The Profumo Affair

I don’t suppose anyone under the age of 70 remembers the Profumo Affair. In the spring and summer of 1963 it rocked British political and social life. It provided days and months of newspaper titillation and speculation. I was a second year undergraduate at the time and I was as transfixed as the next person.

It was brought back to me as I’ve started to re-read “the Pendulum Years” by Bernard Levin. This account of Britain in the sixties written by one of the most acerbic commentators of the time opens with a view on of the febrile atmosphere of the sixties as old certainties were blown away in a gust of change. Incidentally the title is taken from a popular ditty of the sixties which had the line “England swings like a pendulum do”

The Profumo Affair is too complex to describe in detail. Broadly the Minister of Defence had an affair with good time girl who at the same time was also sleeping with a minor Russian diplomat. Crucially he opted to lie about his relationship to Parliament when there was evidence enough to prove he lied.

I rather suspect that without the lie and with present day morality he might have got away with it but at the time it was a gigantic deal. There were ample lurid details which slowly emerged over many weeks. The truthful details were accompanied by even more lurid rumours. These included judges in sexual orgies and perhaps the most bizarre was that a cabinet minister served an orgiastic dinner party naked except for a small lacy apron and wearing a notice around his neck saying “If I don’t satisfy you spank me”.

There was absolutely no evidence in these rumours but with the real and true evidence which slowly emerged these rumours were widespread and found their way into the press. It would be hard to exaggerate the influence on English life. Sexual matters had figured very discreetly in the press until then but suddenly the floodgates opened. Levin partly traces the press prurience to the Vassall case a year earlier. This gained much less coverage and what there was turned out to be wrong. Vassall was a Soviet spy who was also a homosexual. It was incorrectly alleged that he used his proclivities to seduce a minister. This was untrue and the press was humiliated in getting the facts so wrong.

The Profumo Affair had all the juicy sexual detail and most of all it was true. For example Profumo met the girl as she was swimming naked in the pool at Cliveden, a stately home. For months there was revelation after revelation so that even wild suggestions were produced and gained some credibility just because the real events seemed so bizarre.

Bernard Levin, author of the Pendulum Years, came to prominence thanks to a slot on a weekly television show “That was the week that was” now always called TW3. Starting in 1962 this was a completely new comedy show lampooning politicians and spawning the satire boom. It only ran for two series but was amazing, startlingly different to anything which had gone before. Showing on a Saturday night it was compulsive viewing for us students. I remember coming in from Leicester, after seeing Annette back to her digs, one Saturday night and squeezing into the packed common room to watch. Sexual themes never before seen on TV were subject to sketches. I recall one about a public schoolboy hiding his heterosexuality in the homosexual public school environment feeling he was abnormal..

Using a comedic theme covered a lot of really quite serious commentary on the news. The Levin role was to aggressively interview some public figure adding his own savage comments. One was with Emil Savundra, a fraudster who ran an insurance business for some time. Part of his downfall came after being skewered by Levin.

It would be completely exaggerated to say that the whole decade’s social change stemmed from TW3 and the Profumo affar but they certainly contributed strongly to change in public mood. The press certainly saw that sex and scandal sells papers and  adapted accordingly. The content which until then had been the staple of the “News of the World” became widely used. The sixties were a decade in which attitudes, particularly towards sex, changed rapidly. In this 1963 was a pivotal year of which Philip Larkin in his poem “Annus mirabilis” remarks “sexual intercourse began in 1963, which was much too late for me, between the Lady Chatterly trial and the Beatles first LP “