True Crime Campfire - Disgrace: The Story of the Profumo Affair

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

People will do crazy things for desire. From the earliest human tales and histories to stories you can read in your newspaper today, there have been a never-ending number of crimes and betrayals committed because someone started getting hot under the collar. People will risk their relationships, their happiness, their lives for desire. Sometimes they’ll even risk the safety of their nation. And that is the theory behind everybody’s favorite spy tactic: The Honey Trap. A trap that ended up biting back against one government in the 60s. This is a spicy one, y'all: Spies, sex parties, knife fights in nightclubs...the whole shebang.Sources:The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward by Anthony Summer and Stephen Dorrill Secrets and Lies by Christine Keeler with Douglas Thompsonhttps://spartacus-educational.com/SPYlewisJ.htmFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. People will do crazy things for desire. From the earliest human tales and histories to stories you can read in your newspaper today, There have been a never-ending number of crimes and betrayals committed because someone started getting hot under the collar.

People will risk their relationships, their happiness, their lives for desire. Sometimes they'll even risk the safety of their nation. And that is the theory behind everybody's favorite spy tactic. The honey trap. A trap that ended up biting back against one government in the 60s. This is disgrace. The story of the profumo effect. So, campers, for this one were on the idyllic grounds of Clivedon House, a spectacular

country estate in the Buckinghamshire countryside of England, July 1961. It was a warm summer afternoon in the sounds of laughter and splashing drifted from the swimming pool. Three young women and three not-so-young men were having a jolly old time, you might even say, bordering on frolicing. Two of the men cavorted in the pool, showing off for the young women, while the third man relaxed on a lounge chair, watching everything through dark glasses. Sounds like a fun time, right? But this apparently innocent afternoon would end up having momentous consequences, because one of the men in the pool was Yvgeny Ivanov, Soviet naval attache and spy. and the other was Jack Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the British government, and a man tipped as a future prime minister.

Their shared desire for one woman would be a scandal that brought down a government. The third man, watching through dark glasses, was the one who brought them all together. His name was Stephen Ward. Stephen Ward was born in 1912, the son of a Hertzfordshire vicar, and thanks to his mom's connections to Irish gentry, just barely scraping into the upper classes. His early education reflected this, a private tutor, then a prep school, then off to a private boarding school. He didn't give much of a damn about school, though, and the event that made the biggest impression on young Stephen had nothing to do with

academics. In the dorm one night, somebody punched a boy because he was snoring. And when I say punched him, in the morning, this poor kid was unconscious, his skull fractured. Everybody in the dorms knew who'd done it, but nobody told, because that was the code in places like that. The blame somehow fell on Stephen, who actually wasn't the one who did it, and he got thrashed in front of the whole school. But he kept his mouth shut about who the real culprit was, and all the other boys congratulated him for it. Good chaps don't tell, you see. But the lesson Stephen Ward took from this was that he was never, ever going to take the fall for somebody else again. At 17, understandably sick of school, he left.

and got his first job, an ungentlemanly gig at houndstitch carpet warehouse. But that was hard work, and when the Christmas rush hit, Stephen quit, started following the more traditional career route for children of the upper classes, by which I mean he got a job he was completely unqualified for through blatant nepotism. In this case, an uncle landed him a gig as a translator for Shell Oil in Hamburg, even though Stephen's German was atrocious. Must have made for some fun meetings, right? He dated the daughter of the Swedish consul there, all very chaste and proper, which you couldn't say about some of Stephen's other Hamburg activities. As you may or may not know, Hamburg is home to the Reaper Bon, a notorious red light district, and it was there that Stephen discovered his lifelong fascination with sex workers. And I mean fascination, literally.

He'd have sex with these women sometimes, but more often than not, he'd just pay them to sit in the car with them and chat about their lives. The Reaperbott, by the way, doesn't seem to have changed all that much. I've never been to Hamburg, but I can use Google Maps, so I know that there's a falafel joint right next to an establishment just called Six House, which is somehow the most German thing I can possibly imagine. Yeah, I haven't seen it, but I imagine the building has severe architecture that looks like it's judging your punctuality. Your punctuality to the sex party. Yeah. Exactly. We are going to have fun, but you must be on time.

After Hamburg came Paris, theoretically to study at the Sorbonne, but actually to drink, practice his portraiture skills on pretty young women. Friends noticed he was more interested in drawing these women than doing anything else with them, and make money as a tour guide, showing Brits and Americans where the seedy nightclubs were. Then it was back to England, and the country house parties and balls that served as a way for the children of the posh to meet suitable partners. And it paid off when Stephen fell for a lovely young woman by the name of Mary Glover. They were sort of engaged to be engaged, but the problem was that Stephen had no money and no job, and in this social strata, one just didn't get married without those.

