An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo Free

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By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail. The Profumo Affair is generally seen as the great watershed between the old and the new. Peer closer Class and Power in the Age of Profumo the private tragedy of Macmillan and his faithless wife could have been created by Thomas Hardy. Early on, Macmillan had vowed never to allow her a divorce, and to commit suicide if she ever left him. But somehow, his deep hurt had fuelled the drive for his worldly success. To recount it once more: Jack Profumo was the suave, ambitious Minister for War, who seemed to have everything — vast wealth, a glamorous wife, a rocketing career. Covering his tracks: John 'Jack' Profumo resigned from his post of Secretary of State for War in as a result of misleading the House of Commons about the nature of his relationship with Christine Keeler. The two of them had a fling. For Profumo, she was nothing more than a discreet bit on the side. The only trouble was that Christine Keeler was singularly lacking in discretion. One thing led to another and soon the press got wind of the affair. The ripples of the story spread wider and wider. An English Affair: Sex soon began to seem as though anyone who was anyone had been to bed with either Christine Keeler Class and Power in the Age of Profumo her even more fun-loving friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, or both. He was a playboy, slippery and charming and much given to schmoozing: he wanted everyone to have a good time. So instead he was charged with procuring women and living off immoral earnings. The police leaned on witnesses to ensure a successful prosecution; overnight, his name became a byword for wickedness. Following his conviction, Stephen Ward took a fatal overdose. The press, as you may have gathered, were every bit as spiteful and sanctimonious as everyone else — politicians, police, society grandees — involved in this squalid affair. But it was also about much more than the Titanic, just as this one is about much more than the Profumo Affair. In both books, he uses the central event as a way of revealing the undercurrents in society at the time. Over the past few years, I had begun to think that too much has been made of the Profumo Affair, and that its endless knee-jerk referencing by historians and journalists to encapsulate the end of an era was simply lazy. But reading An English Affair has convinced me that it does indeed represent a decadent society in microcosm. Just as one can see the whole world in a grain of sand, so one can see the whole Macmillan era in the sorry tale of Jack Profumo. Davenport-Hines is particularly good in Class and Power in the Age of Profumo under-explored territory of those grim Fifties property tycoons such as Peter Rachman and Charles Clore, both of whom had had affairs with Keeler and Rice-Davies. This was a time when the Home Office was secretly urging the suppression of the news that antibiotics could now cure the two main venereal diseases. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. Argos AO. Comments 0 Share what you think. More top stories. Bing Site Web Enter search term: Search. Back to top Home News U. - An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo

I t was called a sex scandal but An English Affair: Sex sex itself seems to have been boring — "pre-fabricated sex, deep-freeze sex" the novelist Sybille Bedford called it. Christine Keeler was "disappointingly dull in bed", one lover reported, and she has admitted that she "never really enjoyed it". Given the men she slept with, that's not surprising. Peter Rachman had a phobia about dirt and secretions, and saw sex as the equivalent of cleaning one's teeth — "I was the toothpaste," Keeler said. Charles Clore wanted it quick, with no niceties; if a girl hadn't been procured for him as part of a business deal, he would grope Class and Power in the Age of Profumo was sitting next to him at dinner. As for John Profumo, a relentless flirt with a line in tight trousers "surely there Class and Power in the Age of Profumo be some way of concealing your penis," his wife complainedhe wooed Keeler briefly, over one summer, between his duties as war secretary; in the biopic of the affair, ScandalJoanne Whalley, playing Keeler, quietly yawns while he pumps away. If sex wasn't the real issue in the Profumo affair, what An English Affair: Sex That's the question Richard Davenport-Hines addresses on the 50th anniversary of an episode that ended Profumo's parliamentary career and led to the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, stepping down shortly afterwards. His book is devastating about the patriarchal double standards of the early 60s — and a useful antidote to the current nostalgia for the period between the Suez crisis An English Affair: Sex the Beatles' first LP. The main events are well known. Profumo and Keeler met one Saturday in the grounds of Cliveden when he was staying with the Astor family and she was weekending in the cottage informally leased by Bill Astor to the osteopath and dilettante Stephen Ward. Captivated by the sight of Keeler frolicking in the Cliveden swimming pool, Profumo asked for her number, and Ward, whose west London flat she shared albeit as a friend rather than a loverhappily obliged. In the early 60s, at the height of the cold war, the possibility that a British government minister and a Soviet official had shared An English Affair: Sex same lover was alarming in the extreme to the authorities. And though Profumo entrusted Keeler Class and Power in the Age of Profumo no state