Sex, Spies and the Profumo Affair

On a warm July evening in 1961, a group of men from a dinner party at Cliveden strolled down to the swimming pool. One of them was John Profumo, Secretary of State for War. In the water was a nineteen-year-old showgirl called Christine Keeler. On the same weekend, a Soviet naval officer was staying nearby. Within two years a minister had lied to the House of Commons, a society osteopath was dead, a young woman was in prison, and the government of Harold Macmillan was falling apart.

In this episode of Highly Improper, Zac and Lucy tell the story of the most famous political scandal in British history, and ask how much of what we remember actually happened. We meet Stephen Ward, the charming and well-connected osteopath at the centre of the web; Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, the two young women whose names became headlines; Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, the Soviet attaché with a suspicious interest in British society; and John Profumo, the golden boy of the Conservative Party who stood up in Parliament and insisted there had been no impropriety whatsoever.

Along the way we follow the story from the pool at Cliveden to gunshots in a Marylebone mews, from a love letter on War Office notepaper to one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century, and from a courtroom that dissolved into laughter to a trial that ended with its defendant in a coma. We also ask the question at the heart of it all: was there ever really a spy? And why did the man who lied to Parliament end up with a CBE, while the others paid so much more heavily?

📚 FURTHER READING Lord Denning, Lord Denning's Report (1963) Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward (1987) David Profumo, Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir (2006) Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (2013) Geoffrey Robertson, Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK (2013)

Profumo, Ward, Keeler: who do you think was really to blame? Let us know your verdict in the comments.

We'll see you there. Do try to behave.

Watch on YouTube (33 min)