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Despite the spiritual pride of Hailsham and allies like him, Macmillan won the general election of 1959 because the Tories were more convincing as a party of liberty and progress: Labour, by contrast, seeming conservative and cheeseparing. Profumo’s campaign message to the electors of Stratford-on-Avon decried his socialist opponents as regressive killjoys and fretful regulators. ‘Most people are suffering from acute political exhaustion. Facts, figures, graphs, slogans, promises, boasts, taunts and threats galore have been chucked about for weeks.’ But some things were clear: the Labour government of 1945–51 had failed to meet expectations. ‘The Labour leaders were all so keen to establish a Socialist State that they failed to observe what made people tick and what made them kick. They divided us, depressed us, disillusioned us and nearly destroyed us.’ By contrast, since 1951, ‘we have swept away all the paraphernalia of controls and proved that Conservative freedom does work to the benefit of everyone’. Voters were ‘glad to be free of controls; but a Labour Government would clamp them on again … This is your life – don’t let Labour ruin it.’50
Hugh Trevor-Roper, who masterminded Macmillan’s election as Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960, thought that the tendency of the times was towards ‘a vulgar, jolly, complacent, materialist social democracy’. He found ominous ‘the universal absorbent materialism even of spiritual life which has triumphed in America and, unless one fights against it, will gradually triumph here too – has already triumphed in the majority of the population’. A Salford bookmaker’s son thought similarly to the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. ‘I jumped at the chance,’ Albert Finney said in 1961 of his lead in the screen version of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, ‘because of what the film had to say about our present-day smash-and-grab society’. Some Tories shuddered at Macmillan’s bribery of voters. During elections, declared a discontented backbencher in 1962, each political party entered ‘a sort of spiv auction, each one trying to outbid the other with promises of material gain to the masses, in the cynical belief that the electorate is composed of unthinking dupes whose highest aspiration in life is to worship Mammon’.51
If Macmillan’s England seemed a smash-and-grab society to some, it remained a place of frugal, unimaginative routines for many others. Michael Wharton, the Daily Telegraph columnist, lunched every working day in a dingy Fleet Street pub on an identical meal of corned beef sandwiches washed down by brandy and ginger. He ate the same supper each evening at his Battersea flat of lime juice and soda with five fish fingers (never more or less). Yet Wharton felt deep passions, cravings and regrets, as shown by his lament for England in 1961: ‘Her empire and influence is almost gone; her patriots are too much ashamed and beaten down with incessant jeers to speak up for her, or if they do, their voices are shrill and ugly with rancour’ (a reference to the League of Empire Loyalists, a group of embittered hecklers, opposed to decolonisation, who followed Macmillan about shouting that he was a traitor). As to the countryside, farmers had become ‘money-mad mechanics, forever searching for new poisons for the soil which will ensure quick profits at any cost’; fox-hunters chased their quarry around housing estates; Morris dancers cavorted beside atomic power stations; in summer the Lake District was infested by smelly, honking pleasure traffic.
