Dan Snow's History Hit - The Profumo Affair

Episode Date: June 5, 2021

It was the scandal that shook the British political world to its core leading to ministerial resignations and helping to bring down a prime minister and cause the defeat of the Conservative party at the next general election. When John Profumo resigned as Minister for War after being exposed lying to parliament about his affair with the model Christine Keeler. The scandal sent shockwaves through the British press, people and establishment and was one of the defining scandals of the 1960s. Historian Richard Davenport-Hines joins Dan to discuss the events of the Profumo affair, what it says about society at the time and the impact of the scandal.Subscribe to history this weekend using the code dday and receive 50% of your subscription for the first six months. Once subscribed you'll be able to listen to the History Hit's first audiobook The Profumo Affair: Lord Denning's Report

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today I'm talking about a scandal.

A scandal that shook the British political world to its core. A scandal that led to ministerial resignations, brought down the Prime Minister and led to the defeat of the Conservative Party at the following general election. A scandal in which the media, backbench MPs and the voters of the United Kingdom looked askance about a senior minister misleading the House of Commons, lying about his sexual past. Imagine that. Imagine people caring about that. It's a very different time. This was the 1960s, the height of the Cold War. This was the Profumo affair. On the weekend of the 8th, 9th July 1961, 60 years ago, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, met Christine Keeler

at a pool party, a pool party in one of the finest stately homes in England, Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire, owned by the Astors. The Astors were throwing quite the party, quite the party for the President of Pakistan. They invited lots of luminaries there, lots of politicians, lots of other people. The kind of invitation that I do not receive, I'll be honest with you, if there's kind of parties still happening out there, well, send me an invite. The meeting led to an affair. Knowledge of that affair became public. Profumo lied to the House of Commons and the whole thing got escalated when the story broke. The story broke that Christine Keeler was also having intimate relations with a member of the Soviet delegation of the embassy in London.

So it was really a glorious intermingling of powerful Tory Toff gets mixed up in a sex and spy scandal. To mark this anniversary of history, it's doing a couple of things. First of all, this podcast, we're talking to Richard Davenport Hines. He's a historian, biography. He's written a huge number of books and articles on lots of subjects. He's a wonderful contributor, as you'll hear. He's going to talk us through the scandal itself. We've also got an actor to read out Lord Denning's report. Lord Denning was a senior British judge, and he was brought in to find out what on earth had gone on.

The report is 70,000 words. It's available now as an audiobook at historyhit.tv. It proved one of the most exciting, best-selling reports of this kind in British history. 4,000 copies were sold in the first hour. The Daily Telegraph published the entire thing as a supplement and described it as the racist and most readable blue book ever published. Well, you can judge for yourself now by going to historyhit.tv and listening to that audiobook. An inciting journey through the establishment of 1960s Britain. It's all there. Spies, police, MI6, Tories, aristocrats,

and the London party scene. You're going to love it. Because it's another anniversary this weekend, that of D-Day, which occurred on June the 6th 1944, we are launching our ridiculous special offer we do each year. I've had to be locked out of the office. I've had to be put in restraints because this offer is so generous. You get your first six months of HistoryHit.tv for half price, 50% off. That means every month to get HistoryHit.tv, the world's best history channel, you simply pay the cost of a pint of beer. You get all these podcasts stretching back five years ad-free. You get hundreds of hours of history documentaries.

You'll be joining the tens of thousands of subscribers who are making this whole thing possible. And to whom, as I often say, I'm extraordinarily grateful. So head over to historyit.tv now. If you use the code D-Day, D-D-A-Y, you'll get 50% off your first six months. So use the code D-Day, go to historyit.tv, listen to our wonderful reading of the Denning

Report, and then watch some great documentaries. In the meantime, here is Richard Davenport-Hines talking us through the Profumo affair. Richard, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Good to be here. Until very recently, this was regarded as one of the great scandals in British history, but it seems like nowadays scandals come thick and fast. Yes, well, it was an absolute formative scandal because it was the first time that sexually explicit stuff had been on the front pages.

So that for people of my generation, people now in their 60s and 70s, it really was a crash sex education class, which was absolutely transformative for their generation. I know people who were at boarding school who had whole pages of the newspaper snipped out with scissors and mothers who cancelled all the newspapers and stuff like that. So it made a very big splash at the time. Let's come on to the scandal, just the details of the scandal first, and we'll talk about its import and legacy.

