraction to me very clear’.7 His wife, unsurprisingly, did not come along for the ride.
PROFUMO: Miss Keeler and I were on friendly terms.
They had sex for the first time a couple of days later at Profumo’s house in Regent’s Park. ‘He was a strong, forceful lover,’ she said, ‘the kind of man who knows what he wants.’8
PROFUMO: There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler.
There was impropriety on regular occasions thereafter. ‘Jack Profumo came round for a straightforward screw, no more, no less,’ claimed Keeler. ‘As he came through the door he had only one thing in mind, and that was to get me into bed.’9
PROFUMO: I last saw Miss Keeler in December, 1961, and I have not seen her since.
According to Keeler, she broke off the affair after a month or so, when Profumo proposed ‘setting me up in a flat of my own’ – not because of any growing commitment or affection towards her, but because he had been warned by the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman
Brook, that he should steer clear of Ward, who ‘apparently had close connections with the Assistant Russian Naval Attaché and MI5 were not entirely sure he was the diplomat he made out to be.’ By this point Ward had started priming her with questions for her lover about ‘atomic secrets’. Out of loyalty she refused Profumo’s offer and did not see him again.10
PROFUMO: I have no idea where she is now. Any suggestion that I was in any way connected with or responsible for her absence from the trial at the Old Bailey is wholly and completely untrue.
That last bit at least was the truth. Although everyone suspected Profumo of being involved in her failure to appear in the witness box – even the attorney general had asked him about it – the person actually responsible for driving her to Spain was Paul Mann, who was attempting to broker the sale of Keeler’s story to Fleet Street.
The trial concerned Johnny Edgecombe, another of the many dodgy men that Keeler – always described by the Holly Golightlyish euphemism ‘callgirl’ – had unwisely got involved with. A jailbird who had earlier taken a knife to a fellow West Indian man who had become violently obsessed with Keeler, Edgecombe had started stalking her himself. He had been charged with attempted murder after firing a gun at Stephen Ward’s home when Keeler refused to let him in. Having fallen out with Ward, who dexterously combined his adventurous private life with a career as osteopath to a number of high-profile clients, Keeler was now willing to spill the beans to anyone who would listen – but not necessarily for free. Mann hoped to increase the value of her story (and his cut of the proceeds) by preventing details from coming out in court, where any Tom, Dick or Harry would be able to report them. He wanted an exclusive. Now Profumo was living in fear of his own part in Keeler’s story coming out. He wrapped up his oration to the Commons with an ominous warning: ‘I shall not hesitate to issue writs for libel and slander if scandalous allegations are made or repeated outside the House.’
His statement could, of course, be reported, and Keeler read it in one of the British papers at her hideout in Spain. She claimed that her first question was ‘What’s impropriety?’ She got the answer ‘Screwing.’ The trio of senior Conservatives who had interrogated Profumo ahead of his speech had been even blunter: as Iain Macleod, leader of the House of Commons, put it, ‘Look, Jack, the basic question is: did you fuck her?’11 He said no, and they made the mistake of believing him. After saying his piece in the Commons, Profumo and his wife, Valerie Hobson, headed off to the racing at Sandown Park in the company of their good friend the Queen Mother.
But he was not the only one lying about his affair at this point. Stephen Ward was denying everything too. Keeler, when she finally did sign a contract for an exclusive with the Daily Express, initially claimed she and the minister had merely had ‘a friendship no one can criticise’.12 In the end it was the conviction with which Profumo argued his own innocence to his colleagues that undid him. Home Secretary Henry Brooke wanted something done about Ward, who had used the publicity to show off about his friendship with Yevgeny Ivanov, claiming to have passed on information to MI5 about the Russian. The subject was a sensitive one: just a few months earlier a British civil servant, John Vassall, had been convicted of spying on the naval attaché at the British embassy in Moscow after the Russians blackmailed him over compromising pictures of him naked with no fewer than three other men. His boss, Thomas ‘Tam’ Galbraith MP, had been forced to resign as a minister on the grounds that he had addressed a letter ‘My Dear Vassall’ – which was enough to convince colleagues he was also gay.13
Thinking his cabinet colleague was in the clear, Brooke ordered a police investigation into Ward in the hope of pinning something on him. The most anyone could dig up in the way of spying was a passing comment to Keeler that she should ask Profumo about atomic secrets being passed from America to West Germany. This was a bit of a non-starter, so instead officers plumped for a charge of living on the earnings of prostitution. When interviewed by police, both Keeler and Ward had admitted that she had had sex with Profumo; Ward knew all the details, because one of his particular kinks had been that she should tell him all about her sexual encounters. There was no evidence he ever took a cut of her earnings from them, however. In fact she testified that the opposite had been the case: Ward had given her so much spending money that she was still in his debt.
