62 years ago today, Lord Denning published his verdict on the Profumo affair – a minor sex scandal made far worse by subsequent lies. What lessons does the ensuing collapse of Harold Macmillan’s government have for politicians today? Asks Eliot Wilson
Today in 1963, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, published his 70,000-word report on the “circumstances leading to the resignation of the former secretary of state for war, Mr JD Profumo”. Commissioned by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, Denning had written it in three months, and it was a best-seller: 4,000 copies were sold in the first hour, eager customers queueing outside HM Stationery Office. It eventually sold 105,000 copies.
The Profumo scandal is only half-remembered now, more than 60 years ago: sex, spies, a corrupt Establishment and the winding-down of a Conservative government out of touch with a changing Britain. By the time Denning’s report was published, the Beatles had twice been at number one; at Number 10, Macmillan was 69 years old, a First World War veteran who hammed up the pose of a languid Edwardian aristocrat. It was starting to look out of time.
The bones of the scandal are straightforward. John Profumo had been elected as the youngest MP in the House in 1940; a sterling war record followed which saw him a Brigadier at 31, and although he lost his seat at Kettering in the 1945 Labour landslide, he was back on the Conservative benches for Stratford-on-Avon within five years. He was able, handsome, a rising star – and in 1960 he was made secretary of state for war, responsible for the British Army.
Profumo was a glamorous figure, married to the actress Valerie Hobson, but he was also a reckless philanderer. At a party at Cliveden in 1961, he met Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model, and they had a brief sexual relationship. That might have been that, except…except Keeler was living (platonically) with an osteopath called Stephen Ward, who was friends with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, assistant naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London. Ivanov was also an officer in the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. And he was also having a sexual relationship with Christine Keeler.
Not long after the Cliveden party, the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, unofficially warned Profumo against any further involvement with Keeler, Ward and Ivanov. The army minister sharing a lover with a Soviet spy was a potential security nightmare. But the entanglement reached the ears of Labour MP George Wigg, a grotesque and deeply unpopular but well-informed ex-colonel who supplied Harold Wilson with gossip.
When Wilson became leader of the Labour Party in January 1963, Wigg went after Profumo. In March, Macmillan wrote wearily in his diary “I was forced to spend a great deal of today over a silly scrape (women this time, thank God, not boys)”, but a week later, Wigg used the protection of parliamentary privilege to make the scandal public.
Macmillan wrote wearily in his diary ‘I was forced to spend a great deal of today over a silly scrape (women this time, thank God, not boys)’
That night, Profumo met with colleagues including the law officers and the chief whip, Martin Redmayne, to decide how to respond. The leader of the House, Iain Macleod, went to the heart of the issue: “Look, Jack, the basic question is, did you fuck her?” Profumo said that he had not. There was no way back after that untruth.
The following day, just after 11am, Profumo made a personal statement in the House. It lasted only a few minutes, but the secretary of state for war told his fellow MPs “there was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler”, then threatened legal action against any suggestion otherwise. Deliberately and with calculation, he had lied to the House of Commons.
Profumo left public life forever
Profumo’s attempt to kill the story failed. On 4 June, he met Macmillan’s principal private secretary, Tim Bligh, told him everything and admitted that he had lied. Then, with a punctiliousness unimaginable today, he resigned as a minister, an MP and a privy counsellor, and left public life for ever.
A tempestuous debate in the Commons on 17 June saw the government’s majority of 100 cut to 69 as 27 Conservatives abstained. A few days later, Macmillan asked Lord Denning to undertake his review.
Denning blamed the scandal on Profumo, for lying to the House of Commons, and on Stephen Ward, an “utterly immoral” man, who committed suicide in August 1963 while Denning’s pen was at work. Nevertheless, he concluded that there had been no breaches of security, and ministers had simply been let down by a dishonest colleague.
The government’s critics accused Denning of a whitewash, while the public seems on balance to have accepted it. But at best it portrayed ministers, and the Prime Minister himself, as naoive or credulous. It was another blow to an ailing administration, not fatal but telling; a month later, Macmillan stood down on health grounds and was succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home. An unlikely premier, the disarming and likeable Scottish aristocrat held office for only a year; but we too often forget he came within 200,000 votes nationally of Labour, holding Wilson to a majority of just four.
Six decades on, with no evidence having emerged of a risk to security, the Profumo affair remains what it always was, a minor sex scandal. Jack Profumo himself spent the remaining 40 years of his life volunteering at Toynbee Hall and became its chief fundraiser, being awarded a CBE in 1975 to mark some degree of redemption. Margaret Thatcher called him “one of our national heroes”, adding “his has been a very good life”. Perhaps more recent political miscreants could reflect on his 40 years of quiet, selfless repentance.
But Jack Profumo had made a critical mistake in his public career. He lied. A decade before Watergate, he proved that the cover-up is worse than the crime.