Phillip Knightley was a doyen of investigative reporters, a key member of the Sunday Times Insight team which broke the thalidomide scandal. Knightley's other preoccupation was espionage. This, issued towards the end of his active career, is his account of the Profumo Affair of 1963, the year he arrived in Britain from his native Australia. By 1987 many of the principals were long dead and Jack Profumo had redeemed himself by charitable work. Knightley's take on what by then had been exhaustively worked over is twofold: the weaselly behaviour of the servile British Press, and Scotland Yard working hand-in-glove with their governmental masters to frame Stephen Ward.
This gives Knightley and co-writer Kennedy a couple of major problems. Firstly, they are unable to give us any meaningful insight into the character of Ward, who of course committed the suicide on the eve of being found guilty of a relatively minor sex offence - living on the immoral earnings of the prostitutes Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Why would Ward, a successful society osteopath and artist need to take money from a couple of fairly low-rent tarts? What esactly were his personal predilections? Knightley and Kennedy have done their journalistic duty and interviewed loads of people who knew him, but none seem able to offer much. Most are honest enough to admit they liked him but what appealed to them about him does not emerge. And (something I had not fully realised) Ward was 50 years old when he died. How can someone live, often in the public eye, for half a century and leave no perceptible trace? The only answer, which is not addressed in An Affair of State, is that traces have been officially erased.
The second problem is also skirted. The scandal itself was about Profumo lying to Parliament when. in a personal statement, he denied having sex with Keeler. Powerful men (Profumo was Minister for War) have always been prone to the lure of a bit of rough. It gets headlines when it comes out but the scandal here was the blatant lie. Why then would the Establishment think that prosecuting Ward for running prostitutes and using his posh flat as a brothel would somehow restore the Macmillan government's credibility. It should be noted, by the way, that the frame-up was so unsuccessful, the jury cleeared Ward of most of the charges and all the serious ones, leaving only the lesser count - a convition which any barrister capable of working his mouth would be confident of overturning on appeal. The two young women obviously lived off him, not the other way round.)
I do not dispute for a second that Ward was framed. The evidence Knightley and Kennedy set down is overwhelming. It was hot news in 1987 and would have been incredible in 1987. Nowadays, however, we all know that the only reason for the Met's existence (rather than individual local police forces) is to do the goverment's bidding. The government has to rely on the Met because it cannot trust MI5, whose role in this affair is truly murky. In 1963, of course, the secret services were reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Philby too had gone but his defection wasn't confirmed until the week after Ward's suicide. The Cambridge Five were MI6. MI5 is supposedly the home secret service. In 1963 it was headed by Roger Hollis, who Peter Wright, the actual hunter of moles at the time, later accused of being one. There is no doubt whatsoever that Stephen Ward warned them about Profumo's dalliance with Keeler long before the scandal broke. Clearly MI5 did not inform senior ministers, or they would never have let Profumo make his personal statement. What happened there, then? It's not like they weren't relevant issues. Profumo was Minister for War and President Kennedy in 1963 whether to share US atomic capabilities with Britain. Ward told MI5 that Keeler was also involved with Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov. No problem there? Apparently not.
It's a fascinating read, that raises many questions. Perhaps the best of its kind.
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