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

and ardent to bother with discretion as an adulteress; her bracing earthiness left no room for subtlety. Her telephone calls to Boothby were made in earshot of her husband and children; she left Boothby’s love letters visible about the Birch Grove and Chester Square houses. As he wrote to a parliamentary colleague in 1933, she was ‘the most formidable thing in the world – a possessive, single-track woman. She wants me, completely, and she wants my children, and she wants practically nothing else. At every crucial moment she acts instinctively and overwhelmingly.’ Over forty years later, in 1977, Boothby gave a similar recapitulation. ‘What Dorothy wanted and needed was emotion, on the scale of Isolde. This Harold could not give her, and I did. She was, on the whole, the most selfish and most possessive woman I have ever known.’ When he got engaged to an American heiress, she pursued him from Chatsworth, via Paris, to Lisbon. ‘We loved each other,’ he said, ‘and there is really nothing you can do about it, except die.’¹¹

      Commentators have suggested that Macmillan’s distress at his wife’s lifelong infidelity (her affair with Boothby lasted until her death in 1966) made him chary of speaking to Profumo directly in 1963, or of confronting the implausibility of the minister’s disavowals of an affair with Keeler. This is doubtful, for Downing Street power relaxed Macmillan’s inhibitions. ‘The PM,’ wrote his niece, the young Duchess of Devonshire, in 1958, ‘has become much more human all of a sudden and talks about things like Adultery quite nicely.’ His prime ministerial diaries show his pleasure in playing the part of a man-of-the-world who knew about kept women, betrayal and divorce. In 1958, after reading the memoirs of the nineteenth-century courtesan Harriette Wilson, he mused that Doris Delavigne, Beaverbrook’s Streatham-born mistress (and quondam wife of Beaverbrook’s columnist Lord Castlerosse), who took a fatal overdose of barbiturates after being insulted in 1942 in a corridor of the Dorchester hotel by the Duke of Marlborough, was one of the last of the demimondaines. ‘This type really depends on the institution of marriage being strict & divorce impossible or rare,’ he wrote. ‘Now people marry for a year or two & then pass to the next period of what is really licensed concubinage. Since the so-called “upper classes” are as corrupt as they can be, these ladies, like Harriette Wilson, are cut out by “real ladies” – the daughters of our friends. I think the old way was really best.’¹²

      It is, however, true that the Profumo Affair snared a specific, secret susceptibility of Macmillan’s. The ‘foursome’, as Harold Wilson slyly called Ward, Profumo, Keeler and the Russian attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, whose convergence was imagined to raise security issues, had met at the Astor house, Cliveden.¹³ Thirty years earlier Nancy Astor had made decisive interventions during the Macmillan marital crisis: a visit by Boothby to Cliveden had proved critical to its resolution. Like many people who had been done a good turn, Macmillan did not forgive the Astors for helping him at his nadir. He associated them with memories that he preferred to repress.

      Boothby triggered the crisis in September 1932. He told his lover that he could not continue their ‘unendurable’ half-life together: ‘Just an interminable series of agonising “goodbyes” with nothing to go back to. Living always for the next time. Work to hell. Nerves to hell.’ Dorothy Macmillan was aghast at Boothby’s ultimatum: marriage or a clean break. ‘Why did you ever wake me?’ she cried at him. ‘I never want to see any of my family again. And, without you, life for me is going to be nothing but one big hurt.’ She knew that Boothby’s political career would be ruined if he eloped with another MP’s wife, and that they would have little money to live on. She asked her husband for a divorce, confident that he would agree to collude in providing evidence, and was devastated when in January 1933 he gave an adamant refusal. In desperation she sought sympathy and counsel from Nancy Astor, who gave her the use of a house at Sandwich in Kent as refuge for calm reflection. Lady Astor invited Boothby to Cliveden: there were confabulations in St James’s Square with the deserted husband, who also sought his mother-in-law’s help. ‘Poor Harold had another awful time with me last night, & he talked till 3 in the morning, and is still entirely hard about everything and everybody,’ the Duchess of Devonshire wrote to Nancy Astor on 24 January.¹⁴

