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

Influential figures undoubtedly share, in their own refined complacent way, these characteristics, but they are not the cause of them.’ Henry Fairlie, the political journalist who was amongst the most perceptive commentators on Macmillan’s premiership, complained in the same year that this demure coinage, ‘the Establishment’, had been debauched by publicists until it was a harlot of a phrase used promiscuously by dons, novelists, playwrights, artists, actors, critics, scriptwriters and band leaders to denote those in positions of authority whom they disliked. The Establishment’s defenders argued that it was rooted in neither class nor sectional interest, and was, therefore, disinterested. Its opponents found this lack of passion or commitment to be depressing, and perhaps reprehensible.⁵³

      Macmillan’s appointment of a Scottish earl, Home, as Foreign Secretary in 1960, and of his wife’s nephew, the Duke of Devonshire, to the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1961, provoked the anti-Establishment pundits to fume (although neither man failed at his post). The Tories traditionally believed that the tests of experience and of time were sound guides, but after the 1959 election victory appeals to tradition were no longer winning. Instead, Tory leaders had to place themselves as the people best able to manage change. By 1962, Macmillan was trying to identify his party as the modernisers and Labour as retrogressive: Marples’s disastrous transport policies and Britain’s ill-fated application to join the Common Market were at the forefront of this strategy.

      In July 1962, the Observer journalist and former gossip columnist Anthony Sampson published his Anatomy of Britain which, on the basis of interviews with political, business and official leaders, presented public life as amateurish, caste-ridden, dithering and cowed. His bestseller operated by the technique of the prewar fellow-travellers who compiled Union of Democratic Control pamphlets: genealogical tables revealing distant, unsuspected cousinhoods; Venn diagrams of overlapping company directorships and schematic representations of power relations all tending to suggest there was a loose conspiracy by undemocratic, debilitated and incompetent fuddy-duddies. Sampson had a priggish belief that people should be spurred hard by overriding moral purposes; in an earlier generation he might have been a disciple of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament group. He seemed to idealise men who worked exorbitantly long hours, scorned holidays and judged themselves virtuous for spreading stress in their offices.

      Sampson’s book chimed with the clashing cymbals of opinion-making in 1962. Jack Plumb, the son of a Leicester shoe factory worker, was a communist in the 1930s, a Bletchley Park codebreaker during the war, a Cambridge history don from 1946 and an avid, frustrated crosspatch with a beady eye for the main chance. ‘Your time is coming,’ his lifelong confidant C. P. Snow promised him in 1960, ‘one can smell it in the air.’ Initially Plumb resented tradition: in 1962, for example, he decried the privileged readers of history books as ‘those who had nannies, prep-schools, dorms, possess colonels and bishops for cousins, and now take tea once a year on the dead and lonely lawns of the Palace’. In time he proved the very model of an anti-Establishment skirmisher who, once his enemies were routed, annexed their domains of influence and adopted their style and amenities which he had all along irritably envied. Soon he had a rectory in Suffolk and a moulin in France, ingratiated himself with philanthropic millionaires and smart noblewomen, looked cocksure in the private apartments of palaces, became a conspicuous member of Brooks’s, figured until the last moment among the peers in Harold Wilson’s notorious resignation honours list, performed a clumsy political somersault in the hope of prising a coronet from Margaret Thatcher.⁵⁴

      Richard Crossman was another opportunistic rhetorician where modernisation and class distinction were concerned. Reviewing Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain for the New Statesman, he pretended that political and economic power was more irresponsibly concentrated than at any time in living memory. ‘Never in our island history have so many been fooled by so few,’ he claimed. ‘An irreverent attitude to top people is the yeast that makes democracy rise. Without it a free society soon degenerates into a starchy oligarchy, an indigestible complex of collusive interest groups which can only be broken up by subjecting it to constant investigation and public exposure.’ Hostile analyses of the Establishment were class-war waged with polysyllables: a device to get one crowd out of power, and another in; to usurp one set of authority figures, and install a different lot. Anti-establishment critics masqueraded as street-fighting egalitarians, but in truth they were jostlers for place in the corridors of power.⁵⁵

      Simon Raven was rare among Sampson’s reviewers in resisting his thesis. The scolding theme of Anatomy of Britain was that ‘most educated Englishmen reserve their respect for old-fashioned institutions, such as Eton, Latin, the regimental system and Mr Macmillan, and refuse to recognise the demands of the New Age for such qualities as industrial efficiency and high-pressure salesmanship’, wrote Raven. He, however, wanted to be saved from despotic bores who resented people having placid, aimless moments. ‘While long-established English institutions tend to be illogical and wasteful, the values which they promote, however limited in their scope, are morally and aesthetically far superior to anything which the new world of admass tastes and applied science can show. If I want to spend my day writing Latin verses or watching cricket, as opposed to selling some beastly machine or rubbishy gimmick over a fat expense account luncheon, who is to say that I am not the better man for it?’⁵⁶

      Although Macmillan in 1963 headed a Cabinet with the youngest average age for a century, he was also the Prime Minister who kept his only television set at Birch Grove in the servants’ hall. Broadcasting, however, more than newspapers, showed the tendency of the times. ‘The formality of BBC official language used to be one of great reassurance; it spoke of order, like guards on trains,’ reflected Malcolm Bradbury, lecturer in English Language at Birmingham University, in the spring of 1963. ‘Now, in a wave of informality, even the news is changing. The names of contributors to newsreels are frequently mentioned (personal), announcers cough regularly and carefully do not, as they easily can, switch the cough out (informal), the opinions of people in the street are canvassed, though they frequently have none (democratic), and interviewers are aggressive and sometimes even offensive (vernacular). So, personal, informal, democratic and vernacular, becomes the new common speech for all things.’⁵⁷

      The challenge for Macmillan, as the protagonists of the Profumo Affair converged towards their crisis, would be to hold onto power in an age of common speech. His attendance at the Derby, the shoots at Swinton, quips about Boodle’s which were incomprehensible to ninety-five cent of the electorate, had rallied his parliamentary party after 1957, and brought a thumping electoral victory in 1959. But in the new informal, levelling and vernacular age, these poses made his government vulnerable.

       TWO

       War Minister

      When the government minister John Profumo married the film-star Valerie Hobson on New Year’s Eve, 1954, a crowd of about fifty bystanders gathered on the pavement in Pont Street, outside St Columba’s Church, in Chelsea. Boys on rollerskates, London coppers, and two chimney sweeps made it resemble a scene from Mary Poppins. The bride, who was given away by the debonair financier Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger, wore a grey suit of vicuna, a new material from Paris, with a high collar and cuffs of sapphire mink. A grey silk bonnet was perched over her red hair. Among the fifteen guests was Leslie Mitchell, the suave-voiced broadcaster who announced the opening of the BBC television service in 1936 and of Independent Television in 1955.

      The Profumos flew away on their honeymoon that evening, so spoilt by fortune that the head of Heathrow ordained that free champagne should be provided for them and fellow passengers on their Paris-bound aircraft. Next morning, as their car left the Ritz hotel in Paris, with a motorcycle escort from the US embassy revving its engines, the duty manager hastened out with the MP’s pyjamas, which had lain unworn beneath his pillow all night. The Department of Transport gave them the number plate PXH1 (‘Profumo Times Hobson equals Number One’) and a few years later the Foreign Office issued them with passports numbered 3 and 4. Jack Profumo and Valerie Hobson were a golden couple for press