The 1960s sex scandal that rocked British politics

The Profumo affair led to a government minister’s resignation on 5 June 1963. In 1983, Christine Keeler talked to the BBC about her part in a story of sex, lies and Cold War paranoia.

“For 20 years, I think I’ve just been a newspaper clipping, I’ve never really had my say,” Christine Keeler told the BBC’s Sue Lawley on Nationwide in 1983. She was recalling the notorious political scandal that had engulfed her life and made her a household name: the Profumo Affair.

The 21-year-old model found herself thrust into the media spotlight when, on 5 June 1963, John “Jack” Profumo resigned as UK Secretary of State for War after admitting that he had lied to Parliament about having an affair with her. The press alleged that during their dalliance two years earlier, Keeler was also seeing a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, who was believed to be a spy.

The story seemed to have everything: sex, showgirls and the British upper class; lying, a shooting and Cold War spying. Keeler was unprepared for the scandal she was caught up in, and whose fallout would play a role in the collapse of the UK government. “I was an uneducated girl, and when I was 19, politics to me was something totally beyond my scope,” she told the BBC in 1983. As the affair’s details emerged, Keeler would find herself pursued and then vilified by the tabloid press, their coverage defining the public’s perception of who she was. A photograph taken at the time of an unclothed Keeler posing on a chair, would become one of the defining images of London’s Swinging ’60s.

Keeler had already endured a hard and traumatic early life before the Profumo affair exploded. Born in Uxbridge, UK, in 1942, Keeler grew up in poverty after her father left the family when she was a child. She went on to suffer sexual abuse as a teenager at the hands of her stepfather and his friends. At the age of 17, she found herself pregnant by a US serviceman. After he returned to America, she tried unsuccessfully to give herself an abortion. She eventually gave birth to a son, who died six days later. 

Having left school at 15 with no qualifications, she worked variously as a model and a waitress, before landing a job as a showgirl at Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho, London. It would be at the club that she would meet a fellow model, the 16-year-old Mandy Rice-Davies, and befriend the man who would act as her gateway into the elite of British society, Stephen Ward.

Ward was a successful Harley Street osteopath whose clients included both members of the aristocracy and some of the leading cultural figures of the early 1960s. This enabled him to socialise with some of the most influential people in the country. He also had a sideline as a portrait artist, often sketching those he came into contact with, including Queen Elizabeth II’s husband Prince Philip and her sister Princess Margaret. “Stephen was himself a handsome man, intelligent, whose address book read like something out of Who’s Who,” Rice-Davies told BBC’s Witness History in 2013. “His client list included Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren, half the aristocracy of England. In his own way, he was quite powerful.” 

Ward had a habit of setting up his young female friends with older, more powerful men. After meeting the two showgirls, he took them under his wing, and Keeler moved into his flat. Their friendship, while close, remained platonic. The well-connected Ward then began to take Keeler and Rice-Davies to society parties, where he would introduce them to his many wealthy and influential friends and encourage liaisons between them.

“Well, anyone who met Stephen would understand that Stephen had a marvellous charm, and he had a way with him, and I was very close to him,” Keeler told the BBC. “I suppose he was wrong with his attitudes, and he was a bad man – wicked to a degree, he was – but I don’t know, I cared for him.” It would be through Ward that Keeler would go on to have her fateful meeting with Profumo.

Among Ward’s circle of friends was the former Conservative MP Lord Astor, who regularly hosted weekend parties at his Cliveden estate in Buckinghamshire. At one of these events on 8 July 1961, among the illustrious guests that Lord Astor had invited was Profumo and his actress wife Valerie Hobson, who was famous in her own right for starring with Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein in 1935 and in David Lean’s Great Expectations in 1946.

Ward, who rented one of the estate’s cottages from Lord Astor, was there with some friends, including Keeler, and they decided to make use of Cliveden’s swimming pool. “We were all having a swim except Stephen, because he never went swimming, and I got one of the bathing suits that was too big and whatever,” Keeler told BBC Woman’s Hour in 2001. “And Stephen said, ‘Take your swimming suit off, then, if you are complaining about it.’ And so I did – because it kept virtually falling off, it was so big – and threw it to one side. And then Bill Astor and Profumo walked in.” Upon seeing the naked teenager, the 46-year-old Profumo was smitten. 

However, also staying at the cottage was another friend of Ward’s, Captain Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Russian embassy in London. “Yevgeny was a very charming man. I used to have conversations with him about the principles of Communism, he really was a nice chap,” Rice-Davies told the BBC in 2013. “There were several moments when I would say to Stephen, ‘Is he a spy?’ And he would say, ‘Oh darling, everybody in the Russian embassy is a spy.'” 

Keeler would later admit that she had once slept with the Russian, but she told Lawley they hadn’t been in a relationship. “I was never really close to Ivanov, as you read in my book. An encounter happened between us, but we were never lovers. But with Profumo, well, I suppose I was a bit intrigued because he was a war minister, but I didn’t realise just how dangerous the situation was because there was no manipulating on my side.”

Profumo asked for her telephone number, but Keeler told Woman’s Hour that she initially tried to put him off, telling him “to ask Stephen, because I certainly didn’t want him to phone me. He was an older man, and I didn’t fancy him at all.”

“[But Ward] certainly wanted me to go off with Jack Profumo, he persuaded me to see him,” Keeler told the BBC in 1983. Spurred on by Ward, she agreed to go out to dinner with the politician, and the pair embarked on an affair that lasted “a few weeks, about a month at most”, before it ended amicably.

