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

over the allocation of expenditure between the three fighting departments.

      Valerie Hobson had enjoyed the hectic glamour of Profumo’s Foreign Office job. The War Office was equally busy, but less smart, and the incessant official receptions began to become tiresome . Notoriously, the demands of ministerial office, parliamentary attendance and constituency duties made domestic absentees of politicians. ‘Goodbye Daddy, we hope you lose,’ shouted the three sons of Alan Lennox-Boyd as he left to fight the 1955 election campaign in Mid-Bedfordshire. Some MPs stayed working late at the House. Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, alone in his Commons room, beavered at legal papers until three in the morning, when other MPs had gone to bed. Profumo, however, may have been among the minority who used late-night sittings to provide alibis for their amorous adventuring. Although quite short in stature and with receding hair, he was an eager flirt who enjoyed the ruses that occurred in the amatory dusk of brief affairs. David Profumo suspects that, while Minister of War, his father had an intrigue with a woman in his own social set, although he was seldom drawn by intelligent, assertive women, preferring ‘the painted and, if not exactly the semi-professional, then the obviously fun-loving amateur’.¹⁶

      Stanley Baldwin is said to have insisted, in contradistinction to Macmillan’s hero Lloyd George, on forming ‘a Cabinet of faithful husbands’. He also declared that he wanted his Cabinet to have more old Harrovians than any other administration in history – two aims that were surely incompatible. Other premiers were indifferent to their Cabinet’s marital fidelity. There was ready acceptance of extra-matrimonial adventures – so long as the men did not get caught. One way to avoid jeopardising careers was to follow the Duke of Edinburgh’s advice: never to have an affair with someone who has less to lose by being found out. Men proved that they were real men by covering for one another. When Eden’s health broke after Suez, and he was ordered abroad by Sir Horace Evans, he chose to recuperate at a villa in Jamaica belonging to Ian Fleming. The approach to Fleming was made by Lennox-Boyd who, in order to preserve secrecy, asked if he might borrow the house for a holiday. Fleming concurred, and suggested that their wives should get in touch about the details. ‘Oh, you mustn’t tell Patsy,’ Lennox-Boyd insisted. ‘I quite understand, old boy,’ replied Fleming, who doubtless never knew that Lennox-Boyd was involved at the time with a male shop assistant at the Army & Navy Stores.¹⁷

      It was divorce that mattered. When Nigel Fisher, MP for Hitchin, was sued for divorce by his wife in 1952, his resignation of the candidature was accepted by his local Conservative Association because Hitchin was a marginal constituency where a candidate who was the ‘guilty party’ might lose crucial votes. Instead, Fisher was adopted at Surbiton, where the Tories had a safe majority and the anti-divorce vote could be discounted. Eden proved that a divorced man might become Prime Minister; but survivors of the divorce courts were still not nominated as either Aldermen or Lords Mayor of London. Macmillan thought that Eden took ‘a risk’ in appointing Oliver Poole as chairman of the Conservative Party in 1955 (‘like most Conservative leaders nowadays he is a divorcé’) although on becoming Prime Minister he replaced Poole with another divorcé, Hailsham. As late as 1957, he felt that Profumo’s brother-in-law, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, was precluded from a colonial governorship because he had been divorced.¹⁸

      After six years there was sparring as well as glamour in the Profumo marriage. Valerie Profumo compiled a list of reproaches which suggest how tedious her husband’s roaming eye had become. She resented his assumption that all pretty women, or preferably ‘girls’, were ‘fair game’ for him. ‘You will stretch any manners, at any time, to do this – not quietly and discreetly, but laughing and showing off and behaving like an adolescent,’ she complained. ‘The way you kiss women you hardly know “goodbye”’ was another irritation. So, too, was the tailoring of his trousers (‘surely there must be some way of concealing your penis’). He seldom stopped scoping the room, she protested, even when they were dancing together.¹⁹

