Though now 90 years old, Jack Profumo was present last week to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s birthday. Forty-two years ago he was involved in a scandal that has a place in history. It shook the Conservative government in which Profumo was the secretary of state for war and ended his public life. It also ushered in a new era in journalism. The poet Philip Larkin joked that sexual intercourse began in 1963. More accurately, reporting the private lives of British politicians started from that date.
Of course news of scandals had been printed before. The attempt in 1820 by George IV to divorce his wife Caroline created such public uproar that there was fear of revolution. In 1890 the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell was driven out of British politics after he and the woman he lived with, Kitty O’Shea, were found guilty on charges levelled against them by her husband.
But the Caroline and Parnell cases were brought into the public domain by those directly involved and were played out in an open court of law. By contrast, what politicians (and royals) did behind closed doors was then rarely reported. Prime ministers such as Gladstone (who “rescued” prostitutes from the streets), Lloyd George (“the old goat” from whom, reputedly, no woman was safe) and Macmillan (whose wife had a long affair with the Tory MP Bob Boothby) escaped public humiliation.
To list the sex stories concerning politicians that have been printed since 1963 would fill the rest of this column. At least since Cecil Parkinson (then trade secretary) admitted an extramarital affair with Sarah Keays in 1983, we have been asking whether the amorous pursuits of MPs should be reported. Do they have anything to do with us or with their ability to legislate and govern?
There has been some media self-control. Chris Smith, the former Labour cabinet minister, declared that he was gay. It made headlines but there was no media storm that might have ended his career. By contrast, on the heterosexual side the things that excite the media have become ever smaller and ever more irrelevant.
In the Profumo case you could argue (just about) that national security was at stake, because the minister was sharing a girl with the naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. Since then we have descended to exposing cases that have no connection to public duty at all. For example, in the case of David Blunkett front pages have been devoted to his relationship with a 29-year-old woman. Neither Blunkett nor Sally Anderson is married. He says their relationship is platonic. Even if things were otherwise, what would be the public interest defence for the tabloids splashing the story?
The media have exposed and moralised ever more during a period when we British have supposedly become more tolerant and worldly. It also seems we have exported our “standards” to the rest of the world. Whereas President Kennedy could have a woman a night without press comment, decades later President Clinton was impeached on charges arising from his sex life.
There was an old joke that in France a politician would never draw attention to his opponent’s mistresses because that would boost the rival’s chances in the election. Now France has adopted Anglo-Saxon puritanism. Nicolas Sarkozy has ceased being favourite for president since newspapers revealed that his wife has left him and that he is living with a political correspondent for Le Figaro.
Blunkett has had to endure what he would call a basinful of intrusion into his private life. Last week a new television channel, More4, was launched with A Very Social Secretary, a satire on his relationship with Kimberly Quinn (the married woman by whom Blunkett has a son). Theatre-goers have seen an even racier version of the minister’s private life in David Blunkett: the Musical.
I would have good grounds for feeling no sympathy for Blunkett. The Labour party ruthlessly exploited tittle-tattle about the last Conservative government until scandals engulfed it and helped to bring it down. Labour’s strategy was born of its desperation for office. The party had been out of power for too long. It had forgotten that only those who are without sin are in a position to cast the first stone.
Also, since taking power the government has faced little satire that hurts. Despite the splendid mockery of Bremner, Bird and Fortune, Labour is not worn down by an equivalent of Spitting Image. The programme’s puppets were cruel, sometimes obscene, caricatures. They had a corrosive impact on the Tories’ reputation.
You could take the view that Blunkett is getting his comeuppance. When he intervened in the case of Quinn’s nanny, who rapidly received her leave to remain in Britain, he abused his ministerial position. The prime minister made too light of his offence by allowing Blunkett back into the cabinet just five months after he had had to resign.
The minister has questions to answer now about his income from DNA Structures, a company run by his friend Tariq Siddiqi. Blunkett says he was paid only during the election campaign when he was not an MP because there was no parliament. It is hard to believe that an assiduous campaigner like Blunkett would use those two weeks and only those two weeks to make a little extra money. Nor can I think of any excuse for an MP writing about a private matter on House of Commons paper, as Blunkett did when objecting to Wandsworth council about a property development near his home. MPs and their staff know perfectly well what is proper and what not.
Yet I do feel indignant on Blunkett’s behalf about the grubbing about in his private life. Humiliation is being used as a weapon to drive him from politics. It may yet succeed.
It is not easy to lift your head and walk with confidence into a crowded room when you know that everyone is sniggering about your sex life. Gossip makes it difficult to concentrate on being a minister.
I worked closely with Parkinson when scandal hit him 22 years ago. While he tried to weather the storm he would often have to leave meetings in his department to speak to lawyers or to draft an urgent press statement. Authority ebbed away.
A similar tactic is being used against David Cameron, the new frontrunner in the Conservative party leadership contest. For most of the time since his fine speech to the party conference he has been distracted by the issue of whether he has taken drugs. Although on the BBC’s Question Time he faultlessly kept his composure, the problem has engulfed him like a swarm of bees.
Cameron’s predicament reminds me a little of my own when I was a candidate for the leadership and favourite. Before that time I had volunteered the information (to scotch rumours) that as a young man I had had gay experiences. My opponents in the leadership battle, many of whom are Cameron’s enemies now, sought to keep the issue alive by asking my views on section 28, which supposedly banned a sympathetic presentation of homosexuality to schoolchildren.
Whatever may have been the impact on my chances then, I think that Cameron has acquitted himself well enough to survive, depending on future revelations.
The demand that he be precise about what he did before entering parliament shows how far media inquisitiveness has extended since the 1960s. He is right to say he will not answer specific points. Blunkett recently took the same line.
If Cameron made a clean breast of his past that would not be the end of the matter, but rather the beginning of a witch-hunt. If he were candid, that would provide carte blanche for newspapers to print lurid accounts from so-called friends that might not even be true. Others’ private lives would be invaded. Already his close family’s privacy is in tatters.
Profumo is a charming man who has spent much of the past 40 years working conscientiously for Toynbee Hall, an east London charity devoted to helping vulnerable young people. He received a CBE for his work and he deserves to be remembered for it. When I greeted him last week I did indeed recall the good that he has done. Yet involuntarily it came into my mind that this was the man who, when I was 10, cavorted with Christine Keeler in the swimming pool at Cliveden.
I curse my own prurience.
