What was the significance of the Profumo Affair?

LO: To explain the impact of the scandal on the Conservative party

A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society, 1959-1975 Lesson 5

Presentations

Different Interpretations“Assessments of these years vary widely: some point to increasing prosperity, the affluent society, however critics suggest that this developed from the improvement in world trade and had nothing to do with the government’s policies. Some would go further and claim that the “stop-go” policies hindered the country’s economic development, and that Britain missed the chance to benefit from involvement in the EEC.

“The Macmillan years were a crucial period in British history, despite the PMs many gifts, even he was unable to disguise permanently the fact that Britain was no longer a great power.”

Norman Lowe, 1984

The cheerful hedonism of the late 50s, of Macmillan claiming, “You’ve never had it so good”, gave way to deepening uncertainty, emphasised in the work of a number of different writers. A 1961 opinion poll revealed widespread pessimism- a belief that other countries were doing better- Britain was falling behind. Anthony Hartley’s A State of England (1963) spoke of a sense of frustration in English society. An international survey by OEEC showed an old country lagging behind its European neighbours in productivity and investment. In “Encounter”magazine Arthur Koestler wrote of the suicide of a nation. Michael Shanks’ The Stagnant Society (1963) exposed a lack of dynamism and modernisation in the economy. There was social imbalance too- deep structural divisions/ an entrenched class system: Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain (1962) examined a wide range of institutions run by a tiny group of public school/Oxbridge “top people”.

Kenneth O. Morgan, 2001

Activity 5

What did the Conservatives achieve?

a) An improvement in living standardsWages rose 72% from 1951-1963; Prices, 45%: people could afford more consumer goods. In 1961 the working week was reduced from 48 hours to 42. More houses were built than ever before.

b) Important extensions of the Welfare StateBenefits were raised. Mental and physical illnesses now regarded no differently. Announced building of new hospitals. Introduced 2s prescription charge.

c) Help for agricultureGrants and subsidies helped farmers use new fertilisers and machinery. Production rose.

d) An expansion of education6000 new schools built, 11 new universities. Yet continued to support grammar schools.

What did they do wrong?

a) Inconsistent economic policiesNo permanent solution found to problems of how to stimulate economic growth, while keeping inflation under control, and maintaining balance of trade. Sometimes attempting to limit spending, sometimes allowing more freedom: ”Stop-Go”. 1959 tax-cutting budget helped woo voters but once again contributed to consumer boom and an increase in imports.

b) Failure to join the EECThey failed to join at the outset in 1957, which had consequences for British production and exports. Then they tried to join but were denied.

c) Not enough investment in industry“Stops” discouraged industrialists from risking long-term investment. Too much money was invested abroad. Many argued the govt. were spending to much on defence- H-bomb-in an attempt to keep up with the US. Textiles, shipping etc declined in face of stiff foreign competition

d) Scandals and cover-upsGovt.’s reputation was tarnished by scandal- Profumo, William Vassell clerk at the Admiralty spied for the Russians, blackmailed because he was homosexual- covered up by govt. ministers

Activity 2

Photograph of Christine Keeler by Lewis Morley - one of a

series of publicity shots for an intended film which never saw

the light of day

Why do you think this picture has

gained iconic status?

Left: Arne Jacobsen, chair, model 3107, 1957. Museum no. CIRC.371-1970. Right: the Keeler chair

Design?

Political scandal?

Representation of women?

Activity 1

The Land of Lost Content, 1955 - 1964

The 1950s were a period of apparent calm, order and prosperity for Britain, but British people were anxious for change, many began to distrust the government and protestors and satirists led people to question and mock their rulers. In 1961, the liaison between working-class Christine Keeler and Secretary of State for War John Profumo dragged the formally closed world of politics firmly into the public gaze.

Introduction

Macmillan’s Foreign Policy

British Commerce

Labour Party

Scandal/Profumo

Satire/ Conclusion

How to make good notes

� Listen carefully to the start. You will be better prepared to anticipate what notes you will need to take. Decipher the outline by listening for:− A topic for each section. – Supporting points or examples for the topic.

� To make sure that you get everything, get in the habit of skipping words like "the" and "a" and make use of shorthand and abbreviations.

� Summarize your notes in your own words. Remember: your goal is to understand, not to try to record exactly everything said.

