An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo

An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo
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A dazzling reconstruction of the Profumo Affair which brings to life Sixties England and uncovers the shocking truth behind the scandal.Britain in the early 1960s was dominated by the legacy of two world wars. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the Edwardian stalwart, led a Conservative government dedicated to tradition, hierarchy and, above all, old-fashioned morality. But the tide was changing. A breakdown of social boundaries saw nightclub hostesses mixing with aristocrats, and middle-class professionals dabbling in criminality. Meanwhile, Cold War paranoia gripped the public imagination.The Profumo Affair was a perfect storm, and when it broke it rocked the Establishment. In ‘An English Affair’, Richard Davenport-Hines, author of the critically acclaimed ‘Titainic Lives’, introduces us to the key players and brings seedily glamorous Swinging London to life. The cast list includes familiar names such as louche society doctor Stephen Ward, good-time girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and Secretary for War John Profumo himself. But here for the first time we also encounter the full complement of tabloid hacks, property developers and hangers-on whose roles have, until now, never been fully revealed. As the drama builds to its deadly climax, Davenport-Hines exposes the hypocrisy and prejudice of a country undergoing extraordinary change.Sex, drugs, class, race, chequebook journalism and the criminal underworld – the Profumo Affair had it all. This is the story of how Sixties England cast off respectability and fell in love with scandal.

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

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES. An English Affair. Sex, Class and Power in the. Age of Profumo

Dedication

Epigraph

Overture

ONE. Prime Minister

TWO. War Minister

THREE. Lord

FOUR. Doctor

FIVE. Good-Time Girls

SIX. Landlords

SEVEN. Hacks

EIGHT. Spies

NINE. Acting Up

TEN. Show Trials

ELEVEN. Safety Curtain

Picture Section

Footnotes

Notes. Overture

PART ONE: CAST. One: Prime Minister

Two: War Minister

Three: Lord

Four: Doctor

Five: Good-Time Girls

Six: Landlords

Seven: Hacks

Eight: Spies

PART TWO: DRAMA. Nine: Acting Up

Ten: Show Trials

Eleven: Safety Curtain

Index

Acknowledgements

Also by Richard Davenport-Hines

Copyright

About the Publisher

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For Jenny, Christopher and Hugo, and never forgetting Cosmo

Geoffrey Gorer, ‘This is the English’, The People, 30 September 1951

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‘A really remarkable figure,’ Macmillan wrote after a two-hour meeting with Marples in April 1963. ‘I only wish we had more ministers with his imagination and thoroughness.’ However, controversy over the Beeching Axe brought obloquy upon his government, partly because the ministerial presentation was self-advertising, truculent and weak. ‘When Mr Marples presented the Beeching Report,’ noted a future Labour minister, George Thomson, ‘the biggest thing of its kind, we were given to understand, since the Beveridge Report, the operation was intended to show the Conservatives looking forward to the seventies, while the socialists, tied to the railway unions, timorously looked back to the forties. But Mr Marples muffed it monumentally, and suffered a press universally worse than I can remember a minister receiving.’ Macmillan, despite his susceptibility to territorial grandees, was hoodwinked by the bouncy self-promotion of rough diamonds, and the myths of infallibility boomed by self-made men.27

Derick Heathcoat-Amory’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1958 was a better choice by Macmillan than Marples as Minister of Transport in 1959. The assessment of Heathcoat-Amory by Lord Altrincham who, under his later pen name of John Grigg, was one of the canniest political commentators of his generation, had a perfect justness. ‘He is often described as “sound”, an adjective which in this specialised usage connotes a decently concealed intelligence, more than average efficiency, a willingness to take pains (for instance, in not hurting the feelings of moronic colleagues), a belief in good relations between management and the (not so easily) managed, a fine war record and a squirearchical background. There is, indeed, one feature which might make him suspect – he is opposed to the death penalty – but his friends can plead in mitigation that he has been a zealous huntsman. He is the sort of man who not being first-class pretends to be third-class, and so receives a quite disproportionate amount of credit for being top second-class.’28

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