Wharton did not wonder that England, ‘the first country to suffer industrialisation and uniquely vulnerable to its final triumph, clings to survivals, landed titles, splendid rituals’. The move towards classlessness was a drift into stereotypes and the culture of grievance. ‘Policemen and sociologists, clergymen and psychiatrists are chasing the fashionable hooligans and sex maniacs; housewives yawn in deathly new towns; journalists, television interviewers and experts endlessly discuss the Problems of Today. There is the Problem of Youth, the Problem of Delinquency, the Problem of Coloured Immigration, the Problem of the Eleven Plus, the Problem of Parking.’ People thought less in terms of class loyalties, and increasingly as categories of oppressed: ‘as teenagers, homosexuals, motorists, misunderstood criminals and so on’. Mammon ruled under Macmillan, Wharton thought. ‘Over all this England, with its mingled apathy and desperation, lies a thick fog of money and of the operations of money. The ideal Englishman of the advertisements is no longer an aristocrat; he has become a salesman or a financial speculator. His office skyscrapers shoot up overnight where familiar old buildings have been (and he hires public relations men to tell us how much more beautiful they are than the old buildings and makes us ashamed of ourselves for thinking otherwise); his empires of money grow and combine, grow and combine again, continually devising new needs, new categories of people to feel those needs and buy the goods that will satisfy them, temporarily, until new needs can be devised.’52
About the time that Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955, the patriotic catchphrases that public men had traditionally parroted abruptly began to seem bogus, weary and redundant. A few months later, after the revelations of the Burgess-Maclean espionage cover-up, the word ‘Establishment’ was first deployed with the overtone that anything established was suspect. The notion flourished that political, administrative and economic authority was controlled by a secretive sect with strange rites and arcane customs – a mafia comprised of Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘There certainly exists in Britain a number of persons, many of them known to each other and sometimes educated together, who exercise considerable power and influence of the kind that is not open to direct public inspection,’ wrote the young philosopher Bernard Williams at the time of the general election of 1959. ‘Large areas of British life are permeated by mediocrity and the refusal to face genuine issues. Influential figures undoubtedly share, in their own refined complacent way, these characteristics, but they are not the cause of them.’ Henry Fairlie, the political journalist who was amongst the most perceptive commentators on Macmillan’s premiership, complained in the same year that this demure coinage, ‘the Establishment’, had been debauched by publicists until it was a harlot of a phrase used promiscuously by dons, novelists, playwrights, artists, actors, critics, scriptwriters and band leaders to denote those in positions of authority whom they disliked. The Establishment’s defenders argued that it was rooted in neither class nor sectional interest, and was, therefore, disinterested. Its opponents found this lack of passion or commitment to be depressing, and perhaps reprehensible.53
Macmillan’s appointment of a Scottish earl, Home, as Foreign Secretary in 1960, and of his wife’s nephew, the Duke of Devonshire, to the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1961, provoked the anti-Establishment pundits to fume (although neither man failed at his post). The Tories traditionally believed that the tests of experience and of time were sound guides, but after the 1959 election victory appeals to tradition were no longer winning. Instead, Tory leaders had to place themselves as the people best able to manage change. By 1962, Macmillan was trying to identify his party as the modernisers and Labour as retrogressive: Marples’s disastrous transport policies and Britain’s ill-fated application to join the Common Market were at the forefront of this strategy.
In July 1962, the Observer journalist and former gossip columnist Anthony Sampson published his Anatomy of Britain which, on the basis of interviews with political, business and official leaders, presented public life as amateurish, caste-ridden, dithering and cowed. His bestseller operated by the technique of the prewar fellow-travellers who compiled Union of Democratic Control pamphlets: genealogical tables revealing distant, unsuspected cousinhoods; Venn diagrams of overlapping company directorships and schematic representations of power relations all tending to suggest there was a loose conspiracy by undemocratic, debilitated and incompetent fuddy-duddies. Sampson had a priggish belief that people should be spurred hard by overriding moral purposes; in an earlier generation he might have been a disciple of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament group. He seemed to idealise men who worked exorbitantly long hours, scorned holidays and judged themselves virtuous for spreading stress in their offices.