Till now, Stephen's gallivanting had mostly been supported by his mother, but she tightened up the purse strings after Stephen got caught having an affair with a woman who was both married and an actress. gasp and clutch the pearls Stephen's mom had two other sons and two daughters who she wasn't embarrassed to bring up in conversation and she gave her attention and cash to them so if Stephen wanted to get married he'd have to make his own money he met a guy who was introducing osteopathy into Britain

and the guy suggested that Stephen go to the U.S. to learn the profession himself determined to make something of himself and marry his girlfriend Mary Stephen headed for four years of studies in Kirksville, Missouri But it turns out that running off to misery for four years is not actually the best move to making a young romance. Stephen hadn't been stateside for long before he got the old, sorry, you're a great guy and all, but I'm going to marry somebody else from Mary, poor buddy. It totally wrecked him. And from that point on, Stephen was determined to never get close to anybody again. He promised himself.

And it was a promise he'd keep. Oh, no. When World War II broke out, Stephen volunteered his new skills to the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was stationed in India and he earned himself such an impressive rep as an osteopath that Gandhi had him come over to treat his stiff neck. And that was only the beginning. Stephen would end up treating an unbelievable array of famous people. After the war, he set up a clinic in London and he got lucky when the U.S. ambassador set up a weekly

the appointment. Stephen was good at his job, and he was charming and relaxed. The ambassador dropped Stephen's name a few times, and soon, as he put it, my appointment books read like the invitation lists to film premieres. He wasn't kidding. Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, the list goes on. He treated Winston Churchill on the regular, and this is fun. Churchill had a habit of hopping out of bed to get on the treatment table, forgetting that he wasn't wearing any PJs. Oh, boy. Nobody wants to see that.

No. Nope. But Stephen's new business was booming. In 1949, at the age of 36, he made the decision to get married to a 21-year-old model named Patricia Baines. It wasn't a love connection, not for him, anyway. It was just cold logic. I worked it out quite calmly, he'd write later.

She would grace the practice. She would be useful. She was also desirable. romance If you're thinking that doesn't exactly sound like a match made in the stars, you'd be right. The marriage was over within six weeks.

Patricia got suspicious when Stephen kept disappearing for hours at a time every night with no explanation. So one night she hid in the back of his car. When the car stopped, she peered into the front and saw her husband chatting up a sex worker out the car window. So she jumped into the front seat furious,

nearly giving him a heart attack, and sending the poor sex worker sprinting down the sidewalk. Pat filed for divorce, and that was that. The marriage was Stephen's last attempt at faking a normal life, and afterward he concentrated on what he enjoyed most, picking up and manipulating young women. And although there was nothing sexual in these relationships, that doesn't mean they weren't creepy and predatory. He went out of his way to meet pretty young women who were kind of rough around the edges. He'd befriend them, teach them how the upper class acted, and introduced them to his society friends in all kinds of different ways.

Yes, some were invited to dinners and parties with eligible men. At least one of Stevens' protégés ended up as a countess, and several more married rich businessmen. Some were used for sex. If you were a friend of Stevens and you wanted some company for the night, you could call him up and he'd send one of his female companions over. And if you wanted to give her a monetary gift afterwards, well, that was between. you and her. And not all of this was one-on-one. Stephen also became a regular in the orgy and sex party scene of Upper Crust London, which occupied varying levels of kink, because I know this is going to surprise you, but the British

upper classes were into some weird shit. Like, weird shit. Rich people, rich people kink just hits a little different. I wonder if unimaginable wealth alters your brain chemistry, or or if it's just like bog standard boredom that does it. Like when you're not like worried about, I don't know, paying your rent, maybe they're just like, hmm. Right. I wonder what it would be like to have a masked woman with me, you know? Yeah, you got to get that adrenaline up somehow.

You know, you got to have some risk in your life. You've got to have something to get your pulse up. Otherwise, like what's the point? Yeah, I think Katie's kinkshaming corner should double us. in a Mesh store, like, come in, get shamed, pick up a burkin on your way out. And I do like that the lore is expanding that Katie's kingshaming corner rather than, like, roasting is more of a service provided, which I think is true. I think, I think by kinkshaming, I'm providing a service to the general public. Oh, for sure. Giving you some, there's definitely people who would pay you

for that. Giving you some, giving you some proper shame before you, uh, make your way out to the world. Oh. Stephen would often bring some of his wilder female friends along, and this is the funny part to me. He didn't join in on the actual sex, like ever. He would never join in, but he liked to watch. His sexuality is kind of hard to pin down. Most people who met Stephen thought he was gay, but this doesn't actually seem to be the case. This was, of course, a really deeply closeted time for gay folks, but not in the hedonistic kind of circles that Stephen partied in.

I mean, if he wanted men, he could have had him, and others in this story would have definitely known about it. He just seemed to have very little sex drive, period, so maybe he was just asexual. He was definitely a voyeur, though, in every sense of the word. He liked watching others get after it, and he liked to get people to tell them their secrets. And he really got off on pushing young women into new lives among the upper classes, whether as brides to be or as sex toys. And at the end of the 1950s, he met a young woman.

who would be his most spectacular, most calamitous success. Christine Keeler was born in 1942 in Middlesex, right in the middle of World War II. Her dad ran out on her and her mom when Christine was three. She remembered waving goodbye to him as he scuttled out of a packed air raid shelter. He never came back. A stepdad arrived in 1948, and in the tough economy of post-war Britain, he built their first house, connecting two railway cars together side by side. In some ways, it was kind of idyllic.

