{"id":19517,"date":"2013-03-20T10:06:31","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19517"},"modified":"2013-03-20T10:06:31","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:06:31","slug":"the-profumo-affair-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/20\/the-profumo-affair-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"The Profumo affair in context"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>History Today<\/em>, Richard Weight reviews <em>An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo<\/em> by Richard Davenport-Hines which is being published on the 50th anniversary of the Profumo affair:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Meticulous though he is in separating historical fact from tabloid fiction, Davenport-Hines does not unearth any new secrets about the Profumo Affair. The originality of the book lies in the way he places it in the context of mid-20th century social attitudes. This, as the author says, is \u2018a study of milieux\u2019. An accomplished biographer, he puts colour on the cheeks and sparkle in the eyes of the main protagonists in a series of beautifully written portraits. We get to know fully Stephen Ward, for example \u2013 the high society osteopath who became the scapegoat of the affair \u2013 as a closet homosexual and vain Walter Mitty character, whose social climbing stemmed partly from the fact that osteopathy was dismissed by the medical establishment as \u2018a modish form of cosseting\u2019. Ward helped introduce the 46-year-old secretary of state for war, Jack Profumo, to the 19-year-old showgirl, Christine Keeler, at a pool party in the grounds of Cliveden on a July weekend in 1961. Soon after they began the fateful affair that linked him, via pillow talk and paranoia, to a Soviet military attach\u00e9 that Keeler knew.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Jack Profumo typified British male attitudes: he had forced his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, to give up her career for the sake of his image, before taking the lover who was raised in a converted railway carriage near Staines. The author describes Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies as \u2018good-time girls who refused to be doormats\u2019 \u2013 a new breed of ambitious women less willing to shut up once they had served their purpose. In a sense, Keeler anticipated the glamorous defiance of \u2018the People\u2019s Princess\u2019 in the 1990s. And, like Diana Spencer\u2019s, this is a story about the vacuity of the British people as much as it is a story about the hypocrisy of their leaders.<\/p>\n<p>Davenport-Hines also confronts race, the subject usually ignored by historians of the affair. It was the jealous fight between two of Keeler\u2019s black boyfriends outside the Flamingo Club in 1962 that led to a shooting through which the press got hold of the Profumo story. Then a taboo in a predominantly racist country, inter-racial sex gave the cocktail of cross-class transgression an extra shot of liqueur for the public to enjoy. Yet, as the author observes, the Flamingo Club was a multiracial Soho jazz venue then favoured by the \u2018hip white Mods\u2019 of Britain\u2019s first youth culture. In other words the Profumo Affair didn\u2019t so much change Britain as reveal how much it was already changing underneath the cracked surface of prudery and prejudice. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In History Today, Richard Weight reviews An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines which is being published on the 50th anniversary of the Profumo affair: Meticulous though he is in separating historical fact from tabloid fiction, Davenport-Hines does not unearth any new secrets about the Profumo Affair. 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