Sampson’s book chimed with the clashing cymbals of opinion-making in 1962. Jack Plumb, the son of a Leicester shoe factory worker, was a communist in the 1930s, a Bletchley Park codebreaker during the war, a Cambridge history don from 1946 and an avid, frustrated crosspatch with a beady eye for the main chance. ‘Your time is coming,’ his lifelong confidant C. P. Snow promised him in 1960, ‘one can smell it in the air.’ Initially Plumb resented tradition: in 1962, for example, he decried the privileged readers of history books as ‘those who had nannies, prep-schools, dorms, possess colonels and bishops for cousins, and now take tea once a year on the dead and lonely lawns of the Palace’. In time he proved the very model of an anti-Establishment skirmisher who, once his enemies were routed, annexed their domains of influence and adopted their style and amenities which he had all along irritably envied. Soon he had a rectory in Suffolk and a moulin in France, ingratiated himself with philanthropic millionaires and smart noblewomen, looked cocksure in the private apartments of palaces, became a conspicuous member of Brooks’s, figured until the last moment among the peers in Harold Wilson’s notorious resignation honours list, performed a clumsy political somersault in the hope of prising a coronet from Margaret Thatcher.54
Richard Crossman was another opportunistic rhetorician where modernisation and class distinction were concerned. Reviewing Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain for the New Statesman, he pretended that political and economic power was more irresponsibly concentrated than at any time in living memory. ‘Never in our island history have so many been fooled by so few,’ he claimed. ‘An irreverent attitude to top people is the yeast that makes democracy rise. Without it a free society soon degenerates into a starchy oligarchy, an indigestible complex of collusive interest groups which can only be broken up by subjecting it to constant investigation and public exposure.’ Hostile analyses of the Establishment were class-war waged with polysyllables: a device to get one crowd out of power, and another in; to usurp one set of authority figures, and install a different lot. Anti-establishment critics masqueraded as street-fighting egalitarians, but in truth they were jostlers for place in the corridors of power.55
Simon Raven was rare among Sampson’s reviewers in resisting his thesis. The scolding theme of Anatomy of Britain was that ‘most educated Englishmen reserve their respect for old-fashioned institutions, such as Eton, Latin, the regimental system and Mr Macmillan, and refuse to recognise the demands of the New Age for such qualities as industrial efficiency and high-pressure salesmanship’, wrote Raven. He, however, wanted to be saved from despotic bores who resented people having placid, aimless moments. ‘While long-established English institutions tend to be illogical and wasteful, the values which they promote, however limited in their scope, are morally and aesthetically far superior to anything which the new world of admass tastes and applied science can show. If I want to spend my day writing Latin verses or watching cricket, as opposed to selling some beastly machine or rubbishy gimmick over a fat expense account luncheon, who is to say that I am not the better man for it?’56
Although Macmillan in 1963 headed a Cabinet with the youngest average age for a century, he was also the Prime Minister who kept his only television set at Birch Grove in the servants’ hall. Broadcasting, however, more than newspapers, showed the tendency of the times. ‘The formality of BBC official language used to be one of great reassurance; it spoke of order, like guards on trains,’ reflected Malcolm Bradbury, lecturer in English Language at Birmingham University, in the spring of 1963. ‘Now, in a wave of informality, even the news is changing. The names of contributors to newsreels are frequently mentioned (personal), announcers cough regularly and carefully do not, as they easily can, switch the cough out (informal), the opinions of people in the street are canvassed, though they frequently have none (democratic), and interviewers are aggressive and sometimes even offensive (vernacular). So, personal, informal, democratic and vernacular, becomes the new common speech for all things.’57
The challenge for Macmillan, as the protagonists of the Profumo Affair converged towards their crisis, would be to hold onto power in an age of common speech. His attendance at the Derby, the shoots at Swinton, quips about Boodle’s which were incomprehensible to ninety-five cent of the electorate, had rallied his parliamentary party after 1957, and brought a thumping electoral victory in 1959. But in the new informal, levelling and vernacular age, these poses made his government vulnerable.
TWO
War Minister
When the government minister John Profumo married the film-star Valerie Hobson on New Year’s Eve, 1954, a crowd of about fifty bystanders gathered on the pavement in Pont Street, outside St Columba’s Church, in Chelsea. Boys on rollerskates, London coppers, and two chimney sweeps made it resemble a scene from Mary Poppins. The bride, who was given away by the debonair financier Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger, wore a grey suit of vicuna, a new material from Paris, with a high collar and cuffs of sapphire mink. A grey silk bonnet was perched over her red hair. Among the fifteen guests was Leslie Mitchell, the suave-voiced broadcaster who announced the opening of the BBC television service in 1936 and of Independent Television in 1955.
The Profumos flew away on their honeymoon that evening, so spoilt by fortune that the head of Heathrow ordained that free champagne should be provided for them and fellow passengers on their Paris-bound aircraft. Next morning, as their car left the Ritz hotel in Paris, with a motorcycle escort from the US embassy revving its engines, the duty manager hastened out with the MP’s pyjamas, which had lain unworn beneath his pillow all night. The Department of Transport gave them the number plate PXH1 (‘Profumo Times Hobson equals Number One’) and a few years later the Foreign Office issued them with passports numbered 3 and 4. Jack Profumo and Valerie Hobson were a golden couple for press photographers, hotel managers and the image-conscious.