The house set right on a pretty green riverbank, but it was tough, too. They didn't have electricity or hot water, and they had to use a port-a-john-type thing outside. There weren't a lot of other girls, Christine's age around, and she grew up playing with the boys, riding bikes and swinging out into the river on rope swings. She grew up to be very, very pretty, and she learned early on that being beautiful to look at wasn't always a blessing. When she was 12, with her mom in the hospital, her stepdad told her he loved her. and wanted her to run away with him to Blackpool. Ugh, what a piece of shit.

Christine was terrified, of course, and for years after that, she just had to sort of do the best she could to avoid this man around their tiny little train car house. She started sleeping with a knife under her pillow. Bless her heart, that absolutely makes me furious. A little later, she started babysitting for local kids, and more than once got groped by a creepy dad.

When she was 15, a female neighbor came after her with a knife for sleeping with her husband. The neighbor had gotten her facts mixed up. Her husband had actually slept with Christine's mom, not Christine. Her mom had a lot of affairs, and sometimes Christine would have the fun responsibility of hurrying the dudes out the house before her stepdad came home from work. Shows you how awful people can be about this stuff, doesn't it? That the wife would be angry at a 15-year-old girl for sleeping with her husband.

Like, lady, if you're going to pull a knife on anybody in this situation, pull it on him. I mean, don't pull a knife on anybody, but geez, not the 15-year-old. So it's not really surprising to me that by the time she was 17, Christine was pretty cynical about romance and sex already. But like most teenagers, she also had a deep desire for something better than what her life had shown her so far. And 17 was when she and a friend stole a car and ran off to London with no clue what they were going to do there, as 17-year-olds will tend to do. They scratched out a living, surviving pretty much on bread and milk, until Christine got a job as a coat check girl at a Greek restaurant. She hadn't been there long before a glamorous patron by the name of Maureen O'Connor started chatting her up. Why don't you come and work at the Cabaret Club?

Maureen asked her, that's where I work. The money's much better and it would be more fun. You've got just the right kind of looks. The Cabaret Club was a shabby but glam Soho dance club, where the young women on stage performed either in shiny sequin. costumes, or topless. Christine didn't have much experience with dancing, but she did have a pair of hips that did not lie, and she was hired as one of the topless dancers. She'd strut out on stage and a pair of spike heels and a G-string.

Between acts, Christine and the other women would sit with customers, flirting and encouraging them to buy drinks, which they got a commission on. Those and tips were how the dancers made most of their money. And although the cabaret club was kind of run down, those customers were, you know, included the creme de la creme. Aristocrats from all over Europe, movie stars, millionaires from America and the Middle East, both Winston Churchill and Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth's wild younger sister, had been patrons. Wow. Christine had been working there for a couple of months when Stephen Ward visited with a couple of friends. Stephen was 47 years old. To 17-year-old

Christine, he looked like an old man, but when he asked her to dance with him, she said, sure. That was how it worked at the cabaret club. Stephen had literally decades of practice at charming vulnerable young women, and he didn't have to work too hard to get her phone number. He called her the next day, and they started what Christine described as a telephone romance. They only went out on a couple actual dates, which Christine enjoyed, partly because there was not even a hint of Stephen pressuring her for sex.

He was a perfect gentleman. And at the end of that second date, Stephen asked Christine to move into the flat he lived in. Right above his osteopathy clinic. Christine had asked around the women at the club, and she knew that Stephen had money. He was offering her a more comfortable life than she'd ever known, and with no expectation of sex whatsoever. She said, hell yes, and the two of them settled into a weird but comfortable roommate relationship. Sometimes they slept in the same bed, but nothing sexual ever happened. He just didn't seem interested.

That didn't mean there was nothing sexual going on, though. a member of parliament who was a regular at the cabaret club later said, I think I would divide the girls between those who did and those who didn't. Christine was one of the girls who did, and before long, she was going with Stephen to all the upper-class orgies and swinger parties. Stephen told her he was completely impotent, but he liked watching, and he really liked watching Christine become the new center of attention. He was less happy when a millionaire acquaintance, a slum lord named Peter

Rachman talked Christine into moving in with him. Stephen wasn't mad because of any betrayal. He just thought it would hurt Christine's reputation to be seen with Rachman, meaning, I guess, his snotty friends wouldn't be as eager to get their hands on her anymore. Oh, God. Christine enjoyed the money, but quickly got bored of her slumlord boyfriend. And I love this. She said, sex to Rachman was like cleaning his teeth, and I was the toothbrush. Ah. Yeah. That's almost too good. of an image. So she ditched him and moved into a flat with her new sort of friend, Mandy Rice Davies.

Yeah, that might be the sickest burn I've ever heard on somebody's sexual performance. It's so good. That's unbelievable. Blistering. Yeah. Mandy was a cute blonde from Sully Hole who'd done some modeling in local department stores during high school. This landed her a gig in London when she was 16. to stand around and look pretty at the launch of a revolutionary new car called the mini.