Run me through it. Who was swimming naked in whose swimming pool? Let's do it. The Minister of War, John Perfumo, in the Conservative government was a lifetime skirt chaser. He was married to a tremendously famous at the time film star, Valerie Hobson, but had lots of other women on the side. At a weekend party at Lord Astor's house on the Thames,

he met a young woman called Christine Keeler, with whom he had quite a short affair. She subsequently, in her accounts of it, makes the affair sound much longer and much more serious than it actually was. That was in 1961. And then in 1962, Christine Keeler got involved in a criminal case.

A man shot at her and failed to wound her. Then the newspapers started going after her story for the shooting because this was at a time of tremendous racial prejudice. And the man who tried to shoot her was an ex-lover and a West Indian black man. And newspapers then went to her and wanted her story. And of course, they offered more money if she told a more exciting story. So she not only said that she'd been the girlfriend of the Minister of War, but she also added the detail, which was quite untrue, that at the same time, she had been sleeping with the naval attache at the Soviet embassy, which immediately triggered security alerts. And that's really the background to the Profumo affair.

So you say it's actually untrue so was there overlap between Ivanov was his name wasn't it and Profumo? Not only was there no overlap between Profumo and Ivanov in my opinion and a lot of other people's opinion there was no action at all between Ivanov and Keeler it's an invented story if you actually read her accounts in the newspapers of having sex with ivanov and the first time they went to bed together the whole account which is in the tabloid newspaper is so obviously written by a sexually inexperienced easily excitable male journalist. It's every corny and ridiculous male fantasy crammed into a few paragraphs of furniture breaking under the weight of their passion and clothes being torn off and men being men and women never finding their fulfillment as women. It's complete bilge.

And it was in order to create a really saleable story. And she was paid more for this story. She was a very impressionable young woman who had had a sexually abusive stepfather who had been through a very abusive relationship with the police force in 1963, 1964. The terrible experiences at the hands of the police. And these journalists lent on her and produced this ludicrous story. MI5, the security service, completely discounted it. And I don't think anyone nowadays, male or female, who's had any sexual experience at all, would possibly believe her account of it. So it's perhaps hard to believe in the era of Trump and some of the

stories that come out about our own Prime Minister that a consensual relationship, a brief consensual relationship between John Profumo and Christine Keeler would go on to bring down the Conservative government, lead the resignation of the Prime Minister and defeat of the Conservative Party by the Labour Party in a subsequent election. I mean, it's extraordinary. Yes, well, it was a very prudish time of double standards, so that the real victim of the whole Perfumo affair is the man, Stephen Ward, who introduced Christine Keeler to Jack Perfumo at Cliveden, and who is prosecuted later in 1963 under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act and who under the weight of the trial commits suicide, takes a fatal overdose while the jury is out deliberating.

And he's originally arrested and charged under Section 23 of the 1956 Act. This is a provision that created a criminal offence of procuring a girl under the age of 21. Under this law, anyone at a party or in a pub or in any sort of social setting who introduced a girl aged between 16 and 21 to a man, and they subsequently had sex together was guilty of a criminal offence so that I mean you could have a party and a 17 year old woman met a man of any age at all and you introduced them and you fell foul of this ridiculous law which was framed by out of

touch fuddy-duddy old men who had absurd ideas about protecting young women. And so prudish was the state of the nation then that the 1956 Sexual Offences Act, which was a huge piece of legislation, was never debated or discussed at all in the House of Commons. It was entirely dealt with in committee because in the 1950s, it was thought unsuit in committee because in the 1950s it was thought

unsuitable, unimaginable, unthinkable that MPs could be heard talking about sex in the House of Commons. So it's a very haggamagga, poodish generation. We're listening to Dan Snow's History and we're talking about the Profumo affair, more after this. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the Profumo affair. More after this. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War?

Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk? How did England's last medieval king end up under a car park? And were the Dark Ages really all that dark? I'm Dr Kat Jarman and I'm Matt Lewis. On Gone Medieval we'll uncover the most exciting and unexpected stories about the Middle Ages, hearing from the best and brightest minds. We will disentangle fact from fiction, bring you the latest discoveries and reveal how the so-called Dark Ages laid the foundations for much of the world we're living in today. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Why were the tabloids in a position to put this stuff all over the front pages? I mean, people have been having sex in government for years. Why did it make such a huge impression now? legal contempt because they refused to reveal their sources to a recent spy scandal involving a

soviet spy called vassal and these two journalists were sent to prison the reason they didn't reveal their sources i'm sure is that the quotes that were being questioned were made up for a good story and weren't in the least true there weren't any sources but fleet street got very agitated and vengeful in defense of these fellow journalists the second point was that the more tabloid newspapers were engaged in huge competition with independent television which was taking more and more of their readers and therefore their advertising revenues was just much more immediate and so the newspapers were becoming more sexualized and more sexually explicit and more salacious and the third thing is that the Labour Party saw this as a wonderful opportunity to damage the Conservative government. The general public in England for a long time had had the notion, which was probably true, that the Toffs were having far more sex and far better sex than ordinary people.

And there was a sort of punitive, envious resentment of this, which the Labour Party was very keen to tap into and exploited in the six or seven months that the Profuno affair went on in 1963. There was a very strong idea in England that if you enjoyed yourself particularly sexually, you needed some sort of retribution or payback later. It's always seen as a kind of icon. One of the images of the 1960s is Christine Keeler in this story. How do you see it as connected with the wider story of what we think of as going on in the 1960s is Christine Keeler and her story. How do you see it as connected with the wider story of

what we think of as going on in the 1960s? Well, because much of the image of the 60s is a great myth. In the early 1960s, young women were marrying earlier and more set on marriage from an earlier age and investing more hope in marriage than in any time before or since. There was a great fetishization of the marriage state and it was partly so that young women could get away from their nagging mothers and scolding aunts and home and set up independently, which for the first time was financially possible for many less well-off couples. So there's a boom period for marriage and certainly the sexual experimentation before marriage and all that had started long before the 60s, but much more covertly. Now it was beginning to be more publicly acknowledged and people were living together. And there was also, at this time, the most astonishing and shocking

beyond belief to realise what prejudice there was at all levels of society against interracial sexual relations, particularly black men and white women, but both ways. Really monstrous attitudes were prevalent everywhere. And the fact that Christine Keeler was attracted to black men was a very big issue and excitement that happened. Why did this bring down the government? Well, it brought down the government because the Labour Party was able to play it.

The Labour Party knew perfectly well that there was no genuine security angle. MI5 were very clear about this, and anyone who really imagined that Jack Perfumo in his pillow talk with an 18-year-old girlfriend talked about atomic secrets or the German nuclear plans, as was alleged, was really barking. It weakened the Conservative government because it was the latest in a long stream of spy scandals, of which this was the least genuine. It made the Conservative Party seem very out of touch and sexually corrupt what actually happened was that macmillan's health collapsed in the autumn of 63 and he resigned and the new prime minister was much less good at winning elections the whole perfume affair was important but not decisive

in breaking confidence and the conservatives was the natural born, always efficient ruling class. And the Lord Denning report onto this, it's been criticised as being too gentle on the establishment, but there's a flair to its delivery. I don't think that Lord Denning's report was too soft on the establishment. On the contrary, I think it was a mischievous gossip-mongering exercised by a very puritanical man. One needs to remember that when Lord Denning first got into the House of Lords, his first speech in about 1958, he called for the

criminalisation of any man who had a vasectomy or any surgeon who performed a vasectomy, since he said vasectomies enabled men to get away with having sex without its natural consequences of children. of homosexuality because he said it would create the unspeakable situation when a man who punched another man in a pub because he was looking at him wouldn't have a defence of homosexual panic or outrage. And it was an absolutely extraordinary thing. I said what I've just said once, and a very close contact of Lord Dennings came up to me and said, Tom was absolutely white. What you don't understand is that almost all men are absolute beasts. And he had a view of male sexuality and an ignorance of female sexuality that was very purient and disagreeable. Later, when a young woman was expelled from her educational training college because she'd had a man in her bedroom, he said in his judgment that no decent parent would possibly dream of having a woman like that teaching their children. So he was an arch-puritan and a very austere and unforgiving Christian. And I think that is the main strand of his report. He really doesn't

approve the principle of fun or joy. Well, what a miserable existence. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about this. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic

because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World

War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.