John Profumo obituary
It can’t be easy spending the last four decades of your life with your name inextricably linked to a scandal. For a generation of Britons, the name ‘Profumo’ never stood alone but was inevitably expanded to ‘Profumo Affair’. But for the man at the centre of the storm, who died last week at the age of 91, there was life after Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and Harold Macmillan. For John ‘Jack’ Profumo, Baron Profumo, former politician and playboy and the nemesis of two Conservative prime ministers, the years between 1963 and 2006 were spent in quiet, resolute and above all productive public service, at Toynbee Hall in Aldgate.
Initially humbly offering his services, he was to go on to become a massive fundraiser for the charity. It had been established in 1884 so that the privileged classes could do good works: ‘to learn as much as to teach; to receive as much as to give’. It was a mission statement that Profumo took to heart. From society pool parties at Cliveden to helping fill the gaps in the welfare state at Toynbee Hall was quite a journey … but a long way from the fall that some commentators would have it.
Profumo had had a privileged childhood and early success. He was born on 30 January 1915 into a family that owned and ran Provident Life, while father Albert was also a successful barrister. The Profumos were descended from Italian aristocrat Joseph Profumo who had come to London in 1880, and John Profumo was to become the Fifth Baron Profumo (of the former Kingdom of Sardinia), though it was a title he never used. Educated at Harrow and then Brasenose College, Oxford, the young Jack was chairman of the Fulham Conservative Association at a precocious 21. In 1939 he was a soldier in the First Northamptonshire Yeomanry and by 1940 he was MP for Kettering, the youngest member in the House of Commons.
Profumo’s first vote in the Commons was to bring down his own Prime Minister. The Norway crisis of May 1940 saw a failure of confidence in the leadership of Neville Chamberlain. 30 Tory MPs joined Labour to bring down Chamberlain, and usher in the premiership of Winston Churchill and a government of national unity.
Now he embarked on active service, and Profumo had an extraordinarily diverse career. He fought in North Africa and was mentioned in dispatches. He won the (military) OBE while fighting in Italy (where he was to later be present at the surrender of the German forces). He landed in Normandy on D-Day, and was in the fighting at Caen.
And yet, like so many Tory MPs, Profumo was rewarded with the sack in 1945, unseated by the Labour landslide that put Clement Attlee in No 10. Profumo still had his army career of course and later that year he was part of the British mission with General MacArthur in Japan. In 1947 he joined Rab Butler’s team at Conservative Central Office - the urbane Profumo making a perfect advisor on broadcasting policy. In 1950 he was back in Parliament, with the safe Tory seat of Stratford-upon-Avon; that same year he resigned his commission.
Profumo, with a first political stint and a military career already behind him, was still only 35. Now began a smooth ascent through ministerial office: Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Civil Aviation in 1952; Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation in 1953, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1957, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office in 1958, and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in 1959. In 1960 he was made Secretary of State for War. His big job was to establish a regular Army after the scrapping of National Service. Many predicted Profumo would inevitably end up as Chancellor or Foreign Secretary.
In 1954 he had married actress Valerie Hobson, the ever-so English (though in fact born in Ireland) star of Kind Hearts and Coronets. It seemed a perfect and very glamorous lifestyle, as along with his political career Profumo enjoyed a glittering round of society parties. But it all contributed to the image of a ‘playboy’ politician resented by certain members of the House. In January 1961, Profumo was at a party at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire stately home owned by Viscount Astor. It was there that he first saw Christine Keeler, as she stepped naked from the swimming pool. Profumo was transfixed, and a chain of events were to be set in motion that would culminate in a society scandal, a suicide, Profumo’s fall from office, and the end of Conservative power for the remainder of the 1960s.
Cabinet minister John Profumo had always had an eye for the ladies. His old schoolfriend, and fellow Conservative MP, Bill Deedes frankly described a man he admired as ‘good-looking, popular with women … a philanderer’. But the affair he started with Christine Keeler in 1961 was to lead to his downfall and, eventually, that of the Conservative government.