Ah, I love the mini. I've always one of one of those. She got 80 pounds for a week's work, and that might sound kind of crap to our ears, but the equivalent in today's money would be about $2,800. Not too shabby. Nothing in Sully Hole was going to offer her that kind of scratch, so she said goodbye to her parents and got on the train down to London. There she learned a lesson familiar to many aspiring young models new to the big city. There was plenty of work available, as long as long as.

as you're willing to take your top off. And sometimes you bought them, too. She answered an ad for the Cabaret Club, where they had her, the whitest and blondest girl, you can imagine, perform as a scantily clad Native American. And my skin is just crawling, thinking how toe-curlingly racist and awful that act must have been, especially because it was 1959.

Yeah. Anyway, at the Cabaret Club, she met Christine Keeler, who by then had been working there for about a year. And it was dislike at first sight. Andy later remembered. And Christine felt the same way, just immediately mutual hatred. But it didn't stay that way for long. They shared a dressing room at the club and worked together almost every night, and they often went to the same parties with customers from the club, so soon they realized that life would be a lot easier if they had each other's back. They became known for being

open to threesomes with men, which they enjoyed for the act itself, and also because the guy in question, usually just wanted to watch, which made for a pretty easy night for them. When Christine needed a place to stay, it made sense for her and Mandy to move in together. They were a good match. Christine was wild and dreamy and had an easy-come, easy-go attitude about money, whereas Mandy, despite her flirty fun personality, had a practical streak a mile wide. She knew exactly how far a pound could stretch. They were both tired of the cabaret club, which was hard work, and quit to pursue their dreams of mainstream modeling. But like it does for a lot of folks, even really, really pretty young women,

this went nowhere fast, and after a while they both started taking on sex work. When Stephen Ward called, it wasn't hard for him to talk Christine into coming back to stay with him, and grudgingly, he invited Mandy to. He and Mandy were like oil and water. Christine described them as like cat and mouse around the flat, although she didn't specify who was who. Mandy didn't stay for long. She soon took Christine's place as Peter Rackman's sexual toothbrush, and he set her up in a flat of her own, although she and Christine stayed close and went to a lot of parties together. In all of Stephen Ward's attempts to cozy up to the British elite, his biggest success was with the famous Astor family. This started when he treated Bobby Shaw, stepson of Viscount Astor.

Bobby was a former army lieutenant, and he was an out-gay man at a time when that was kind of a big deal. Bobby had once served six months in prison for homosexual offenses, God's sake. That'll show him. Bobby introduced Stephen to his younger brother Bill, a former conservative member of parliament who became Viscount Astor in 1952. Bill, always in the shadow of his charismatic half-brother, was a shy, awkward dude with some kinky interests of the leather and whips variety. He and Stephen became fast friends, not the least because, after the end of his second marriage, Stephen introduced. him to a never-ending stream of young women willing to play the kind of

you know games he liked. And by the way, can we talk about how awesome the word Viscount is just for a second? We don't have any titles that cool over here. If I were a British peer, I think I'd want to be a Viscount. Viscount Dracula.

Count Dracula's slightly trashy cousin. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The Astors lived in a ridiculously enormous mansion called the Clivedon House, which had a cottage on its grounds down by the Thames, and by cottage, we mean the kind of luxurious three-bedroom house most of us can only dream of. Bill Asser made this place freely available to Stephen Ward on weekends. Stephen held quite a few

of his sex parties there, and once Christine entered his orbit, she was there all the time, too. The place was called Spring Cottage. Spring Cottage, more like, Stop it. It should be sprung cottage, and we all know it. On a warm Saturday night in July 1961, Stephen, Christine, and a few friends were staying at Spring Cottage. While up at Clifton House, the Aster's hosted a fancy dinner party in honor of the president of Pakistan. Stephen had a standing invitation to use the swimming pool at Clifton, and after 10 p.m., his group, who were all about six whiskeys deep by this point, headed up for a dip. around the same time the dinner party was breaking up in the usual upper class way the ladies all gathering together in one room to talk about like i don't know knitting and stuff and the gents heading to the billiards room for brandy and cigars women right what do we even talk about

that's like that's like the knitting the women be shopping of the 1960s women be knitting women be knitting the asters had swimsuits laid out beside the pool for their guests but christine's suit wasn't comfortable just jump in without it stephen said christine was a lot of things but shy wasn't one of them so she stripped off and dove in naked some of the dinner party guests up at the Aster House heard the laughter and splashing from the pool and started drifting down. By the time the first ones got there, Stephen had tossed Christine's swimsuit away from the side of the pool and was shining a spotlight onto her. She scuttled out of the pool to grab a towel as Bill Astor and another man, both informal evening wear, walked over.

Christine, I'd like you to meet Jack, Bill said. So that, naked, dripping, and gritting, was how Christine Keeler met Jack Profumo, Secretary of State for for war. As you can imagine, she made a hell of a first impression. I bet. The dinner party crowd all thought this was hilarious, and they invited Stephen and his crew to join them for the rest of the evening. Bill Aster invited them to come swimming again the next afternoon. So Stephen, Christine, and a couple other friends drove up to Clivedon the next day, and along with the Aster's and Jack Profumo, they met a guy Stephen knew from the Soviet embassy, Yevgeny Ivanov.