secrets, the security issue became an excuse for the press to go big on the story when after a chapter of chaotic but unrelated events involving drugs, an ex-lover, a knife fight and a gun attack Keeler along with her friend Mandy Rice-Davies spilled the beans to the Sunday Pictorial. The minister, the spy, the pimp and the call girls: the story was too good to miss. Keeler and Rice-Davies denied being prostitutes. They'd met while working as bar hostesses at a club called Murray's and had also done a bit of modelling. Both were very young Keeler was 19 when she met Profumo, Rice-Davies two years younger. But they moved in a world of seedy tycoons whose idea of romance was to bribe women with gifts then set up them in flats as mistresses. Perhaps it's no coincidence that three of these men — Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, Clore and Jack Cotton — were property developers or landlords. The welfare state was meant to have banished spivs. But a new generation Class and Power in the Age of Profumo merchant adventurers were emerging who, as Davenport-Hines puts it, transformed the capital "with a brutal phallic modernity". By day, they defeated planning officers to push through building schemes or run rent rackets; by night they defied moralising prudes in the cause of libertinism. Stephen Ward was no more a pimp than Keeler and Rice-Davies were street workers. But osteopathy lacked the cachet of other branches of medicine, and because of his relentless socialising, his loose tongue and his ambiguous sexual status some who met him thought he was gayhe became the chief scapegoat in the affair. He was friends with everyone — until the scandal broke and they deserted him. Under Section 23 of the Sexual Offences Act, a person who introduced a woman under 21 to someone with whom she then had a sexual relationship could be charged, as Ward was, with "procuration". He was also accused of living off immoral earnings, even though it was he who subsidised Keeler, not the other way about. The prosecution at his trial was led by Mervyn Griffith-Jones, prosecuting counsel at the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial three years earlier: like DH Lawrence, Ward was said to have plumbed "the very depths of lechery and depravity". Griffith-Jones spoke of a two-way mirror, through which voyeurs could get their kicks. That Ward's flat had no such mirror was beside the point. After the judge's hostile summing up, he knew he'd be found guilty and pre-empted the verdict by taking an overdose of barbiturates, from which he died three days later. Lord Denning's report into the Profumo affair, in the wake of the trial, was no less determined to pin the blame on Ward. Davenport-Hines finds it "awash with the spite of a lascivious, conceited old man" who derived a prurient excitement from interviewing Keeler and Rice-Davies about their sex lives, then pilloried them as sluts. The police were also culpable in stitching Ward up, tapping his phone and interviewing witnesses in what was less an investigation than a witch-hunt. After two days' detention, during which she was body-searched and had her pubic hair shaved, she finally gave them what they needed. The press come out of it badly, too. The technology might have been different but most of the excesses identified by Leveson in were evident 50 years ago — not just chequebook journalism and intrusions into privacy but the use of newspapers to pursue vendettas on behalf of their owners. Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express group, had a grudge against the Astor family and instructed his editors to gun for them. The Mirror had its agenda too, to exploit the Profumo affair to oust the Conservatives at the next election. Under Harold Wilson's leadership, the Labour party took the same line, needless to say, attacking the Tories for encouraging greed and corruption "there is something utterly nauseating about a system which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays a prime minister". Like Howard Brenton in his recent play Never So GoodDavenport-Hines shows considerable sympathy for Macmillan, who was too worldly to think adultery a grave offence he tolerated his wife Dorothy's long affair with Bob Boothby and retained his dignity — and grouse-shooting "patrician nonchalance" — while others were losing theirs. His days were numbered, though, and his successor, Alec Douglas-Home, fared no better. Not till Margaret Thatcher did the Conservatives shake off their image as the party of toffs and fuddy-duddies — an image the current crop of Etonians is busily restoring. As a nine-year-old at the time of the scandal, Davenport-Hines was too young to grasp what it was all about, though when a teacher asked his class for a noun beginning with a vowel he had his answer — "Orgy" — and was sent to be caned as a result. His book is oddly lopsided in structure pages on the cast list, on the drama and some of Class and Power in the Age of Profumo judgments are puzzling: was it merely "whiny" or "priggish" of those on the left to criticise the establishment of the day for its hedonism, nepotism and indolence? And doesn't John Bowlby's work on parenting and separation anxiety deserve more than to be called "shameful"? Still, if some of the early An English Affair: Sex of the book read like witty Class and Power in the Age of Profumo entries "He was the only member of the staid Athenaeum club to marry a captain of the British women's ski team"by the end the prose is fuelled with indignation — not just at the miscarriage of justice that An English Affair: Sex the life of Stephen Ward, but at the An English Affair: Sex, sexism, racism, malice and small-mindedness of British society in the 50s and early 60s. For anyone who imagines things were better in the age of "never had it so good", this book should be compulsory reading. Topics Books Book of the week. Reuse this content. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Most popular. A very British affair: How John Profumo and Christine Keeler brought down a Conservative government

