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

was elected with a safe majority as Tory MP for the newly created constituency of Stratford-on-Avon in 1950 (his parents’ house, Avon Carrow, lay in the constituency, where his unmarried sister still lived). Two years later he succeeded Reginald Maudling as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Civil Aviation, Alan Lennox-Boyd. In the Civil Aviation ministry he enthused about helicopters, and wanted to foist a heliport on Londoners. Subsequently the Civil Aviation and Transport ministries were merged under a single minister, John Boyd-Carpenter – ‘spring-heeled Jack’ as he was nicknamed. The two parliamentary secretaries of the united department were, Boyd-Carpenter recalled, ‘Hugh Molson, cautious, precise, reliable, a little inflexible on the ground transport side, and John Profumo, lively, quick and adroit – the best company in the world.’¹⁰ There are politicians who run on full throttle in their race for power; there are overwrought firebrands obsessed with principle; and breezy types who scoot along on charm. The latter get people to like them, put them at their ease, recognise their faces, mollify their feelings, nod encouragingly at their remarks, and make apt replies. This was Jack Profumo.

      Six months after Profumo’s re-election to Parliament, Valerie Hobson went to the opera with Havelock-Allan, let him stay the night and became pregnant. Shortly after her second son was born in April 1951, the couple agreed to divorce – perhaps to facilitate her marriage to a new suitor, the Marquess of Londonderry, a drunkard who swerved between self-pitying submission and ugly aggression. In conformity with the prevalent divorce laws, Havelock-Allan, with his long career of adulteries, had to contrive being caught with a woman in circumstances that seemed to provide proof of adultery, although the woman was a respectable stranger hired for the purpose. After the divorce was accomplished in 1952, Londonderry’s attentions became importunate; but Profumo instead bounded back into play. He and the newly freed Valerie Hobson announced their engagement in October 1954. Profumo, saddled with an Italian surname suggestive of women’s scents, cannot have helped his flighty reputation among the more wooden-headed MPs by marrying an actress.

      Profumo insisted that his bride, who was then starring as the lead in the hit musical The King and I, must stop work after she married. She complied reluctantly, though in public she showed a brave front. ‘I am giving up all my stage and film work – everything,’ she told journalists when she married. ‘It is the happiest step I can possibly take, though don’t imagine I have not loved my profession. I know lots of men and their wives mix their careers: I want to be a hundred per cent wife.’¹¹ Similarly, it was unthinkable for Bronwen Pugh, perhaps the highest-paid model in England, to continue her independent working existence after her marriage to Lord Astor in 1960. Both women were obliged by their husbands to uproot a flourishing career; but they were among the luckier women. Choices were far narrower for most others.

      Hobson left the stage before the changes in dramatic taste associated with John Whiting’s Marching Song (1954), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen (1959), Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1960). In the early fifties, younger playwrights deplored the theatre’s dependence on plays written by decorous novelists or verse dramas by Eliot and Fry. ‘Well, that marriage broke up,’ John Whiting mused in 1961. ‘Since then the theatre’s been sleeping around with journalism, reportage, propaganda, autobiography and the movies among other things. And the old whore’s produced some very odd offspring.’¹² This edgy, ungracious, shop-soiled world was not for Valerie Hobson.

      In 1948, Profumo obtained a lease from the Crown Estates of 3 Chester Terrace (telephone: Welbeck 6983), an elegant house designed by Nash overlooking the Regent’s Park. Nash’s terraces kept a battered look for years after the war; and were only restored in the early 1960s. After the Profumos’ marriage their house was revamped with a cool chic that reflected the frosty smartness of their lives. It had a forty-foot drawing room, lit by tall windows, with views of the park beyond. Stéphane Boudin, the Paris interior designer who later advised Jacqueline Kennedy on the redecoration of the White House, imprinted the drawing room with his light version of the Regency style. Side-tables were set on an Aubusson carpet and arrayed with treasures. David Profumo recalled pagodas carved from ivory, an Epstein head, and a bejewelled Fabergé bulldog. It was a special treat for him, when his parents had guests, to hide under the green velvet of one of the side-tables, and nibble rice crackers from a black japanned tin decorated with pink blossom on its lid. Overall, the boy’s upbringing was emotionally chilly.