      Macmillan was exciting himself into a suicidal rage. Around 31 January 1933 he scrawled an agonised pencilled note from 14 Chester Square to his trusted intermediary in his marital negotiations. It is the most emotionally naked document of his that survives, and the fact that it was sent to an Astor may explain his inhibitions, and unforgiving attitude to Bill Astor, when thirty years later a scarring scandal was foisted on Cliveden. ‘Dearest Nancy,’ he wrote. ‘Sorry to bother you. But make it clear to her that I will never divorce her’ – even if she publicly absconded with Boothby. ‘If she does that, I will kill myself. I won’t & can’t face the children. This is real – not stuff.’ Having promised suicide if Dorothy deserted him, he proposed the best way forward. ‘If I could feel she was trying to achieve the same ultimate objective as I am, I will do everything to make her life happy. But I must feel that we are working together, as it were. And she must be considerate to my nerves.’ If she would try to restore ‘normality,’ he promised, ‘I’ll devote anything that [is] left of my life for that – for the children & for her – whom I love more than I can say. Tell her that I am still grateful for the 8 happiest years that mortal man ever had. Nothing can take that away from me.’¹⁵

      A few hours later he sent Nancy Astor a second message: ‘You are our angel – and you are really fighting for a soul, as well as for lots of innocent people – e.g. four lovely children.’ On 1 February he saw Boothby, and received a letter from Dorothy accepting a compromise. ‘It only remains, therefore, for us to help her to build a new life & to heal the wounds,’ he told Nancy Astor in a third letter. ‘I realise that I can do nothing – except negatively, by leaving her alone.’ There was no bridling of his gratitude to Lady Astor for her handling of Boothby. ‘Dear, dear Nancy – I know how much I owe to you. When I saw him on Tuesday after he had been at Cliveden, he was in a different mood (I sensed a great change) to any that I had seen at previous interviews. It seemed to me that some of the crust of cynicism had been broken & all the rot with which he had protected himself was rather shattered. Your influence I trace there.’ Macmillan believed that their prayers, too, had helped. The continuing strains in the situation were clear in a later confidence of Evie Devonshire’s to Lady Astor. Dorothy’s temper was stabilised, the duchess wrote, but ‘whether she will ever get over her dislike of H is another matter, but she is less hard and angry’.¹⁶

      Macmillan’s marital traumas raised a muffled commotion in Society. It was humiliating that parliamentary colleagues knew he was Boothby’s cuckold. He donned a mask of indifference, but was instilled with the vengeful ambition and steely endurance that brought him to the premiership in 1957. He described himself to his biographer Alistair Horne as ‘this strange, very buttoned-up person’. Strolling in the Birch Grove grounds with Horne, he proffered a hint about himself: ‘I think gardens should be divided, so you can’t see everything at once.’ Pamela Wyndham, wife of his closest confidant as Prime Minister, said he was protean in his shape-shifting: ‘one moment you had a salmon in your hand, the next it was a horse’. Significantly, one of his favourite novels was Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, with its hero who returns from the dead in various disguises to wreak revenge on those who had betrayed and humiliated him. An air of cynical mastery was what he aspired to.¹⁷

      Two anecdotes from the day (Thursday 10 January 1957) that Macmillan became Prime Minister show his derogation within his family and his studied nonchalance. In the afternoon he had an audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and accepted her commission to form a government. The news was swiftly broadcast by the BBC. At the Macmillan publishing offices excited staff brought the news to Daniel Macmillan, the eldest brother and chairman of the business. ‘Mr Macmillan’s been appointed Prime Minister,’ they said. ‘No,’ replied Daniel Macmillan, ‘Mr Harold has been appointed Prime Minister.’ (A few years later Daniel Macmillan, while lunching at the long table at the Garrick, was bearded by a club bore. ‘Is it true,’ demanded the bore, ‘that President Kennedy speaks to your brother daily on the telephone?’ Daniel’s reply was deadpan: ‘Whyever would President Kennedy want to do that?’) Edward Heath, who was the Tories’ highly effective Chief Whip in 1955–59, recalled the evening of the tenth. Macmillan had