Christine had always been attracted to macho men, and Ivanov was a big, musly dude with a lot of chest hair. She was attracted to him right away, and both Ivanov and Jack Profumo were attracted to her. And they went about it with all the subtlety of a teenage boy, racing each other in the pool, having water fights. These were two grown-ass men with real influence in global politics, making a jackass of themselves over an 18-year-old girl. It's really kind of depressing. Yeah, and also kind of hilarious. That too. Profumo managed to get Christine's number, but it was Ivanov who drove her back to her flat in London,

where they split a bottle of vodka and had sex. A couple of days later, Jack Profumo called, and after a couple of meetings, they began what most people called an affair. Christine Keeler described it a little differently. A well-mannered screw of convenience, which is, the most British phrasing of just fucking I've ever heard. Oh, boy. Jack Profumo was 46 at the time and considered a rising star of the conservative government.

He'd first been elected as an MP when he was just 25 and had an impressive record from the war, landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. He'd risen through the ranks fast and was made Secretary of War, basically the equivalent of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, In 1954, he'd married the actress Valerie Hobson, who horror nerds might know as Elizabeth, the doctor's fiancé from Bride of Frankenstein. Fun fact. Valerie was forgiving in the way that only a politician's wife can be, because Jack had a lot of trouble keeping it in his pants, but Valerie, bless her heart, would stand by him to the end. Which is just so depressing. It always is so depressing.

They stand there with those like frozen smiles at the press conferences. You know, it's just heartbreaking. Jack and Christine Jack and Christine only met for sex. Usually at the flat, Christine shared with Stephen, but sometimes in Profumo's bed at his house, or in his car, or just right out in the street. Classy. Which kind of makes you wonder if he got off on the risk of getting caught. If that was the case, he was going to get what he wanted, but it wouldn't turn out to be a whole lot of fun. And we need to take a step sideways here and look at all this

from another angle, because there was more going on here than a bunch of rich horny pricks and a couple of wild girls too young to know better. This was the height of the Cold War. The Cuban missile crisis was just a year away, and there was a lot of shady spy stuff going on on all sides. This included a number of intelligence scandals that had recently embarrassed the British government. In 1960, a spy ring was exposed after stealing secret submarine plans from the Navy. In 1961, British intelligence officer George Blake was exposed as a Soviet double agent who had given up the identities of dozens of MI6 agents to the KGB. And in 1962, A naval intelligence officer, John Vassel, was exposed as a Russian agent.

Vassel, who was gay, had fallen for a Soviet honey trap operation, and then was blackmailed by compromising photographs. The honey trap was something of a Soviet specialty. A conservative MP, Anthony Courtney, tried to reduce the number of personnel allowed in the Soviet embassy in London. At a Moscow trade fair, he was seduced by a specially trained female KGB agent, what they called a swallow, and the compromising pictures were used to make sure he lost his next election. And now, British intelligence saw a chance to turn the tables. Yevgeny Ivanov was officially at the London Embassy as a naval attache.

Both the British and Americans knew he was actually an agent for the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, and the Brits thought he could be enticed to defect. A foreign office report said that, quote, his character weaknesses are apparent when he is under the influence of alcohol, notably his lack of discretion and loss of personal control, his thirst for women, and his tactless bluster. Yes, hello, foreign office, welcome to men getting drunk. That quote, by the way, comes from The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorrell, which has a lot more info than we could ever fit in this episode if you want to know more, and it is juicy stuff. But the first piece of bait, MI5, wanted to dangle in front of Ivan. was Stephen Ward. Ward, with a closet full of skeletons and close connections to many of Britain's

elite, was a prime candidate for cultivation by a Soviet agent like Ivanov. An MI5 new Ward would show him a real good time. We mentioned earlier that Stephen was a portrait artist, right? Well, by the 50s, he was highly skilled and his work was sometimes shown in galleries. One of his sketches of Christine is still in the National Portrait Gallery. He'd been invited to Buckingham Palace to sketch various royals, including Princess Margaret and Prince Philip, and now he apparently wanted to visit Moscow to draw Khrushchev. This was almost certainly a cover story by MI5 to get Ward and Ivanov together. They were introduced by a mutual acquaintance with close ties to British intelligence, supposedly so that Ivanov could help Ward get a visa. The two men, as everybody

expected they would, hit it off and were soon hanging out a lot. MI5 gave Stephen a handler, known only as Woods. It's just kind of funny. And Stephen reported his conversations with Ivanov to him. Unbeknownst to her, of course, Christine was intended as the honey in the trap to help entice Ivanov to a defect, and things were going as planned, until Jack Profumo stuck his dick in the way. Profumo was Secretary of State for War, privy to the nation's most sensitive secrets. Him, sharing a lover with a Soviet spy, had the immediate potential to be a scandal, and posed a real security risk. Vital secrets could be passed to Ivanov via Christine, and Profumo was open to blackmail from any number of sources. So within a few weeks of the affair starting,

MI5 had a subtle word with the secretary for war, warning him about getting too close to Stephen Ward and his friends, which Profumo correctly interpreted as meaning, we know about you and Christine Keeler, knock it the fuck off, which he did for a while. But then, He went back for a few more months of casual sex. Because what is national security when you can get your rocks off with a hot girl young enough to be your daughter? I mean, come on. The affair, such as it was, eventually fizzled out, although there were already whispered rumors in London about a scandal involving Jack Profumo. These would ultimately be brought to light by Christine's messy personal life.