      Smart London did not fully revive after the war until the Season of 1956. ‘For the first time since before the war, the British upper class has got the bit between its teeth’, reported the New Statesman in May of that year. ‘Not since the thirties has it consumed so much bad champagne and dubious caviar, trampled so much glass underfoot. After years of wartime equality, Crippsian austerity, servantless mansions, travel allowances, dividend restraint and triumphant bureaucracy, the Butler Boom is beginning to take effect: Society is scrambling shakily to its feet again and cocking a tentative snoot at the masses.’ It was revealing of the postwar pusillanimity that rich people enjoying good parties were thought provocative. Rich people should apologise for their wealth, the New Statesman averred, and should not be seen having fun. ‘The upper-class spending spree – of which the 1956 Season is the apotheosis – is a form of collective hallucination, a desperate attempt on the part of Britain’s financial and social élite to persuade itself that nothing has changed. Every all-night party, every case of champagne, every hamper of pâté de foie gras is one more proof … that the Labour Government was just a transitory nightmare, that equality is … receding into the remote distance.’ In the authentic tone of an envious killjoy, the magazine closed with a whiny question: ‘Is it too much to ask, just once, that the people at the top should set something other than the worst possible example?’¹³

      The New Statesman prig disapproved of what he called ‘the leisured class’, and was tormented by the thought that somewhere people might be enjoying themselves. For the prim and pinch-lipped frowners, who often in these years seemed to constitute the majority, the only pleasure was in foiling other people’s enjoyment. ‘The workaday flavour of England today,’ wrote James Morris in 1962, ‘is dictated by the middle-aged, born out of the slough of war and depression, and empty of exuberance. Whose heart has not sunk, to see the elderly, grumpy, sweaty English porter crossly awaiting him at London Airport? Who has not heard the deputy assistant regional manager, with a gleam of his dentures and a hitch of his spectacles, reiterating his unshakeable conviction that it can’t be done? Who has not been testily reminded by a frumpish crosspatch in a frilly apron that coffee is only served in the lounge? Who has not felt the deadweight of that worn-out, disillusioned, smug, astigmatic, half-educated generation, weighing lumpishly upon the nation’s shoulders?’ This was the England against which the Profumos of Chester Terrace were in glamorous rebellion.¹⁴

      In January 1959, Macmillan appointed Profumo as his Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. This promotion was resented by the Tory old guard, who mistrusted the ‘Eye-tie’ surname, thought him ‘a jumped-up opportunist’, and nicknamed him ‘the Head Waiter’. One venerable editor judged him an agreeable young man, whose ‘advance to ministerial rank had been rapid’ for such ‘a lightweight’. It is likely that Macmillan, who ranked most men by their attitude to appeasement, favoured Profumo as the youngest and bravest of the thirty-three rebels who had fatally wounded the Chamberlain government in the historic Norway vote of 1940. It is an irony of history that without the fall of Chamberlain, there would have been no Profumo Affair.¹⁵

      As a Foreign Office couple the Profumos began a life of canapés and circuses. They attended official entertainments for foreign ambassadors and envoys at Lancaster House, state dinners and banquets for visiting heads of state at Buckingham Palace, tea with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Apart from official duties, Valerie Profumo had a busy round of clothes fittings, appointments with hairdressers, and smart lunches. She preferred Italian couture, had an awesome array of stiletto-heeled shoes, and owned a skirt made from python skin. In the reshuffle of July 1960, Macmillan appointed Profumo as Secretary of State for War. The valiant anti-appeaser became one of three service ministers – Peter Carrington (Navy) and Hugh Fraser (RAF) were the others – under the Minister