      Despite his flirting at parties and buoyancy at the despatch box, Profumo did not sparkle as a public speaker. The conventionality of his opinions was evident in his respectably prosaic speech at his adoption meeting at the Hippodrome in Stratford before the 1959 general election. Perhaps he judged his constituents aright. The local newspaper allotted more space to reporting that the Marquess of Hertford had served hot-dogs in the grounds of Ragley during a barbecue, at which a hundred accordionists played around a camp fire near the lake, than to reporting the speeches of Lords Mills and Balfour of Inchrye at Profumo’s campaign meetings. ‘Election? What election?’ the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald editorialised. ‘Hardly a poster seems to raise its head on the hoardings; in villages one or two can be seen, but it seems as if the Indian Summer’s soporific spell has bewitched elector and candidate alike, for hardly a voice can be heard raised in anger, let alone politics.’ The Conservatives made their headquarters in an Edwardian villa called the Firs. There a band of volunteers worked more quietly than a hive of bees, answering enquiries, addressing envelopes, and despatching posters. The Labour Party’s nerve centre in Central Chambers was even quieter, for the candidate and his agent went to solicit votes at factory gates as constituents arrived for work in the early morning, toured villages during the day, and addressed meetings at night. ‘Both sides have adopted the “whistle-stop” technique, but their loudspeaker vans seem to have a muted sound, as if they are loth to disturb the householders from “Emergency Ward Ten” or “The Archers”. Sundays, by tradition, are rest days (one wonders if they vary much from other days).’²⁰

      All this typified Profumo’s constituency, with its prosperous villages stretching south towards Oxfordshire. Avon Carrow, the Profumo house, lay in the parish of Avon Dassett, near Kineton, midway between the spa town of Leamington and the market town of Banbury. Strong support for Profumo burst from the Banbury hinterland when crisis overwhelmed him in 1963. Banbury was a town which, more than Stratford, reflected the weakening traditions and eroded identity that accompanied provincial England’s rising prosperity in the 1950s.

      The changes had begun when an aluminium factory started production there in 1933. A corset factory, employing hundreds of women, followed. Soon the cattle, sheep and horse markets, which had been held in the cobbled streets for seven centuries, were resettled across the river under a roof. The marketplace was given a tarmac surface on which cinema-goers could park their cars. A zebra crossing with Belisha beacons was sited by the historic Eleanor Cross, where previously children had played marbles. Long-haul lorries, vans, cars, coaches and motorcycles resembled barbarian warriors as they stormed past the Cross on the north-south road between London and the Midlands conurbation. This road, flanked by stone houses where professional people had once lived in pleasant intimacy, was now a fraught wasteland of dehumanising traffic, where spacious homes were shoddily converted into offices and boarding houses. In the High Street, the Red Lion inn had been demolished for a Woolworths, and the farmers who had done business at its bar had yielded to young mothers with prams. W. H. Smith stood on the site of the Fox, where the fights had once been bloody and blasphemous. A few family concerns survived, but most shops were branches of national chains, and run by managers: Montague Burton the tailor, Dewhurst the butcher, Charles Clore’s shoe retailers Freeman, Hardy and Willis were all there.²¹

      The aluminium factory at Banbury was, in machinery, techniques, and organisation, unlike anything known in the town before. Previous Banbury industries had been associated with farming products or agricultural tools. Employees were used to small workshops where the ‘gaffer’ was always visible; but the aluminium managers were, although based locally, often away in Canada, Switzerland, Wales or London. The factory stood ‘in green fields beyond the town, surrounded by ten feet of barbed wire, immaculate flower beds, orderly bicycle ranks, and lines of neatly parked cars’, reported local sociologist Margaret Stacey. ‘The huge white, green-roofed, hangar-like building, with its strange-shaped chimneys and tubes, and its unpredictable noises, seems like something from a different world.’ There might be no one visible outside except the guard at the gate, but inside up to 800 men and women toiled. At six in the morning, two in the afternoon, and ten at night, the shift changed, and another 700 to 800 men and women took their places. ‘Working life,’ wrote Stacey, ‘is out of time with home life, with wives’ cooking, shopping and sleeping, and with the children’s school life, out of time too with the social life of