In October 1961, she wound up in an abusive, violent. relationship with Aloysius Lucky Gordon, a Jamaican jazz singer with a mean streak. He was intensely jealous of Christine's friends as well as other men and was always showing up unannounced to check on her. Partly to escape Lucky, Christine and Mandy traveled by boat to New York, theoretically to take another crack at getting their modeling careers going, and also to blow off some steam. According to Mandy, during the five-day voyage, Christine banged a teenager in a lifeboat and also screwed both the first officer and the captain, which I guess was her way of saying,

fuck you, Lucky. I know. Honestly, like, props. I get it. Like, Jesus. I'll give you something to be jealous about Lucky. The American adventure was cut short after Christine and Mandy went sunbathing on Fire Island, used to English summers, they didn't bother with sunscreen, and they both crisped up like Kentucky fried chicken.

Red as lobsters, they flew back to England less than a week after arriving. Lucky Gordon was there, and Christine came up with a plan to deal with him. She hooked up with a guy named John Edgecombe, a tough former sailor from Intigua, so he'd protect her from Lucky, which he did, slashing Lucky in the face with a knife when they all happened to meet in the same nightclub. But Edgecombe didn't treat Christine much better than Lucky, and he refused to accept it when she tried to break things off with him. On December 14th, 1962, Edgecombe turned up in a cab at Stevens Flat, where Mandy was currently staying with Christine.

He started hammering on the door to be let in. Mandy stuck her head out of an upstairs window and said, Christine's not here. Don't give me that bullshit, Edgecombe hailed. Christine came to the window and Edgecombe yelled, Come down to the door, the taxi's costing money. Oh. Christine tossed a pound note out the window, and that really seriously. set him off. Edgecombe started hurling himself at the door, trying to break it down. Then he pulled a gun

and started shooting at the lock. Whoa. Men. Jesus Christ. When Christine came back to the window, he took a shot at her. Then he jumped into the taxi, and the apparently unperturbed driver took him away. As soon as Edgecombe started shooting, Mandy called Stephen, who called the police. Edgecombe was arrested at his house and charged with shooting with intent to kill and possession of a firearm. Man, you got to give a shout out to that cab driver. That guy must have seen some shit. Like, he's just like, all right, where are you headed? Really? I would have just peeled out of there. Like, yeah. Balls of steel. Gun crime was rare in London back then, and the story made a splash. The headline in the Daily Mirror the next day was Girl in Shots Drama.

Stephen had Christine and Mandy move out for a while and urged them to keep their heads. heads down and their mouths shut. But Christine, understandably shaken up and never great at taking advice, kept on going out and telling anybody who'd listen about her recent drama with Lucky Gordon and John Edgecombe and also about her entanglements with Jack Profumo and Yvgeny Ivanov. Rettro. One night at the cabaret club, she happened to spill all this to a chap by the name of John Lewis. Lewis was a businessman, former Labor Party MP, and dedicated asshole. A fellow MP once described him as one of the lowest forms of human existence I've ever met. Loathsome in every sense.

Jeez, you know how much of an asshole you have to be in politics for somebody to go that far? Like, woof. He was suspected of being corrupt in both business and politics, and after he lost his seat, colleagues in the Labor Party refused to endorse him for another run. He was universally known as a nasty piece of work, and he absolutely hated Stephen Ward. In the late 40s, Lewis married a model by the name of Joy Fletcher, and the marriage was almost immediately a disaster, not just because Lewis was a prick, but because of their sex life. Joy told her friends she thought Lewis had learned about sex solely from sex workers and

expected her to act like one. This apparently included making her clean his junk after they had sex. They had a volatile relationship of riproar and fights and walkouts, often because Lewis didn't see marriage as a reason for him to stop seeing sex workers. Joy was miserable and repulsed by her husband. She wanted out, but that wasn't so easy in the 50s. Her family doctor suggested that the best way to engineer a divorce was to have an affair or two, which, damn, like, that doctor did not mess around.

I never heard of anything like that before. But yeah, apparently it was the family doctor. Because apparently every good-looking woman in post-war London was, Joy was friends with Stephen Ward, who set her up with a journalist buddy of his, and the two started seeing each other, while John Lewis slowly marinated in his own rage. After a particularly nasty fight, Joy stormed out and spent the night at Stevens' flat.

Now, this was totally platonic. Stephen, true to form, got off on pairing people up, but had very little interest in getting involved himself. But Lewis was convinced they were sleeping together. What really drove him over the edge was when Joy had an affair with another friend of Stevens, a lesbian, Swedish, beauty queen. This just fried the circuits in Lewis's brain, and for some reason, all his anger about it focused on Stephen Ward.