Realizing he was being set up as a fall guy, Ward wrote to Brooke and the leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, informing them that Profumo had lied to Parliament, which was a far more serious crime than a bit of extramarital nooky. On 3 June the war minister was called back from a holiday in Venice with his wife. He resigned from the government the next day. ‘Daddy’s decided to stop being a politician’ was how Valerie, who had only learned of her husband’s adultery during the holiday, broke the news to their seven-year-old son, David. ‘He told a lie in the House of Commons, so now we’re going to have a little holiday in the country’.14
Profumo, who had been talked about as a potential prime minister not so long before, withdrew entirely from public life. He spent the next forty years working discreetly as a volunteer for Toynbee Hall, a charity in the East End of London. In his absence, the country went potty. The Times thundered, ‘It is a moral issue’, and declared that Britain had been reduced ‘spiritually and psychologically to a low ebb’.15 The Sunday Mirror railed against ‘the Upper Classes [which] have always been given to lying, fornication, corrupt practices and, doubtless as a result of the public school system, sodomy’.16 The dam of deference that had for so long protected the ruling classes had finally, and permanently, been breached. In the Commons, Harold Wilson opportunistically frothed about ‘disclosures which have shocked the moral conscience of the nation’ and ‘a sordid underworld network’ getting its claws into the government.17 The prime minister himself wrote a near-hysterical letter of apology to the Queen, assuring her: ‘I had of course no idea of the strange underworld in which other people, alas, apart from Mr Profumo had allowed themselves to become entrapped. I begin to suspect in all these wild accusations against many people, Ministers and others, something in the nature of a plot to destroy the established system.’18
What definitely existed was a plot to destroy Stephen Ward, who was made the official scapegoat for the whole affair. He was arrested a few days after Profumo’s resignation, refused bail and thrown into prison. His many friends in high places turned on him and refused to serve as character witnesses. His trial was held at the end of July. There was a scrum of photographers present on the morning after the judge’s summing-up, as he was carried into an ambulance having taken an overdose of barbiturates. He died three days later, but not before the jury found him guilty on several charges.
For her own part, Keeler got a criminal conviction – but in another case altogether. She was sentenced to nine months for perjury during the trial of a man who had raped her and held her prisoner. All she had done was go along with a story suggested to her by the officer leading the investigation, Samuel Herbert, who was keen to gather evidence against Stephen Ward. By that point, having been denounced by the press as a ‘shameless slut’ and an ‘empty-headed trollop’ who would ‘turn your house into a brothel, with coloured layabouts all over the place, drug orgies and all that jazz’, the twenty-three-year-old welcomed it as a relief. ‘I would be safe in prison, it would give me time to sort out the terribly confused state I was in.’19
‘He repeated his question, “Will you marry me?” I asked if he really meant it. “I give you my solemn word of honour,” he said. He even said he would put it in writing if I did not believe him. “Don’t be ridiculous”, I said. “Your word of honour is good enough for me.”’
Sara Keays, account of conversation with Cecil Parkinson, 9 June 1983
Mrs Thatcher’s favourite cabinet minister, Cecil Parkinson, was often described as a ‘love rat’, just as the child he fathered with his secretary was always called his ‘love child’. Since he never showed that child, Flora Keays, any love, and
refused to even meet her until the day he died, the second bit of tabloidese seems inappropriate. The Queen’s English also provides a better description than the first. Cecil Parkinson behaved like a shit.
That certainly is the descriptor that would be recognized among the classes in which the whole scandal played out. Sara Keays, the young woman who fell so heavily and unwisely for her boss when she arrived to work in his Commons office in 1971, was a solid product of the twinset-and-pearls, sherry-after-church Tory shires. She grew up in a large house in rural Somerset with parents who she introduces as ‘Colonel and Mrs Hastings Keays’ in her book about the affair; her brother-in-law was shortlisted as a Conservative candidate in the 1983 general election, and Sara hoped to be selected too, though she was happy to step aside when told it would be ‘better to have a man as their candidate’.20 Parkinson had the looks of a matinée idol and was praised by the Daily Telegraph for his monogrammed shirts; he had been a successful businessman both before and during his career as an MP and was plucked out as a protégé by Thatcher, who raved that he was ‘dynamic, full of common sense, a good accountant, an excellent presenter’.21 (More than one observer thought Thatcher had the hots for him.) When he became Conservative Party chairman in 1981, he had been married for twenty-four years and had three young daughters – as well as a long-standing bit on the side in the form of Keays, sixteen years his junior.
Not that that was how she saw herself. ‘It was a genuine love affair,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘I wanted so much to marry him and have his children.’22 And Parkinson repeatedly assured her that was exactly what he wanted too, although after eight years she had stopped believing him, and left both him and London in 1979 for a year-long placement in Brussels. He didn’t keep his promise not to contact her – instead, he called, begged her not to hang up and made a new promise. As she relates in her book:
The Lies of the Land Page 4