� Recognize main ideas by signal words that indicate something important is to follow. − There are three reasons why...." (Here they come!) – And most important,...." (A main idea!) – A major development...." (A main idea again!) He may signal support material with:– "On the other hand...." – "Furthermore...." He may signal conclusion or summary with:– "Therefore...." – "In conclusion...."

� Jot down details or examples that support the main ideas.. Indicate examples with "e.g."

� If there is a summary at the end, pay close attention to it. You can use it to check the organization of your notes.

Effective note taking is an important skill that many college students have not mastered. Here are some tips for how to listen actively and take accurate notes.

Philip Larkin - Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(which was rather late for me) -Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.

That old rogue Larkin was out by a few years of course, but he captured perfectly the mood of the early 1960s. It was an era in which anything was possible and nothing was safe; a time when the established order was being challenged, subverted, and ultimately buried.

The Chatterley ban was indeed one of the first shibboleths to evaporate. In August 1960 Penguin was prosecuted for publishing one of DH Lawrence's lesser works, Lady Chatterley's Lover, notable only for its use of the f-word and some sublimely silly sex scenes. The trial was farcical - at one stage the jurors were invited to consider whether they would be happy for their wives and servants to read such a book - and the outcome rarely in doubt. When Penguin was given the go ahead to publish, there was minor pandemonium: the initial print run of 200,000 copies sold out on the day of issue, November 10, at the then rather stiff price of 3s 6d (17.5p).

Several more sensations were to unfold before - to follow Larkin's conceit - the Beatles' first LP. 1961 saw the first publication of a little magazine trying to revive an age old tradition of political and social satire. It was called Private Eye. In the same year, and the same spirit, a group of Cambridge graduates - Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller - brought their irreverent revue, Beyond the Fringe, to London's West End.

In 1962 satire burst out on television, with the late night show That Was The Week That Was, or TW3 to its aficionados.

It thrived by debunking religion, politics, royalty and sex, attracting a colossal audience of some 12m viewers - almost as many as the other TV sensation of the age, Coronation Street - making presenter David Frost a national celebrity, and giving the BBC governors some sleepless nights.The mood of iconoclasm spread even to the Palace of Westminster. In 1961 a young and ardent Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, was barred from the House of Commons after winning a by-election at Bristol South-east, on account of having inherited a viscountcy. Tony Benn, as we now know him, went on to campaign successfully for peers to be allowed to renounce the titles - and, in his case, to shear several syllables off their names as well.

The mood of the day was embodied in the explosion of pop culture. Towards the end of 1962 there was a surge of interest in a new group - they were not called bands then -from Liverpool. It wasn't so much the music at first which caught the public eye (their first single, Love Me Do, barely scraped into the Top 20), but rather their bizarrely long hair. The following year, curiosity became craze, and the Beatles were on their way to their first LP.

Political context

Some commentators have compared the convulsions of the early 1960s, leading up to the election of Harold Wilson's first Labour government in 1964, with the sweeping aside

1963: The Profumo ScandalAt the height of the cold war, as the established order was challenged as never before, Britons paid rapt attention to a sordid little affair which involved a cabinet minister, a showgirl and a Soviet naval attaché.

Derek Brown (The Guardian) looks back on 1963.

of the Thatcher-Major years and the accession of Tony Blair in 1997. The analogy is tempting: both events involved the ending of long periods of unbroken Conservative government, and the promise at least of a new era. But it is a false comparison none the less. What happened in 1997 was a change of management and style. In 1964, the upheaval was much more fundamental.

At the start of the decade, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was still basking in the glow of his 1959 near-landslide election victory, with a Commons majority of over 100. The cartoonists called him Supermac, and political writers were addicted to the adjective "unflappable". Urbane, patrician and when the occasion demanded utterly ruthless, he seemed scarcely threatened by a Labour party wracked by left-right dissent.

But Supermac was not invincible at all. There was rising discontent in the country and in the Tory party over Britain's lacklustre postwar economic performance. Japan and Germany were booming, while the UK's hidebound economy was bedevilled by inflation and dreadful labour relations. Belatedly, the government lumbered towards an application to join the European Economic Community, universally known as the Common Market, but the nation was less and less enamoured by ministers who seemed to represent a bygone age.

