The 1960s in Britain are often remembered as a time of profound social and cultural change, when the staid mores of the previous decades gave way to a new permissiveness and rebelliousness, especially among the younger generation. Perhaps no single event encapsulated this upheaval more than the Profumo Affair, a scandal that began with a covert affair between a government minister and a model and ended with the downfall of a prime minister and the shattering of the British public‘s trust in its ruling classes.
A Slow-Burning Fuse
The fuse for the scandal was first lit in the summer of 1961 at Cliveden, a stately Buckinghamshire estate owned by Lord Astor. It was there in July that John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan‘s Conservative government, first met Christine Keeler, a striking 19-year-old model and topless dancer.
Profumo was 46, married, and a rising star in the Tory party, a veteran MP who had previously served as a junior minister at the Foreign Office. Keeler meanwhile came from a working-class background and had lived a turbulent youth in London, including a teenage pregnancy and time spent in a home for delinquent girls. Despite their differences, the two soon began an illicit relationship.
Profumo and Keeler were brought together by Stephen Ward, a mysterious London osteopath and socialite who moved easily between the worlds of high society and the demimonde. Ward rented a cottage at Cliveden from Lord Astor and had taken Keeler under his wing, grooming her as a model and introducing her to his wealthy and influential friends.
One of those friends was Yevgeny Ivanov, the senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. Ward had introduced Ivanov to Keeler shortly before she met Profumo and the pair had quickly begun a sexual relationship as well. Keeler would later say that Ward asked her to quiz Ivanov for information, though whether this was merely pillow talk or a concerted spying effort remains unclear.
Profumo and Keeler‘s dalliance was brief, lasting only a few months until Profumo cut off contact in August 1961. However, whispers about the affair, and Keeler‘s simultaneous fling with Ivanov, began to spread through London‘s gossipy upper crust. By early 1963, Keeler was back in the spotlight for an unrelated incident between two of her other lovers that culminated in a shooting outside Ward‘s flat.
A Scandal Erupts
It was this shooting incident that finally alerted the wider British public to the Keeler story and began to pull on the scandalous threads connected to Profumo and Ward. In March 1963, Profumo was questioned about Keeler before the House of Commons. He issued a fierce denial of any "impropriety whatsoever" and threatened to sue anyone who suggested otherwise for libel.
Profumo‘s bluff held for a few months, but by June the rumor mill had reached a fever pitch. On June 4, an embattled Profumo finally came clean in a statement that admitted he had misled his colleagues and the public:
"I said that there had been no impropriety. To my very deep regret I have to admit that this was not true, and that I misled the House."
Profumo promptly resigned his government and Parliamentary posts. The opposition Labour party pounced and called for a formal inquiry, which Macmillan initially resisted. The press, meanwhile, went into overdrive.
Amidst the furor, attention soon turned to Stephen Ward and his role in the whole tawdry affair. In July, Ward was arrested and charged with living off the "immoral earnings" of Keeler and other young women. His high-profile trial began on July 28 but ended abruptly a week later when Ward took an overdose of sleeping pills and fell into a coma. He died three days later without regaining consciousness.
Casualty List
As the true extent of the scandal unfolded throughout the summer and fall of 1963, the collateral damage mounted. The public was captivated by the tabloid press‘ breathless, often lurid accounts of the key players‘ private lives and misdeeds.
Macmillan, already in ill health, found his credibility shattered by his defense of Profumo. In October, he resigned as prime minister, ostensibly due to his health issues. However, most observers agreed that the Profumo Affair had delivered the coup de grâce to his premiership.
The Conservatives as a whole were tarnished by the scandal and a rising sense that the fusty establishment was crumbling from within. In the October 1964 general election, the Labour party under Harold Wilson swept to victory and ended 13 years of Tory rule.
The central figures at the heart of the scandal fared poorly as well:
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Profumo retreated completely from public life after his resignation. However, he eventually achieved a degree of redemption through his longstanding charity work in London‘s East End, even earning a CBE from the Queen in 1975. He died in 2006 at age 91.
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Christine Keeler struggled under the weight of her notoriety. Although she published several books about the scandal, she dealt with depression, poverty and run-ins with the law in the coming decades. She died in 2017 at 75.
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Mandy Rice-Davies, a fellow model and friend of Keeler‘s who also featured heavily in the press coverage, fared somewhat better. She enjoyed a brief acting career and married an Israeli businessman. However, she couldn‘t fully escape the shadow of the scandal. She died from cancer in 2014.
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Yevgeny Ivanov was recalled to Moscow at the height of the scandal. Little is known of his later life and he died in 1994.
A Hinge of History
In many ways, the Profumo Affair represented the crashing together of two eras in Britain. On one side was the old guard – an aristocratic ruling class used to having their indiscretions buried and glossed over, a paternalistic government that expected unquestioning deference from the masses.
On the other was the oncoming wave of the iconoclastic 1960s. A new generation was eager to shake off the conformity and stuffiness of the postwar years. The Beatles were topping the charts and a cultural revolution was underway. The public was no longer willing to ignore the bad behavior of their supposed betters.
As historian Dominic Sandbrook writes in his book Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles:
"The Profumo affair had exposed Macmillan‘s government to charges of hypocrisy and deceit, of covering up a scandal to protect their own interests…it also reflected, and to some extent anticipated, deeper undercurrents of social and cultural change – a growing suspicion of the ‘Establishment‘, a resentment of privilege and inequality, and a less deferential popular culture."
Christine Keeler faces the press scrum outside the courthouse where Stephen Ward was on trial, August 1963 (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
In the end, the Profumo Affair had all the classic elements of a British scandal – sex, spies, politicians, nobility, courtroom drama. But its cultural impact went far beyond mere titillation. It marked a loss of innocence for a nation, the tipping point when the age-old English maxim of "Noblesse oblige" gave way to a far more modern, and more cynical outlook.