They had met exactly seven years earlier at a fancy dress ball held at the Royal Albert Hall to usher in New Year’s Day, 1947. He was dressed as a policeman, she as Madame Récamier (the nineteenth-century Paris hostess commemorated by a type of daybed). She was twenty-nine, with a string of film successes behind her, and stoically married to an inveterate womaniser. He was thirty-one, temporarily out of Parliament, but already with five years’ experience as a Conservative MP.
The Profumos were a legal and mercantile family on whom the King of Sardinia bestowed a barony in 1843. The third baron settled in England, became a naturalised British subject and in 1877 founded the Provident Life Association, which made a fortune for his descendants. The Provident enabled lower-middle-class men who could never afford to buy a house outright to take out an endowment assurance policy, pay a small weekly premium and build up a sum which would be held as a deposit when, after five years, they were entitled to borrow several hundred pounds representing the total cost of a house. Their debt would be paid off over twenty-five years.
The grandson and eventual heir to the Provident money and Italian title was born in 1915, and in 1928 started at Harrow School, perched on a hill in Middlesex, ten miles north of London. ‘While everybody knows that Englishmen are sent to public schools because that is the only place where they can learn good manners,’ Rebecca West wrote in 1953, ‘it unfortunately happens that the manners they learn there are recognised as good only by people who have been to the same sort of school, and often appear very bad indeed to everybody else.’ There was no school of which this was truer than Harrow. It had its private vocabulary (a boy was called a ‘Torpid’ until he had turned sixteen or completed two years), arcane rules (boys in their first year had to fasten all three buttons on their jackets, one button in their second year, and thereafter none), special costumes (top hats for all boys on Sundays, a red fez with tassels for football players) and other rigmaroles. ‘We lived rather like young Spartans; and were not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything that we learned in relation to life at large,’ John Galsworthy recalled of his years at Harrow. ‘In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast until you have reached a certain form … you must not talk about yourself or your home people, and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.’ Giles Playfair, who was a pupil shortly before Profumo, emphasised Harrow’s ugliness (‘the stone floors and staircases, the dark subterranean passages, the dirty blue paint peeling off the walls, the ill-conditioned bed sitting-rooms and the wholly unattractive sanitary accommodation’) and philistinism (‘“He jaws about poetry”, they said, and quite tirelessly and mercilessly, by a process of mental cruelty, they saw to it that I paid the penalty for my indiscretions’). Playfair felt degraded by the fagging system, especially at mealtimes, when he had to assist one irritable butler and two kitchen youths with dirty collars and greasy hair in serving eighty hungry boys.1
Harrow School, when Profumo arrived in 1928, was pervaded by militarism, veneration of the dead and sombre pomposity. Memories of the Great War, which had ended ten years earlier, still overshadowed the school. Almost three thousand Harrovians had served, 690 were wounded, and 644 (twenty-two per cent) killed. A huge ‘War Memorial Building’ was erected amidst a range of old school premises: its ‘silent emptiness,’ wrote Christopher Tyerman in his superb history, ‘appropriate for the hollow anguish and grief caused by the losses’; but its location like ‘implanting a dead heart in the school’. There was no forgetting Harrow’s Glorious Dead for the school chapel was lined with plaques commemorating hundreds of them. The chaplain appointed in Profumo’s time had the Victoria Cross, and joined the Officer Training Corps like other masters. There was army drill, in full khaki, twice a week plus military exercises on Sunday mornings. The soldierliness embedded in the weekly timetables, the rituals of conformity, the zeal of masters in promoting notions of duty and service, exceeded anything that the Edwardians would have desired. The OTC commander was such a martinet in the 1920s that boys protested: despite newspaper coverage of their mutinous discontent, the OTC remained compulsory for Harrovians until 1973.2
The headmaster of Harrow School in Profumo’s time was Cyril Norwood, who began his career teaching in grammar schools and was nicknamed ‘Boots’ by Harrovians because his manners seemed common. Masters and pupils thought him abrasive, over-confident and self-publicising. His morality, like that of other weak men masquerading as strong, was stubborn and unimagin-ative. ‘His appearance was sallow and plebeian,’ recalled Playfair. ‘His manner was cold and severe … he never welcomed contradiction or allowed his will to be flouted. He was a bad listener.’ When recruiting a new master, in 1929, he sought a good cricketer in holy orders.3
Norwood published books with such titles as The English Tradition of Education. He saw public schools as a training ground for the hierarchies of adult life. ‘It is the business of everybody to obey orders: it is expected that the orders will be reasonable, but they are there not to be criticised but obeyed.’ If obedience to orders was the first principle of Norwood’s universe, conformity was the basis of his public school code. ‘Everyone sees the sense of rules, and the happiness of everyone is found in carrying them out, or conforming to them loyally.’ Norwood’s Harrow instilled a smooth-mannered duplicity. It taught boys to show outward deference to people for whom they felt little respect. It rewarded them for giving a pleasant smile while conforming to rules that they inwardly scorned. It assured them that compliance to higher authority was the essence of English racial superiority. ‘There is an inherited system of morality, which represents the experience of the race, the rules which our ancestors have found to govern the game, and there is a racial character, a setting towards some ideals and not others, towards qualities and types of pursuit which appeal to Frenchmen, and not Englishmen, or to Englishmen, and not Frenchmen.’
