FREE AN ENGLISH AFFAIR: SEX, CLASS AND POWER IN THE AGE OF PROFUMO PDF Richard Davenport-Hines | 352 pages | 10 Sep 2013 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780007435852 | English | London, United Kingdom Profumo affair | British political scandal | Britannica 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.