An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo. Richard Davenport-Hines

pliable’. Homosexuality was indeed ‘a proselytising religion, and initiation by an adept is at once the cause and the occasion of the type of fixation which has led to the increase in homosexual practices’. Hailsham, with his authority as a Queen’s Counsel and Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, held that ‘homosexual practices are contagious, incurable, and self-perpetuating’, that ‘homosexuality is, and for fundamentally the same reasons, as much a moral and social issue as heroin addiction’. Homosexuals, he averred, were pederasts by preference. ‘No doubt homosexual acts between mature males do take place … but the normal attraction of the adult male homosexual is to the young male adolescent or young male adult to the exclusion of others.’

      As so often, hostility to same-sex activity splayed into asinine condemnation of heterosexual behaviour. ‘Adultery and fornication may be immoral but, on the lowest physical plane, they both involve the use of the complementary physical organs of male and female,’ Hailsham explained. However, ‘between man and woman the persistent misuse of these organs in any other way is often fraught with grave dangers, emotional, or even physical, to one or both of the participants’. This seems to be a verbose warning that people who enjoyed using either mouths or fingers in their sex lives were in peril of nervous or bodily collapse. Homosexual practices were worse because they used ‘non-complementary physical organs’, Hailsham continued. ‘The psychological consequences of this physical misuse of the bodily organs cannot in the long run be ignored … nearly all the homosexuals I have known have been emotionally unbalanced and profoundly unhappy. I do not believe that this is solely or exclusively due to the fear of detection, or of the sense of guilt attaching to practices in fact disapproved of by society. It is inherent in the nature of an activity which seeks a satisfaction for which the bodily organs employed are physically unsuited.’⁴⁸

      Hailsham sounded moral alarms monotonously, although the miscreant modernity that he despised was tied to material ease promoted by the government of which he was a member. His inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University in 1959 flailed ‘the emotional, intellectual, moral, political, even the physical litter and chaos of the world today, when truth has almost ceased to be regarded as objective, when kindness is made to depend on political, class or racial affiliations, when only the obvious stands in need of publicity’. He felt revulsion, he declared, ‘when I look at popular pin-ups, playboys, millionaires and actresses with the bodies of gods and goddesses and the morals of ferrets lurching from one demoralising emotional crisis to another and never guessing the reason; when I view the leaders of great states, the masters of immense concentrations of power and wealth, gesticulating like monkeys and hurling insults unfit for fishwives; when I reflect on the vapidity of so much that is popular in entertainment, the triteness of so much that passes for profundity, the pointlessness and frustration in the popular mood.’ In these rounded periods lay the quandary of the Macmillan era, and the trap for Jack Profumo.⁴⁹

      Despite the spiritual pride of Hailsham and allies like him, Macmillan won the general election of 1959 because the Tories were more convincing as a party of liberty and progress: Labour, by contrast, seeming conservative and cheeseparing. Profumo’s campaign message to the electors of Stratford-on-Avon decried his socialist opponents as regressive killjoys and fretful regulators. ‘Most people are suffering from acute political exhaustion. Facts, figures, graphs, slogans, promises, boasts, taunts and threats galore have been chucked about for weeks.’ But some things were clear: the Labour government of 1945–51 had failed to meet expectations. ‘The Labour leaders were all so keen to establish a Socialist State that they failed to observe what made people tick and what made them kick. They divided us, depressed us, disillusioned us and nearly destroyed us.’ By contrast, since 1951, ‘we have swept away all the paraphernalia of controls and proved that Conservative freedom does work to the benefit of everyone’. Voters were ‘glad to be free of controls; but a Labour Government would clamp them on again … This is your life – don’t let Labour ruin it.’⁵⁰

      Hugh Trevor-Roper, who masterminded Macmillan’s election as Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960, thought that the tendency of the times was towards ‘a vulgar, jolly, complacent, materialist social democracy’. He found ominous ‘the universal absorbent materialism even of spiritual life which has triumphed in America and, unless one fights against it, will gradually triumph here too – has already triumphed in the majority of the population’. A Salford bookmaker’s son thought similarly to the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. ‘I jumped at the chance,’ Albert Finney said in 1961 of his lead in the screen version of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, ‘because of what the film had to say about our present-day smash-and-grab society’. Some Tories shuddered at Macmillan’s bribery of voters. During elections, declared a discontented backbencher in 1962, each political party entered ‘a sort of spiv auction, each one trying to outbid the other with promises of material gain to the masses, in the cynical belief that the electorate is composed of unthinking dupes whose highest aspiration in life is to worship Mammon’.⁵¹

      If Macmillan’s England seemed a smash-and-grab society to some, it remained a place of frugal, unimaginative routines for many others. Michael Wharton, the Daily Telegraph columnist, lunched every working day in a dingy Fleet Street pub on an identical meal of corned beef sandwiches washed down by brandy and ginger. He ate the same supper each evening at his Battersea flat of lime juice and soda with five fish fingers (never more or less). Yet Wharton felt deep passions, cravings and regrets, as shown by his lament for England in 1961: ‘Her empire and influence is almost gone; her patriots are too much ashamed and beaten down with incessant jeers to speak up for her, or if they do, their voices are shrill and ugly with rancour’ (a reference to the League of Empire Loyalists, a group of embittered hecklers, opposed to decolonisation, who followed Macmillan about shouting that he was a traitor). As to the countryside, farmers had become ‘money-mad mechanics, forever searching for new poisons for the soil which will ensure quick profits at any cost’; fox-hunters chased their quarry around housing estates; Morris dancers cavorted beside atomic power stations; in summer the Lake District was infested by smelly, honking pleasure traffic.

      Wharton did not wonder that England, ‘the first country to suffer industrialisation and uniquely vulnerable to its final triumph, clings to survivals, landed titles, splendid rituals’. The move towards classlessness was a drift into stereotypes and the culture of grievance. ‘Policemen and sociologists, clergymen and psychiatrists are chasing the fashionable hooligans and sex maniacs; housewives yawn in deathly new towns; journalists, television interviewers and experts endlessly discuss the Problems of Today. There is the Problem of Youth, the Problem of Delinquency, the Problem of Coloured Immigration, the Problem of the Eleven Plus, the Problem of Parking.’ People thought less in terms of class loyalties, and increasingly as categories of oppressed: ‘as teenagers, homosexuals, motorists, misunderstood criminals and so on’. Mammon ruled under Macmillan, Wharton thought. ‘Over all this England, with its mingled apathy and desperation, lies a thick fog of money and of the operations of money. The ideal Englishman of the advertisements is no longer an aristocrat; he has become a salesman or a financial speculator. His office skyscrapers shoot up overnight where familiar old buildings have been (and he hires public relations men to tell us how much more beautiful they are than the old buildings and makes us ashamed of ourselves for thinking otherwise); his empires of money grow and combine, grow and combine again, continually devising new needs, new categories of people to feel those needs and buy the goods that will satisfy them, temporarily, until new needs can be devised.’⁵²

      About the time that Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955, the patriotic catchphrases that public men had traditionally parroted abruptly began to seem bogus, weary and redundant. A few months later, after the revelations of the Burgess-Maclean espionage cover-up, the word ‘Establishment’ was first deployed with the overtone that anything established was suspect. The notion flourished that political, administrative and economic authority was controlled by a secretive sect with strange rites and arcane customs – a mafia comprised of Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘There certainly exists in Britain a number of persons, many of them known to each other and sometimes educated together, who exercise considerable power and influence of the kind that is not open to direct public inspection,’ wrote the young philosopher Bernard Williams at the time of the general election of 1959. ‘Large areas