A boarding house was a model for the outside world, and its rules – which upheld violence, but punished sex – were applicable there, too. ‘It is proper that a House Captain should have the right to cane,’ Norwood insisted. ‘Caning is not felt by English boys to be a degradation, and it is not so looked upon. It is a quick and effective way of dealing with “uppishness” and insubordination. Nevertheless, if a Housemaster discovered that his captain was making free use of the stick, he would know that his House had gone all wrong.’ Norwood’s ideal was manliness isolated from sexual fulfilment (a common public-school experience was for a housemaster suddenly to cease thrashing with his cane once he had married and could relax with other outlets). He had no truck with physicians claiming that expulsion was the wrong treatment for schoolboy homosexuality or social masturbation: ‘they themselves would never leave a patient with smallpox in a dormitory of healthy people, and it has always seemed astonishing to me that they should think that a schoolmaster should think twice about permitting a detected corrupter to range free inside a school’.4
In this Harrow School was a microcosm of English attitudes. ‘The English are filled with fear of themselves and their own impulses – and above all of other people’, the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer reported in 1951. ‘They fear their neighbours; they fear what people would say if they did something a little different from the rest. And this terror of other people’s opinions stifles originality and invention, and often prevents the English from enjoying themselves in their own ways.’5
The Profumo Affair, one might think, was Norwood-made. Jack Profumo learnt at school how to ape the fearful English version of good behaviour while bent on quietly enjoying himself in his own way. It is hard to imagine that he was ever a shame-faced boy. He discreetly pursued his courses with outward deference but private indifference to the school authorities’ moral shams. That morality – still less the empty, fretful orotundity with which it was expressed – bore little resemblance to the imaginations and experiences of any boys or men except the insufferably prim. It provided, though, the antecedent context for the scandals of 1963. Profumo’s belief that he could bluff senior ministers with his denial of an affair with Christine Keeler was learnt in the stupid humbug of Norwood’s Harrow.