Rumours of their relationship circulated among the press, but it might never have become public knowledge were it not for an incident that took place outside Ward’s flat in December 1962. By this time, Keeler had begun seeing two other men, a jazz singer, Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon and a small-time criminal called Johnny Edgecombe. Both men had violent pasts and were engaged in a jealous row over Keeler. When she broke things off with Edgecombe, he turned up outside Ward’s flat and demanded to be let in. After Rice-Davies refused, he produced a gun and began firing at the door. “We called the police, and the police came along, and following hot on the tail of the police were, of course, the press,” Rice-Davies told Witness History in 2013.

By this time in the 1960s, the Cold War was in full swing, and the media had already covered a number of high-profile spying stories. In 1961, UK Secret Service officer George Blake had been exposed as a KGB double agent and the same year five Britons, who became known as the Portland Spy Ring, had been discovered plotting to pass official secrets to Moscow. Just the year before the Profumo scandal, John Vassall, a gay Admiralty clerk, had been blackmailed into spying by the Soviet Union. With news of Edgecombe’s arrest, the press took a renewed interest in the swirling rumours of the war minister’s affair – and the possibility that Keeler could have obtained secrets from him and passed them to Ivanov.

As speculation intensified, Keeler fled to Spain, avoiding giving evidence at Edgecombe’s trial; he would end up being sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing a firearm with the intent to endanger life. But her disappearance merely served to heighten the press’s scrutiny. Questions were raised in Parliament about the allegations of Profumo’s affair and its national security implications. In response, the Secretary of State for War vehemently denied to Parliament that there was any “impropriety whatsoever” in his relationship with Keeler.

Keeler’s appearance in another court case involving Lucky Gordon, who was charged with assaulting her, gave the press reasons to run ever more headlines about her and Profumo. “Of course, the press went absolutely mad,” said Rice-Davies. “The situation was so overwhelming for John Profumo that he had to stand up in the House of Commons and deny that he had ever met Christine on any occasion, apart from a social occasion where his wife was present – except of course the press came to me for confirmation that she had been having this fling with Profumo.”

Ten weeks after denying their affair, Profumo finally admitted that he had lied to Parliament, and resigned. But the scandal continued to reverberate. Days after Profumo’s resignation, police arrested Ward and charged him with procuring women and living off immoral earnings. At his court case, the prosecution accused Keeler and Rice-Davies of being prostitutes and Ward of being their pimp. The evidence presented for this was that the women had sometimes been given gifts by the men they had had relationships with, and they had given Ward cash for electricity and food while living at his flat.

The trial and its witnesses’ testimonies, detailing the sex lives of the upper echelons of society, generated reams of newspaper coverage. The press and the public flocked to the court every day to catch a glimpse of the colourful characters involved. And Rice-Davies became notorious for the phrase she used when she was told, in the witness box, that Lord Astor had denied that they had slept together: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

None of the influential friends that Ward had so carefully cultivated would testify in his defence. “Stephen had decided that he couldn’t handle the situation anymore, and the jackals were out to get him no matter what,” Rice-Davies told the BBC. On the last day of the trial, after the judge began his damning summing up, Ward took his own life, dying three days after he was found guilty. Lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC is one of people who now regard the case as a miscarriage of justice. He argues that neither woman was a prostitute, that Ward had, in fact, subsidised both women off his earnings as an osteopath, and that he was the victim of a government cover-up. In 2017, a submission to review Ward’s conviction was denied, and the official material from his trial is currently sealed until 2046.

Following his death, Keeler would also find herself in trouble with the law. In December 1963, Gordon’s three-year sentence for her assault was overturned by the Court of Appeal, and Keeler was accused of lying at his trial, because she had protected two of the men present at the assault by testifying that they weren’t there. She pleaded guilty to perjury and was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison.

In the wake of the scandal, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, ordered an inquiry into the Profumo affair. The report by Lord Denning in September 1963 concluded that national security had not been compromised and there was no evidence to link ministers to certain stories of “vile and revolting” sexual activities. Although it was critical of the government’s inept handling of the scandal, it largely laid the blame on the “utterly immoral” Ward. The report was accused of being a whitewash, and Lord Denning’s files regarding the Profumo scandal have been withheld from being publicly released. In 2020, the Cabinet Office decided to keep the files confidential until 2048.

The whole episode served to damage the credibility of Macmillan’s government. The PM resigned in October 1963, citing ill health, and the Conservatives lost the general election the following year. Profumo would never return to politics but spent the rest of his days as a volunteer at an east London charity called Toynbee Hall. He was awarded a CBE for his efforts by the Queen in 1975.

Keeler was not so lucky. On her release from prison, she struggled to find work to support herself. By the time she came to speak to the BBC in 1983 about her ghost-written autobiography Nothing But…, Keeler had gone from being one of the most talked about women in the UK to living in a council flat with her young son and relying on social security.

Having lived in the shadow of the Profumo affair for two decades, Keeler told Lawley that the book was an attempt to get across her side of the story. “Other people have come along with their books and rubbish and complete lies, writing about my life, and I thought it was only fair, after all, that I should get my book published.”

The book would be one of five that Keeler would publish about her life, reflecting her conflicted relationship with the episode that brought her infamy. One of her books, Scandal, went on to be the basis for the 1989 film of the same name, with Joanne Whalley starring as her. 

Douglas Thompson, the author who worked with Keeler on her 2001 memoir The Truth at Last, told the BBC when she died in 2017 that he believed she was forever trapped by the legacy of the Profumo affair.

“I don’t think she ever got away from it – that was a tragedy. She could never stop being Christine Keeler.” 

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