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This iconic 1960s portrait of 21 year old English “party girl” prostitute Christine Keeler [b. 1942] relates to one of the 20th century's biggest political scandals known as the Profumo Affair [1963]. Her liaison with a prominent British government minister, 27 years her senior, entirely destroyed an illustrious and promising political career, and brought down a government, earning her fame and fortune and a jail sentence in the process.
The encounter was as brief as it was casual and the matter might have ended without public awareness, but for a bizarre set of circumstances. The affair advanced not by public disclosure but via a grapevine of rumour that got considerably bigger until the truth could be concealed no longer. It had all the alchemy of a TV soap opera and then some, quickly mushrooming into a media frenzy given a toxic brew of salacious high society shenanigans involving weekend house parties, call girls, and pimps in high places, with MI5, Russian spies and senior government ministers thrown in for good measure, against a backdrop of Cold War paranoia.
In the late 80s, Keeler's autobiography and the film, Scandal in which she collaborated revived interest in the events and raised doubts about the perjury charges made against her. Her latest book, "Christine Keeler, The Truth At Last (2001)" continues to raise questions about the case even after almost 40 years, which cannot be verified until 2046 when official papers will be released.
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real shame
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John Porfumo, who died in 2006 at 91, suffered scandal without reply. He made a vow of silence and never opened his mouth again to answer any criticism or misrepresentation, however unfair. Buffered from financial concerns by an inherited family fortune, he and his wife, the former film star Valerie Hobson (1917-98), disappeared from public life and London society, and cloistered themselves in their country estate. He quietly assumed a new identity and purpose through charitable community service work for the rest of his life. He did not cooperate with the inevitable books and movies about the scandal. A friend said of him, "No one judges Jack Profumo more harshly than he does himself. He says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt real shame."
Curiously, despite Profumo’s devastating fall from political grace and shameful loss of social respectability, his enduring legacy may well have been his vote in 1940 (some 20 years before the scandal) against his own party... a vote which led to the downfall of Chamberlain (1869-1940) and the arrival of Churchill (1874-1965) as a wartime prime minister. Profumo's prospects some years later for the Prime Minister role were arguably within his grasp had events turned out differently.
Without Christine Keeler, there was a possibility that the debonair Profumo would have become a Conservative prime minister in the late 1960s or 1970s. But Profumo did not need to move to 10 Downing St. to be revered in British history. Within weeks of being elected to Parliament during the darkest period of World War II in 1940, Profumo joined in casting what may been the most important legislative vote of the 20th century. In May 1940 -- with Norway falling to the Nazis and talk of a separate peace with Hitler gaining in London -- Profumo was one of 33 backbench Conservative MPs who broke with their party on a vote of confidence to force the resignation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Without this Conservative rebellion, Winston Churchill would not have been prime minister during the Battle of Britain.
ReplyDeleteWell if you can afford it I guess, it’s a little easier to assume dignity in disgrace. Had Porfumo not had a family fortune to ease his way, he’d as likely as all the others be at the media trough squeezing every penny out of the opportunity to tell his side of the story to an ever gullible and curious public!
ReplyDeleteThe former film star Valerie Hobson's prowess as a screamer was much remarked upon, and Universal took the precaution of filing her top decibels in the studio sound library for use whenever a script called for a damsel in distress.
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