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Profumo scandal, An English Affair is a sharp-focused snapshot of a nation on the brink of social revolution. Britain in — Harold Macmillan was the Prime Minister of a Conservative government, dedicated to tradition, hierarchy and, above all, old- fashioned morality. But a breakdown of social boundaries saw nigh Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Profumo scandal, An English Affair is a sharp-focused snapshot of a nation on the brink of social revolution. But a breakdown of social boundaries saw nightclub hostesses mixing with aristocrats, and middle-class professionals dabbling in criminality. Meanwhile, Cold War paranoia gripped the public imagination. The An English Affair: Sex Affair was a perfect storm, and when it broke it rocked the Establishment. An English Affair: Sex we also encounter the tabloid hacks, property developers and hangers-on whose roles have, until now, never been fully revealed. Sex, drugs, class, race, chequebook journalism and the criminal underworld — the Profumo Affair had it all. This is the story of how Sixties England cast off respectability and An English Affair: Sex in love with scandal. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Class and Power in the Age of Profumo. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about An English Affairplease sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Aug 26, Nancy rated it liked it Shelves: cold-warread. This is a fascinating and persuasive account of the Profumo affair which upended some of my preconceptions, but sloppy execution costs it a star. Davenport-Hines presents a scathing indictment of morals, hypocrisy, politics and the suborning of justice for social and political ends in 50s and early 60s Britain. It's a snapshot of society on the cusp of a seismic shift in attitudes, peopled with the still-famous, the forgotten and the notorious. Many public figures are excoriated and I'm fascinated that Harold Wilson comes off quite badly. However, the organization is messy and convoluted and Davenport-Hines pursues the extraneous in greater detail than warranted. He can't resist repeating cogent conclusions, which An English Affair: Sex far less impressive the second and third retelling. Worst of all, he writes in a state of umbrage so that this is polemic as much as history. He'd have been better served to let the facts speak for themselves and gotten out of the way of his story. For all that, well worth the reading. View all 10 comments. Aug 28, Tim Pendry rated it it was Class and Power in the Age of Profumo Shelves: cultural-studiesbritishtwentieth-centurydecadentespionagefive-starhistorypopular-culturecrimepr- propaganda. Reading this book could not have come at a more interesting time - as I write, the British are stunned and appalled by the sustained abuse of 1, young children in Rotherham by mostly Asian criminals over an extended period of time. Although the sexual shenanigans of a Minister of War, a Soviet attache, a naive osteopath, a couple of easy-living women and assorted walk-on rascals may seem a world away, there are grim similarities in the politics of these cases. Sex is the marker of culture and p Reading this book could not have come at a more interesting time - as I write, the British are stunned and appalled by the sustained abuse of 1, young children in Rotherham by mostly Asian criminals over an extended period of time. Sex is the marker of culture and politics is a struggle about identity and meaning as much as it is about resources and interests. Davenport-Hines, an accomplished historian of British sexuality and culture, takes the Profumo affair as his cue for a more general inquiry into the cultural politics of the late s and early s. The book is in two parts. The first two thirds are an exquisitely argued dissection of the hypocrisies and miseries of the separate sub-cultures that came together in this sad case. This is high end of the game - an establishment whose ankles were constantly being bitten at by the middle class opportunists of Labour and who were recovering from what was, economically, a bad war. Davenport-Hines then looks at the low end of the game - the self-made osteopath Stephen Ward, hapless victim in the story, the 'good-time girls', the Jewish landlords, the reptiles of the media and the security apparat. In each case, though perhaps he tends occasionally to an edgy polemic, Davenport-Hines show a fairness and sympathy where he can and a coruscating critique where he must. Although history is supposed to be non-judgmental, this is judgmental history that is good history because the facts dictate our sympathies. The last third is less accomplished because there is something of Class and Power in the Age of Profumo anti-climax in telling the story of the affair itself. These are diminished, tired, hypocritical and weak people and that is just the political lot. One ends An English Affair: Sex feeling sympathy for some and disgust for others. Above all, one asks the question - what really is the point of it all. On the simpatico side, there is, above all, Stephen Ward himself - Davenport-Hines broadly makes the case that this man was the victim of a deliberately arranged show trial based on 'fixed' evidence. His