Rising discontent led to a series of resounding by-election defeats for the government, most sensationally at Orpington in Kent in March 1962, when a Tory majority of nearly 15,000 was turned into a majority of 7,800 for Jeremy Lubbock of the suddenly resurgent Liberal party. Macmillan, hitherto unflappable, began to flap like a wet hen. Four months after Orpington, in one of the most ruthless political bloodlettings of modern times, he abruptly sacked and replaced seven senior ministers - one-third of the entire cabinet. It was

instantly dubbed 'the night of the long knives'. Supermac became Mac the Knife.

Conservative disarray, meanwhile, was being mirrored by Labour consolidation. For much of the 1950s, the party had been convulsed by ideological wrangling, most notably over the issue of nuclear disarmament. Hugh Gaitskell, who had taken over the leadership from the last Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, was politically all but hamstrung by the internecine strife. But the new decade, with its intangible but unmistakable sense of change, brought a new sense of purpose - and opportunity - to the party. By the time Aneurin Bevan, the leading leftist scourge of the establishment, died in 1960, the party was reinventing itself as a movement for change.

Harold Wilson, seen as a pragmatic leftist, first challenged Gaitskell for the leadership, unsuccessfully, in November 1960. But he and his generation of Labour leaders - George Brown, Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey - were honing a new style of politics which looked to the challenges of the future, not the ideology of the past. That their time was coming, they had no doubt. But they could not have known that their ascent to power would be hastened by a scandal more sensational than any in modern British politics.

Tarts, toffs and traitors

Even today, in our peculiar society, we get excited when ministers and other public figures are caught with their pants down. In 1963, the very notion was deeply, deliciously shocking.

It was still mostly a pre-pill, pre-promiscuity age, when unmarried pregnancy was a matter of deep family shame, and backstreet abortionists thrived.

The tabloid newspapers were already brash but not yet sex-crazed, and were by and large polite to politicians. But when the storm broke, it was not simply driven by sex; there was a deep, dark context of rank treachery.

Since the early 1950s, when diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to their paymasters in Moscow, the chattering classes had speculated about the existence of a "third man". The brave new world of the 1960s did nothing to curb the tittle-tattle; indeed, as the cold war intensified, the issue assumed ever more menacing implications.In 1961 George Blake, another ex-diplomat, was given a record 42-year prison sentence for spying for the Russians. Sensationally, he was said to have been brainwashed by communists while in captivity in Korea. Even more sensationally, he was to escape from jail after serving only five years.

The cold war was at its coldest, and the Soviet Union was at the zenith of its power, launching the first man into space, and defying the world by supervising the construction of the Berlin Wall. America's apparent impotence, meanwhile, was underlined by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world terrifyingly close to nuclear annihilation. Close to the peak ofthe crisis, a 38-year-old Admiralty clerk and the son of a vicar, William Vassall, was jailed for 18 years for spying for the USSR. He had been recruited by the KGB in a homosexual "honey trap". In July 1963 the government named Kim Philby, former Foreign Office colleague of Burgess and Maclean, as the "third man". But even that huge revelation was subsumed in a greater sensation now gripping the nation.

For months, rumours had circulated about the private life of John Dennis Profumo, secretary of state for war.

Educated at Harrow and Oxford, he was a quintessential high Tory who had achieved cabinet rank after serving in a number of junior posts. He was married to the film star Valerie Hobson, and moved effortlessly in the highest of society.

In the deferential spirit of the 1950s, the rumours may have been restricted to salon gossip. Now, in the new age of iconoclasm, the whispers were amplified in the media. That Was The Week That Was scored a telling blow with a splendid parody of the old music hall number, She was Poor but she was Honest. The words of the new version went: "See him in the House of Commons / Making laws to put the blame / While the object of his passion / Walks the streets to hide her shame.“

The "object of his passion" was a young woman whose name is now embedded in British political folklore: Christine Keeler. Keeler, unlike Profumo, had had an extremely undistinguished life. Born in 1942, she left home at 16 after an unhappy childhood in the Thames Valley, and gravitated to London where she found work of a sort at Murray's cabaret club. There she met and befriended another showgirl, Marilyn "Mandy" Rice-Davies. Soon, both young women had drifted into the racy circle around Stephen Ward, a fashionable West End osteopath and socialite.

Keeler's relationship with Ward was both torrid and rocky. They broke up several times, but he seemed to exercise an almost centripetal force on her, and always she drifted back. Soon both young women were celebrated players, albeit with bit parts, in Ward's sexual circus.

