The Scandal That Rocked Britain

Fifty years ago, summer 1963. London is swinging, and the old guard is barely holding on. And then the Profumo affair begins ...

She sits astride a knockoff copy of a plywood Arne Jacobsen chair, the chair reversed so that its kidney-shaped back provides just enough modesty to the axis of her nakedness. Her elbows rest on the chair back; her forearms cover her breasts, her chin in her cupped hands. She stares with impudence at the camera. She is young, but there is a little coarseness to her as she plays the vamp; she has been groomed in a hurry for the role.

Keeler, photographed in January 1963, before the Profumo scandal erupted. (Popperfoto/Getty)

“Lucky chair,” says someone.

The chair itself is a clue—austere Danish utility in a country inclined to Victorian bulk. Such economy of design is disruptive to many eyes, part of a disruptive time. Tastes, generations, the protocols of a calcified society are colliding.

And like the chair, the famous loins that will become even more famous are also disruptive; for a season, they will be the loins of the most famous femme fatale in the world. Already they have destroyed a politician, shaken a government, revealed uncomfortable truths, and threatened to reveal dangerous things. A man close to her will die.

The prime minister, Harold Macmillan, mutters, “I will not be brought down by that tart.” He’s referring to the girl in the chair, Christine Keeler. But he will be brought down, because of a miscalculation: it is a scandal of a kind that no longer belongs exclusively to his own caste and times, that cannot be hushed up. This is both the last gasp of an old order and the appearance of a new impertinence toward privilege and power, the likes of which have never been seen and will change the country profoundly.

We are in London in that riotous, rampant, and insolently creative year of 1963. It is summer, suddenly, and the scandal, as ripe as the strawberries, provides the enormous pleasure of a spectacle that nobody seems able to control. The faces of the mighty are puce in their impotence to assert order; their mouths spew cant about concepts they hold dear: “propriety” and “decency.”

The disgraced government minister who so enjoyed those loins is at the center of the whole affair. At first he insisted that there had been “no impropriety whatsoever.” He had stood up and said this in the sacred chamber of the House of Commons, flanked by his prime minister and the cabinet. But the girl had kept a copy of one of his letters: “Darling, In great haste because I can get no reply from your phone—alas something’s blown up tomorrow night ... I won’t be able to see you again until some time in September. Blast it. Please take care of yourself and don’t run away. Love J.”

J for Jack. Jack Profumo, the minister of war, with his shiny forehead and receding hairline. Profumo, unusual name for a Tory, second-generation English descended from a baron of Sardinia who had risen steadily if not spectacularly, had had a good war and—a rebel in his party—backed Churchill. Good old Jack, one of us. And he understood the rules of this political class. OK to cheat (who could resist a girl like that?). OK to lie about it. But not OK to be caught lying, and lying to Parliament, a place of practiced, polished dissemblers ready to be ruthless with the failed liar. Rules of the game. Victorian, permissive until threatened.

Minister of war Jack Profumo, with wife Valerie Hobson, in a photo taken while the spying and sex scandal were unfolding. Taken in the 1960's (AFP/Getty)

Outside in the streets, it is different. Miniskirts. Mini Coopers. The Beatles. Their first anthem, “Love Me Do,” is casting its spell. The pill has made libertines out of the sexually repressed. Swinging. Making a whole new louche boulevard of a street called the King’s Road, where the owner of one boutique (creator of hotpants) uses as her brand identity her own pubic hair shaved (by her husband) into the shape of a heart. Swinging.

But behind the music, behind the carnival, is the Cold War, and the scandal has ensnared a spy—or, to be more precise, those same loins have. A Soviet spy, Eugene Ivanov, who operated under the cover of naval attaché, but can be more accurately portrayed as the bedroom attaché.

Keeler spoke of Ivanov’s virility as a capital asset: “he was a man.” Size mattered, and in the few pictures of him Ivanov does indeed have a chunky Slavic muscularity. Ivanov’s presence suddenly becomes the detonator of the whole scandal: while pleasuring the Russian, Keeler has been asked to pump Profumo the war minister for information about the movement of U.S. missiles in West Germany. Technical stuff. Ballistics. Logistics.