A friend of his happened to be there when Lewis learned about Joy's lesbian affair, and he said, I'll get Ward, whatever happens, then took a revolver out of his desk. I'll shoot myself, but not before I get Ward. This burning hatred for Stephen Ward stayed with him for years, but, hey, Joy got the divorce she wanted. Now, Christine Keeler had no idea who John Lewis was. He just seemed kind and sympathetic and sat there and listened to her, but he was already scheming. He'd struck gold with this conversation. Here was ammunition to get revenge on Stephen Ward and also to embarrass the conservative government. That could get him back into the Labor Party's good books and back into politics. He started passing Christine's information onto Labor MP George Whig, and he also passed on enough to journalists that they started. Pryan. The whispers about a Profumo scandal were getting louder, so much so that in January

1963, Christine tried to sell her story to the papers. The Sunday pictorial gave her 200 pounds as a down payment with the promise of 800 more upon publication, but pressured by Perfumo's lawyers, they never ran the story. Still, Christine got her 200 pounds, which she used in March for a quick vacation to Spain, right at the time she was supposed to be testifying in John Edgecombe's trial. Do. By now, every journalist in London knew about Christine's connection to perfumo and Ivanov, even if they were too gun-shy to print it. Christine, being a no-show at the trial, gave them the chance to hint that there was something deeply nefarious going on, and there was more to the Edgecombe case than met the eye. This story was clearly about to break, and the

Labor Party, which had been wary of the information fed to them by John Lewis, finally brought it up in the House of Commons. George Wigg asked the Home Secretary to comment on rumors of a minister. Everyone knew he meant Profumo, being involved in the Edgecombe case. The Home Secretary refused to comment, but right after the debate, Conservative Whips told Profumo he had to make a personal statement to the House declaring his innocence. Traditionally, such statements were accepted as fact without question. So the next day, Jack Profumo spoke to the crowded house. is no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Ms. Keeler, he said, and added, I shall not hesitate to issue writs for libel and slander, and if scandalous allegations

are made or repeated outside the house. Yeah, good luck with that, babe. So, there you go. Case closed, right? I mean, a politician wouldn't lie just to protect his career, right? Of course not. I've seen Hamilton, okay? Christine flew back from Madrid, baffled at the fuss her little vacay had caused. She claimed she'd just gotten confused about the trial dates, but more likely, she just hadn't wanted to testify. Stephen Ward decided that when it came to it, he was on the side of the establishment after all.

He backed up Profumo's version on TV news. He soon became aware that he was now under investigation by the Metropolitan Police for, quote, off of the earnings of prostitution, which involved 24-hour surveillance and a tap on his phone, extraordinary measures for a pimping investigation. Stephen started to panic. Both his osteopathy and portraiture business were quickly crumbling as hints about his seedy private life spread throughout the city. He sent multiple letters to people in the government, begging them to call off the investigation. No one answered him. Almost every one of his supposed friends abandoned him.

Ugh. At the beginning of June, Jack Profumo finally confessed the truth to his wife. Then the prime minister and resigned from the government. Then Lucky Gordon was convicted of assaulting Christine and sentenced to three years in prison. The next day, Stephen Ward was arrested and charged with living off of the earnings of prostitution, specifically from Christine and Mandy, and procuration of a girl under 21. Both the press and the courts went after Stephen with everything they had. He was an immoral pervert, and almost certainly a Soviet agent. Somehow, this whole Profumo business was his fault.

The savage coverage of his arrest and trial partially covered the more serious backbone of the story, that the government had been insanely lax in handling the security risks posed by Jack Profumo. Yeah, it almost makes you wonder if that was intentional, right? I mean, surely the media wouldn't allow itself to be influenced by powerful people, right? Surely they wouldn't, like, frame the story in such a way that a scapegoat takes the blame instead of the government, right? Nah, that would never happen. That's exactly what happened, obviously. And Stephen Ward's trial was ridiculous.

Almost everybody else facing his kind of charges were dealt with in the lower courts and faced, you know, fines or probation. But the police and prosecution in this case devoted all their. efforts to getting a conviction and imprisonment, including harassing and pressuring witnesses. One of Stephen's acquaintances, a sex worker specializing in, you know, flagellation, known as Rana the Lash, was threatened into testifying against Stephen by a detective who was a regular client of hers. Don't you love the naked hypocrisy of that? She eventually withdrew her testimony and had ACAB tattooed onto her wrist. Did you know that phrase went back that far? I didn't until this case.

It goes all the way back to the 1920s in Britain. Used to be coppers instead of cops, which I think makes it sound a bit more whimsical than punk. Well, everything has to be whimsical in Britain. We've talked about this. It's a law. Yeah. Between osteopathy and portraiture,

Stephen was making the equivalent today of nearly $200,000 a year. He had no need to pimp out Christine and Mandy, and he didn't. He gained connections and status and fun from their little sex capades, but not money. It actually flowed the other way. He'd given both of them lots and lots of money, multiple loans with little to no expectation of them paying him back. But the strict, stupid letter of the law had it that if Christine and Mandy made money from sex and then used some of that to pay Stephen back, or just to buy groceries for the flat or help with the electric bill, that constituted living off prostitution, even if he'd lost money to them rather than made it. Damn, that is just so dumb.