Throughout the mid-twentieth century, schools like Harrow sent to Oxford, as Hugh Trevor-Roper lamented, ‘dim paragons of reach-me-down orthodoxy’. In 1933, Profumo, who was dyslexic, went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Agriculture and Political Economy – the least taxing of subjects. Brasenose was not a scholarly college. It was presided over by sozzled dons such as the epicurean Maurice Platnauer, ‘a particularly plump, peach-coloured and port-fed rat’, together with ‘a mountainous old man who drank a bottle of whisky a day’ called ‘Sonners’ Stallybrass, who peered ‘through glasses as thick as ginger-beer bottles and was forever veering away from Justinian’s views on riparian ownership to Catallus’s celebration of oral sex’ (the descriptions come from Trevor-Roper and John Mortimer). Jack Profumo had a dashing restless temperament that was well suited to Brasenose, although his carousals were never very boozy. The college luminaries preferred their undergraduates to achieve sporting Blues rather than first-class honours. Profumo, finding the rugby trials too bruising, took up polo, point-to-point riding and pole-vaulting, which earned him three half-Blues. Brasenose’s ethos resembled that of the RAF, wrote the college historian: ‘athletic, loyal, light-hearted, physically courageous’. Many Brasenose sportsmen, including Profumo, learnt to fly with the Oxford University Air Squadron (Profumo kept his own Gypsy Moth at a Midlands airfield). His son David describes him in early manhood as ‘part-daredevil and part-lounge lizard’.6
In March 1940, Profumo was elected in a by-election as Conservative MP for Kettering. Aged twenty-five, he was the baby of the House of Commons. When his father died three weeks later, he inherited a fortune, and became fifth baron of the Kingdom of Sardinia and third baron of the United Kingdom of Italy, but decided that to use his title would hinder his political career. His first vote in the House of Commons, on 8 May, was a momentous occasion. He was one of thirty-three Tory MPs, including Macmillan, who voted with Labour, rather than abstaining as sixty others did, in a vote censuring the Chamberlain government’s failure adequately to supply British troops in Norway. The Minister of Health spat on Profumo’s shoe. The Tory Chief Whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’.7
As pilot officers, flight lieutenants and squadron leaders, Profumo’s generation at Brasenose were in the front line during the Battle of Britain – during which many of them perished. Profumo was not an aerial combatant, but served as an air intelligence liaison officer and then a general staff officer until he was posted abroad in 1942. He fought in the battle of Tunis, the invasion of Sicily and the conquest of Italy. He was attached to the staff of Field Marshal Alexander, for whom he liaised with the RAF and United States Army Air Force, and received both American and British decorations.
After losing his parliamentary seat in the Labour general election triumph of 1945, Profumo was promoted brigadier and spent eight months living in the British embassy in Tokyo as second-in-command of the British military mission in the Far East. He was said to have dislodged Enoch Powell from being the youngest brigadier in the British Army. It was at the end of 1946, back in England, and a prospective parliamentary candidate again, that he dressed as a policeman, went to a New Year’s Ball and met his future bride.
Valerie Hobson was the daughter of a dud. Her father – Commander Hobson as he liked to be called – devised great schemes, but lacked judgement, perseverance and luck. Once he was offered a chance to invest in a new substance for wrapping bread, called Cellophane, but was sure that housewives would never buy it. He dealt in bric-à-brac, opened a South Kensington bridge club and kept his family in precarious gentility at transitory addresses. One of his few successes was to renounce alcohol after years of unseemly tipsiness. He and his wife shifted about with their two daughters, staying in the spare rooms of patient relations, becoming paying guests in the homes of spinster gentlefolk, moving on within a year before their hosts tired of them. His public face was bluff optimism, but at home there was tetchy despondency.
Valerie Hobson was a plain child with monstrous teeth. But she matured into a beauty, went to RADA, and at the age of sixteen secured her first film part – for which she was paid £20. Three years later, in 1936, while taking part in a Shepperton Studios film called Eunuch, she fell in love with a spruce gallant named Anthony Havelock-Allan. Tony Havelock-Allan, too, had a background of feckless, unsettled indigence. At the time of his birth, his father had been managing director of the Northern Counties Spa Water Company, but losing that post in 1907, had tried to keep a wife and three children on an allowance of £200 a year from his elder brother (a Durham baronet). He tried to raise his income by becoming Master of the West Kent Foxhounds with the intention of running the hunt to his personal profit. Instead, after one hunting season, he went bankrupt in 1914. The second son of a bankrupt second son, Tony Havelock-Allan had to skip university, but studied gemmology at Chelsea Polytechnic after getting his first job with the Regent Street jewellers Garrard’s. He dallied in Weimar Berlin, met Ravel and Stravinsky during his stint as recording manager of a gramophone company, flogged advertising in Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard to estate agents, and hired cabaret acts for Ciro’s nightclub (where the cocktails ‘Sidecar’ and ‘White Lady’ were invented). From Ciro’s, Havelock-Allan was recruited by his chum Richard Norton (afterwards Lord Grantley) to be casting director at the English branch of the Hollywood company Paramount Pictures, for whom he became a film producer in 1935.