Not all the action was centred on Ward's Wimpole Mews flat, equipped with two-way mirrors and other aids to lubricity. Soon, Keeler and Rice-Davies were circulating in more exalted milieux, including Lord Astor's country

mansion of Cliveden. It was there that John Profumo first laid eyes on her. A brief but passionate affair ensued, and tongues began to wag.

Even then, it might have been brushed under the carpet in the time honoured English way, but Profumo made a fundamental error: he lied to the House of Commons. In March 1963 he told the chamber that there was "no impropriety whatever" in his relationship with Keeler. Ten weeks later he appeared before MPs again to say "with deep remorse" that he had misled the House, and would resign.What brought Profumo down even more than his deceit of the Commons, was the startling revelation that Keeler had also slept with Eugene Ivanov, the naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. It was that detail which captured world attention, notably in the United States, where the FBI compiled a detailed report called Operation Bowtie.

In Britain, Profumo's downfall naturally caused a huge sensation, inflated by the establishment's crude and cruel attempts to find scapegoats for its own embarrassment. As usual, official wrath was turned on those least able to defend themselves. Stephen Ward was prosecuted for living on immoral earnings. On the last day of his trial, he killed himself with an overdose of sleeping tablets.

Less than two months after Ward's tragic and mysterious death, an official report was produced by Lord Denning, master of the rolls. It was a hot number: hundreds queued to buy a copy when it was released at midnight. But there were few juicy bits in Denning's findings.

He criticised the government for failing to deal with the affair more quickly, but concluded that national security had not been compromised. And, to the dismay of the reading public, he failed to identify the man who, naked except for a

mask, had served at Ward's dinner parties. There had been rumours that the "man in a mask" was a cabinet minister but Denning, who interviewed him, denied it.

There it ended, though it never really went away. The 1989 movie, Scandal reignited some of the controversy, and Christine Keeler raked over the embers in her autobiography, The Truth At Last, published early in 2001. In it, she revived some of the more startling claims made at the time - though alas she was unable to offer convincing new evidence to back them up. She claims for example, that the then MI5 chief, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet spy; and that Stephen Ward ran a spy ring which included Hollis and Sir Anthony Blunt, who was surveyor of the Queen's pictures. Blunt was indeed revealed as a long-time Soviet agent in the 1980s, around the same time that Hollis, the object of numerous rumours, was officially cleared.

The aftermath

The Profumo affair was no passing sensation. It all but brought down the Macmillan government and it almost certainly finished Macmillan himself as prime minister. In October 1963, less than a month after publication of the Denning report, the prime minister resigned citing ill health. There were no party elections in those days, and the mantle passed to the most improbable of candidates, the 14th Earl of Home.

The Tory mandarins - known as "the magic circle" - were desperate to keep out the obvious successor, Rab Butler, who was on the liberal wing of the party. They preferred the Old Etonian, cricket-loving laird, who was only too happy to oblige, quickly using the recent legislation sparked by the Anthony Wedgwood-Benn affair to renounce his ancient title and transform into being plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Write a paragraphWhat was the significance of the Profumo Affair?

Consider its impact on the Conservative government, politics, the media and the country as a whole

The significance of the Profumo affair, was that it brought to a head existing anxieties that had been simmering away for years beneath the apparently untroubled surface of the affluent society. Harold Wilson insisted that it revealed 'the sickness of an unrepresentative sector of our society'. It certainly tipped the scales in favour of Wilson’s Labour Party in what was an extremely tight election. It was also a milestone in the history of newspapers. It made for a more exciting Press and a more candid atmosphere about sex generally……

Examination Practice

Pick out phrases in both sources which provide a contrast of views. Don’t forget that ‘how far’ also requires you to look at the similarities (if any).

For “to what extent” you need to make a two-column table with examples on both sides. Decide where to cite evidence from the sources and in what order you will make you points. Point out differences in provenance, tone and language. Your argument should be balanced and lead to a supported conclusion.

Pick out phrases in both sources which provide a contrast of views. Don’t forget that ‘how far’ also requires you to look at the similarities (if any).

For “to what extent” you need to make a two-column table with examples on both sides. Decide where to cite evidence from the sources and in what order you will make you points. Point out differences in provenance, tone and language. Your argument should be balanced and lead to a supported conclusion.

Interview with Alec Douglas-Home

Interview with Clement Attlee

• Look back over your notes in preparation for a timed assessment next week

Further Research

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