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lovers was a Russian naval attache named Ivanov, who was also a Russian intelligence
officer. The whole affair had taken place against a backdrop of society scandal; Profumo
and Keeler had met at Cliveden, where Viscount Astor hosted nude parties by his
swimming-pool and Stephen Ward, a society osteopath, had a weekend cottage to which
he invited Keeler and her fellow call girl, Mandy Rice-Davies. Following a court case
involving Keeler and one of her lovers who was accused of assaulting her, rumours
reached such a pitch that Profumo had been forced to make a statement formally
denying in Parliament that there had been any ‘impropriety’ in his relationship with
Keeler. In June, several months later, Profumo confessed the truth to his wife and
decided to come clean about his lie to Parliament; he resigned his office and retired from
public life to devote himself to charity work in the East End. Understandably he begged
to be excused the customary valedictory audience with Elizabeth. Stephen Ward was
charged with offences under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 including brothel-keeping
and procuring a living on the earnings of prostitutes. Abandoned by his society friends,
he took an overdose of Nembutal. He had been a participant in the Thursday Club
lunches and had drawn portraits of the Duke of Edinburgh and other members of the
royal family. When Ward’s drawings were put up for sale by his supporters to pay his
legal costs, Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures since April 1945, quietly
bought them to save the royal family embarrassment.
At the same time another of Macmillan’s ministers, Duncan Sandys, was about to
become involved in the fall-out of a salacious divorce case between the Duke and
Duchess of Argyll. The whole scenario shocked Macmillan; sex was a subject from which
he recoiled, involving as it did the central tragedy of his life, his wife’s affair with
Boothby, a man known for the eccentricities of his sexual attachments. Macmillan was
appalled by the seamy underside revealed in these scandals and hesitant in his public
approach to them. The American Ambassador in London, David Bruce, described
Macmillan’s statement in Parliament as ‘pitiable and extremely damaging’ when he
claimed ignorance of the whole affair, ending lamely, ‘I do not live among young
people much myself.’ On 23 June he wrote to Elizabeth what his biographer describes as
‘an almost painfully apologetic letter suggestive of a truly stricken man’, expressing his
deep regret at ‘the development of recent affairs’ and his feeling that he should
apologize ‘for the undoubted injury done by the terrible behaviour of one of Your
Majesty’s Secretaries of State upon not only the Government but, perhaps more serious,
one of the great Armed Forces…’ He repeated the pathetic exculpatory tone of his House
of Commons statement: ‘I had, of course, no idea of the strange underworld in which
other people, alas, besides Mr Profumo, have allowed themselves to be entrapped…’ He
ended, with a touch of paranoia, that he had begun ‘to suspect in all these wild
accusations against many people, Ministers and others, something in the nature of a
plot to destroy the established system…’ 8
Elizabeth was reassuring, sympathizing with him over the ‘horrible time’ he must be
experiencing and comforting him with her assurance that she was well aware how
difficult it was for people with high standards to suspect colleagues of unworthy