This month's ten-minute extra bonus episode on news events at the time we're looking at is on the Profumo Affair, and how a sex scandal transformed Britain. Click through to the full post to read a transcript.



Transcript

Welcome to the second episode of "I Read the News Today, Oh Boy", the ten-minute bonus podcast I'm running monthly alongside the main podcast. In case you've forgotten from last month, in these bonus episodes I'm going to talk about aspects of the news that were happening at the same time as the music we're talking about, so you have some idea of the wider context in which the music was being made.

This month, we're going to look at the Profumo affair, which was one of the most important moments in post-War British history, not for anything that actually happened, but because of the change in cultural attitudes it created. A brief warning -- this one contains some mention of suicide, violence against women, and gun violence.

In 1963, the Conservative Party had been in power in Britain for twelve years, and as with any party in power for that long, it was starting to become unpopular. In that time there had been three different Prime Ministers -- Winston Churchill, who had returned to power in 1951 after losing the 1945 election, but who had retired before the 1955 election; Anthony Eden, who had replaced Churchill, and who had been Prime Minister during the Suez Crisis, which was the event that finally led to the realisation that Britain was no longer a major world power; and finally Harold Macmillan, an ageing, Patrician, figure who gave the impression of being an amiable but rather befuddled old man.

But the government was finally brought down by the first British sex scandal among the ruling classes ever to go public. John Profumo was a minor minister, never in the Cabinet but with a long history of ministerial roles. He was as establishment as you could get, having been educated at Harrow and Oxford, and he was technically the fifth Baron Profumo, a member of the Italian nobility, though he inherited his title during the Second World War at a time when Britain was at war with Italy, and the title was abolished soon afterwards. He had been the youngest MP to be elected in 1940, he'd gone and fought in the war and risen to the rank of Brigadier, and he was married to Valerie Hobson, an actor who had appeared in films such as Bride of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London, Great Expectations, and Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Profumo had attended a party hosted by his friend Viscount Astor, where he'd been introduced by the society osteopath and artist Stephen Ward to Christine Keeler, a model who was twenty-seven years younger than him, and who had a very active love life. Keeler was involved with many men, and Profumo soon became one of them -- which caused problems with MI5. Because one of the other men with whom Keeler was involved was Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian spy in Britain who MI5 were trying to induce to defect, while Profumo was the Minister of War, in charge of Britain's defence.

Profumo and Keeler's affair was quite brief, and would have been hushed up as these things usually were, except that one of Keeler's other lovers, a jazz promoter named Johnny Edgecombe, attacked another man, a singer called "Lucky" Gordon, after being told by Keeler that Gordon had assaulted her. Edgecombe became angry when Keeler refused to testify in his defence, and took a gun round to Stephen Ward's flat, where Keeler was staying, and shot five rounds into the building.

This brought Keeler to the attention not only of the police, but of the press, and the story was initially just about the shooting -- along with the excitement of the shooting itself there was also the prurient interest of a beautiful young woman with multiple lovers, and a chance for some good old-fashioned British racism, as Edgecombe and Gordon were Black.

But because of this interest, the press started sniffing around Keeler's other lovers, and di