He first spotted 19-year-old Keeler as she climbed naked from the swimming pool at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire country estate of Viscount Astor. Her costume had been pulled off by her friend Stephen Ward, a 50-year-old society osteopath, whose clients included Hugh Gaitskell, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Frank Sinatra. Ward had rented a cottage on the estate, and was accompanied by his friend. Soviet attache Yevgeny Ivanov. It was the Russian connection that was to cause the trouble.
Profumo and Keeler began an affair, which soon came to the attention of MI5 (who apparently had been tipped off by Ward). The security services warned Profumo that Ivanov was thought to be a spy, and the minister ended the affair. But the rumours began to percolate around Westminster, and two years later, on 20 March 1963, Labour’s Barbara Castle asked a direct question in the House of Commons: Had the Secretary of State for War had an affair with Keeler? The Conservative Whips debated what to do until the early hours and Bill Deedes was summoned from his bed by a 2am phone call to join the group preparing a reply for the Commons the next day. A befuddled Profumo had taken a sleeping pill to escape the reporters who were surrounding his London house. He was called to the meeting and arrived at 3am. So it was that a statement was put together denying everything.
The next day, a cornered Profumo made his statement to the House, with prime minister Harold Macmillan beside him, that there had been ‘no impropriety whatsoever in the liaison’. But events were overtaking him. Stephen Ward was now on trial for living off immoral earnings, and wrote to both Macmillan and Labour leader Harold Wilson, implicating Profumo. The minister came clean to an astonished Macmillan, who found it inexplicable that a gentleman could have lied to him and the House.
On 5 June, 1963 Profumo resigned, expressing ‘deep remorse’. The fallout was to continue. A devastated Supermac resigned on 25 September. The month before, on the final day of his trial, Stephen Ward had killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
Just a few days after he quit politics, Toynbee arrived at Toynbee Hall in the East End, asking if there was anything he could offer. It was a relationship that was to last more than 40 years. Profumo had private money of course, so he could devote himself entirely to charitable work, and for four decades he avoided the spotlight, including the 1989 movie ‘Scandal’ which dramtatised the affair. Friends believed that the remainder of his life was a process of atonement. ‘No-one judges Jack Profumo more harshly than he does himself. He says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt real shame,’ said his friend Jim Thompson, the late Bishop of Bath and Wells.
But it never overshadowed the work he did at Toynbee Hall. Profumo and his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, worked tirelessly for the charity, as he became chief fundraiser, using his old contacts to raise funds. Lord Longford said he felt ‘more admiration [for Profumo] than for all the men I’ve known in my lifetime’. A helper at Toynbee Hall was more succinct, saying: ‘We think he’s a bloody saint.’ As his wife said of him: ‘It isn’t what happens to a man, it’s what he does with it that matters.’
Toynbee Hall
Toynbee Hall was the first of the university settlements in the East End. These grew indirectly out of the Oxford Movement and the assertion of Christians at Oxford University that the Britain’s ‘two nations’ (to quote Disraeli) could somehow be bridged by privileged students going into the poor areas to share their skills. The result would benefit both the recipients and the givers, who would be doing Christian work but also re-connecting with the underclass of Britain’s cities. When Samuel and Henrietta set up the settlement in 1884. they invited people to come to Toynbee Hall ‘to learn as much as to teach; to receive as much as to give’. Toynbee Hall’s role ‘has always been to create new solutions for social problems, to research and develop local programmes that have the power to become national solutions’. Education and physical recreation were on the menu, and an extraordinary diversity of 20th century movers and thinkers passed through its doors. Clement Attlee was a frequent visitor, as was William Beveridge, who would go on to draw up the blueprint for the Welfare State. In 1898, Toynbee Hall started offering free legal advice. The Workers Educational Association was started there 1903. One of the first Citizens Advice Bureaux was set up at Toynbee in 1949. For more on Toynbee Hall see www.toynbeehall.org.uk.