desperate suicide at the tail end of the trial was nothing more than state-inspired manslaughter by corrupt cops, frightened politicians and a judicial system of consummate evil. One also feels this is quite surprising a degree of sympathy for the better part of the establishment - no worse or better than the incoming hypocrites of An English Affair: Sex, a crew of equally consummate ambition and sheer nastiness. Brown and Wigg are the worst of a rough bunch of damned near psychopaths, matched by the moral hysteria and viciousness of social conservatives like Hailsham. But what cautious decency there was seems to have been Tory. The author is even-handed about the Rachman types and the good time girls, pointing out that their bad behaviours were not unconnected to the horrors of the holocaust and in the case of some of the girls appalling poverty. It is not said in the book but an alignment of Jewish and other spivs and the good time girls - some of whom became rich and some dead - may be the mutual comfort of those who have seen the worst and are determined on survival. But now to the villains - and these are men of what I would call Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, pure evil, ideological manipulation and destructive misuse of high intelligence to destroy others and ensure their own power. Perhaps Davenport-Hines' angle is too obvious here - he loathes the prurient British media with its ugly intrusions into private life, all in the spurious claim that Class and Power in the Age of Profumo the public is interested in is in the public interest. Well, he is absolutely right and, though the worst excesses of the Beaverbrook and Cudlipp Press are long since passed, not much has changed - it is not just the 'hacking' but the determined propensity to lie and make and break people. But more evil than the British media at its most narcissitically depraved is the corrupt cop and the political judiciary and we have these to thank for the destruction of Mr. Ward and the wrongful claims about Keeler and Rice-Davies. On this score, I will not do a spoiler. The last third does have the aspect of whodunnit or rather 'whodidoverothers' about it. There are many unpleasant people but Class and Power in the Age of Profumo worst is not Rachman or Keeler or even petty criminals like 'Lucky' Gordon but, ultimately, Alfred Denning, Law Lord. This is not the conventional view of the noble Lord Denning but Davenport-Hines is persuasive and I leave you to read his account and make your own judgment. I would fear the Noble Lord returning to earth and destroying me as he destroyed the reputation of Ward if I went much further. So, why is this relevant today? On two separate grounds. The first is that struggles over sexuality continue to have resonance in the struggle over power at the heart of the State. The second is that, in many ways nothing has changed. Taking the second first, we can look at this superficially. We have progress in that we have a Cabinet of Old Etonians rather than one of Old Etonians and Wykehamists running the country so perhaps we should be grateful. We still have a reptilian media creating chaos and limiting opportunities for good governance, destroying lives, failing to investigate wrongs on the evidence and manufacturing outrage. We still have an ambitious and cynical opposition whose silences and evasions over the Rotherham Abuse leave one with the most unpleasant of tastes in the mouth. We still have a hidden establishment prepared to use the resources of the State and to create and manage law to preserve their power and cover up for their many incompetencies. And we still have a political leadership utterly neglectful of the condition of Britain and more interested in cavorting ineffectually on the world's stage as if governance was a boy's own adventure. Above all, we still have an underclass from which the wide boys and good time girls make their way only to face the hypocritical sexual controls and prejudice of a conservative centre of pseudo-liberals. The Profumo affair is widely marked as the end of an era of establishment authority but I am not sure that Davenport-Hines is right to take the surface for the reality. Politics is not only a history of circulating elites but of circulating ideologies and just as the new elite is no more kind and competent than the previous one so the succeeding ideology is no more compassionate. The Rotherham Abuse scandal has all the signs of exposing one set of elites and an ideology in precisely the way that the Profumo Affair appeared to expose another. Perhaps there is a cycle and the scandal had to happen to meet its needs but the Rotherham Abuse case is, like the Profumo case, essentially about power, incompetence, sexuality, ambition and national security. In both cases,there is a rising elite now national populism, then democratic socialism waiting An English Affair: Sex the wings to throw out an establishment now the liberal bien-pensants, then the propertied. There are issues of competence - about national security in a class-based apparat the Right's claim to Class and Power in the Age of Profumo and the ability of the new managerialism to protect the vulnerable the Left's claim to rule. Then, the Minister's lying was the mere trigger for an outpouring of sexual neurosis and conservatism that backfired with the liberal reforms of the following Labour Government under an essentially Liberal Home Secretary. Now, local council and police incompetence is the trigger for an outpouring of Class and Power in the Age of Profumo neurosis about immigration and wider government failures regardless of party which leads we know not where.