After blistering summations from both the prosecutor and a hostile judge, Stephen took an overdose of sleeping pills and fell into a coma. He was hospitalized and found guilty in absentia the following day and was to be sentenced when he was fit to appear. But he never regained consciousness and died four days later. Today, his conviction is considered a famous miscarriage of justice and widely and I think rightly so viewed as the establishment making him the scapegoat for an embarrassing situation. And just like when he was a schoolboy, Stephen kept his mouth shut. He didn't blab about the politicians and judges and lords who'd gone to sex parties with him, and he didn't blab about MI5 pulling his strings throughout the whole thing. Back to good chaps, don't tell.

Just like in boarding school, right? A government report into the Profumo affair came out the following month and was pretty much a whitewash. No one in government or the intelligence services had done anything wrong. Jack Profumo hadn't shared any sensitive information. information, Stephen had involved himself with Ivanov, and the whole business was largely down to his foolishness and immorality. The fact that he'd been doing MI5's bidding wouldn't be made public for decades. There was widespread expectation that Prime Minister McMillan would resign in the wake of

the Profumo scandal. One reporter described him as either ludicrously naive or incompetent or deceitful or all three. But he declared he was going to stay in office. Then, a month later, he got sick and managed to convince himself he had cancer. He didn't, and would survive to the age of 92. He resigned due to supposed poor health, though, and in the general election the next year, the Labor Party ousted the conservatives. It was a narrow, narrow victory,

and there's good argument to be made that the Perfumo thing tipped the balance. Jack Perfumo gave up on his political career and concentrated on charitable work helping poor families in London, and he did a lot of good, but in a lot of press and popular culture, this is somehow morphed into him being

the victim of the whole business and not just a greasy old purve. Look, you know what? You can do both. You can do good deeds and be a greasy old purve. Nuance exists. However much we try to pretend it doesn't these days, nuance exists. And he was knighted for his charitable work in 1975 and died in 2006 at 91. The Soviets recalled Yevgeny Ivanov from the London embassy just before the Profumo scandal broke. When it did, his wife Maya dumped his sorry ass. on. Who knows if he continued an intelligence work, but he stayed in the Soviet Navy serving in the Black Sea Fleet. He died in his Moscow apartment in 1994 at the age of 68. For a while, Christine Keeler was one of the most famous women on the planet, and for a few years lived the swing in mid-60s life. Nights out on the

town, celebrity romances, tiny little sports cars. She made a lot of money from selling stories and interviews to newspapers, and spent a lot, both on fun and on various legal fees. As the Profumo scandal faded, the money started to dry up. In the 1970s, she took on a joke gig as an advice columnist for the TittyMag, men only, which she seems to have had fun with. There were also two disastrous one-year marriages, and by 1978, at the age of just 36, she decided she was pretty much done with men in relationships and would live alone. Well, yeah, she lived five lifetimes by 36, man.

I don't blame her. She published various, often contradictory autobiographies. Seems like every time she needed some cash, she'd promise fresh secrets. And I don't blame her for trying to make some money from the events that derailed her life. She was once fired from a job at a school because, quote, someone told the headmaster, you're Christine Keeler. But some of her taller tales should be taken with a grain of salt. She died in 2017 at the age of 75.

Mandy Rice Davies tried to cash in on her newfound fame in 1964 with an album of cover versions called Introducing Mandy. You can hear most of them on YouTube. They're terrible. After an up and down decade of two marriages and trying to get various nightclubs and restaurants going, she got her feet under her in the 80s with some acting gigs and a publication deal for her autobiography and some novels. I haven't read any, but I think you can guess the tone from a blurb on Amazon. Love was an easy game until she broke all of the rules. Amethyst Barclay was everything a modern woman craves.

Talented, successful, and achingly attractive. Oh, my God, Amethyst Barclay. We have got to read that. Yeah. Possibly live. Yes. Patrons. Do you want it?

We'll do it. In the late 80s, she married a wealthy guy named Ken Foreman, who was in business with Dennis Thatcher. That's Dennis, husband of Maggie, and the prime minister and former call girl struck up an unlikely friendship with the two couples going on vacations together in the 90s. Wow. Mandy described her life as one slow descent into respectability. She died of cancer in 2014, age 70. And she was in an episode of Abfab, Absolutely Fabulous, which is my favorite. thing about her. So, yeah, you know, we like to think that the fates of nations are decided by

big momentous events with serious people in the driver's seat, but so often it's messy shit like this that drives it. It's fascinating. Show me a government and disarray. Eight times out of ten, I'll show you a chain of events that leads back to some duffus thinking with his little head. Probably best not to think too much about it. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now. Now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Tiffany, Amy, Jennifer, Heather, Whitney, Ingrid, Amber, and Chloe.

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