It is half a century since John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, lied in the House of Commons about having an affair with the call girl Christine Keeler.

The denial resulted in the exposure of a searing story of sex, suicide, intrigue and espionage – and demolished Profumo’s world of red-leather despatch boxes, scrambler telephones and the panoply of a Minister of the Crown.

Profumo began 1963 as Secretary of State for War. He was a rising star of the Tory Party, close to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a favoured visitor at Buckingham Palace, a war hero and the dashing husband of a famous film star.

Then, seven shots fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Christine Keeler triggered Britain’s most notorious political sex scandal of modern times.

The Profumo affair convulsed Westminster for nearly six months.

Macmillan’s Cabinet was shaken by Keeler’s revelations that she had sex with both Profumo and Commander Eugene Ivanov, a handsome Russian intelligence officer and the Soviet assistant naval attaché in London.

At the height of the crisis, Cabinet ministers feared some of their colleagues might become the targets for scandal-mongers.

There were tales of organised orgies, including whipping parties at a house in Mayfair where, it was said, one of the guests became overexcited and died of a heart attack.

On March 22, 1963, battered by parliamentary gossip, Profumo delivered a personal statement to MPs denying any “impropriety whatsoever” in his relationship with Keeler.

His claim that a platonic affair had ended in 1961 was accepted by the Cabinet. Downing Street described the matter as closed.

Prime Minister Macmillan and Cabinet colleagues took Profumo at his word, but opposition MPs and newspapers remained sceptical.

On June 4, 1963, after a welter of rumour, accusation and denial that rocked the Government, Profumo, known as Jack, was forced to resign when osteopath and man-about-town Stephen Ward was arrested and charged with living on immoral earnings.

It was Ward, an artist and son of a country parson, who in 1961 took Keeler to Lord Astor’s country home at Cliveden, Berkshire, where Profumo first set eyes on the doe-eyed brunette climbing nude from the swimming pool.

She was 19 and he was 48, married to the beautiful Valerie Hobson, star of classic Ealing comedies such as Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Hobson, who loyally stood by her husband throughout this terrible personal crisis, died aged 83 in November 1998.

Profumo came from a Sardinian family who emigrated to Britain in 1885 and built their fortunes on insurance.

His father was an Italian baron and a King’s Counsel.

Profumo was born in 1915 and brought up as an English gentleman. From Harrow he went to Oxford. He joined the Army in 1939 and ended the war as a brigadier, just the right background for a Tory MP. He entered the Commons at only 25, winning Kettering at a by-election in 1940, to become the youngest MP in the House.

After the war he lost his seat, but got back into Parliament in 1950 as MP for Stratford-upon-Avon. Two years later he was in government office, as Joint Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Transport.

Ever ascending, Prime Minister Macmillan made him Secretary of State for War in July 1960 with a brief to boost Army recruitment following the end of conscription. He made a success of it.

It appeared as if nothing could stand in the way of Profumo’s ambition to be Foreign Secretary.

He was even tipped as a future Prime Minister. Then he met Keeler. Their affair was as brief as it was casual. It might have ended without public knowledge, but for a bizarre set of circumstances.

Keeler was also sleeping with Ivanov, whom she met through Ward, and with a West Indian petty criminal called Johnny Edgecombe.

The involvement of the Russian was seen as a potentially serious threat to national security.

Newspapers, to whom Keeler sold her story, held back from publishing details. But gossip circulated in Westminster and Fleet Street, not only about the War Minister and Keeler, but linking other prominent Tory politicians with call-girls and sex orgies.

The affair became public by a grapevine of rumour that got considerably bigger all the time until the truth could be concealed no longer.

The Profumo affair rocked the Tory establishment to the roots during the final months of the Macmillan administration, when he was sick and Labour – under its new leader Harold Wilson – was smelling blood.

The rumours surrounding the case, including one that a Conservative minister attended an orgy wearing only a maid’s frilly apron and a mask, led to an inquiry by Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls.

He found all the rumours to be untrue.

The Denning report became one of the hottest-selling Government publications ever but was widely viewed as an example of the Establishment closing ranks.

Ward committed suicide after being found guilty on some, but not all, charges.

In the end the seediness of the Profumo affair proved fatal to 13 years of unbroken Tory rule.

Before the year was out, Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who lost the general election.

Profumo suffered scandal without reply.

The summer he fell, he made a vow of silence and never opened his mouth again to answer any criticism or misrepresentation, however unfair.

The only time he spoke of it was to his son David who produced the memoir Bringing the House Down.

Profumo served penance for parliamentary dishonour with more than 30 years of charity work among the poor in the East End of London.

Profumo’s wife’s death was a terrible blow to him, but he carried on his work as best he could. In 2003, the 40th anniversary of the Profumo scandal, all-party efforts were made in the Commons to restore his Privy Counsellorship.

Profumo died in hospital on March 9 2006 after a stroke.

Britain was gripped by a perfect storm

The Profumo affair set the level for every subsequent political sex scandal that followed. Nowadays it is hard to imagine how explosively shocking the revelations were that emerged from Jack Profumo’s downfall.

But at the time in 1963, the nation was agog with the story’s emerging strands of spies, shootings, suicide and sex parties.

“Everybody was absolutely captivated by what happened,” said Richard Davenport-Hines, author of An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo.

“So many people wrote to me to say it was their first political memory or first sense of grown up sex and tabloid journalism.

“It had a tremendous impact on my generation’s lives quite apart from the political impact.”

It certainly made an impression on the schoolboy Davenport-Hines. In the wake of the scandal a teacher innocently asked his class for a noun beginning with a vowel.

“Orgy,” the youngster answered and was dispatched to be caned – an ironic punishment for those who knew of the scandal’s claims of parties where naked revellers were whipped and abused. The author believes Britain is actually “more puritanical nowadays”, but part of the interest in the wider Profumo story was through a guilty, vicarious satisfaction.

“People like to read about other people’s sex lives as long as they are enjoying the sex but are caught and punished,” said Davenport-Hines, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

“The whole idea surrounding politicians’ sex lives is very childish.

“It’s very much like little child-ren bursting into their parents’ bedroom to catch them at it on a Saturday morning.”

The author said Profumo had many parallels with today’s post-Leveson age. “It completely changed the nature of journalism.

“Until Profumo, if politicians were caught in the bushes in St James’s Park newspapers hardly reported it.

“But this put their foot down on the accelerator in a more intrusive form of journalism with quite irrelevant stuff about private lives dragged into the idea of public interest.

“The extraordinary notion got around after 1963 that anyone who lied about their private life was unfit to be a politician because they might lie about their politics.”

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