Profumo affair

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The Profumo affair was a political scandal surrounding the British Army Minister John Profumo in 1962/63.

overview

Profumo was a member of the Conservative Party and from 1960 to 1963 Minister of War under Harold Macmillan . He was married to actress Valerie Hobson . The scandal is based on his affair with the mannequin Christine Keeler . Profumo met her in 1961 in Cliveden on a pool party that from the fashionable London osteopath Stephen Ward in the home of Lord Astor in Buckinghamshire was given. Ward had raised a kind of prostitution ring with Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies . The affair between Profumo and Keeler lasted only a few weeks before Profumo ended it.

Rumors of the affair became public in 1962 when it became known that Keeler had another relationship with Yevgeny "Eugene" Ivanov , the naval attaché of the Soviet embassy. Rumors arose that Keeler had spied on the minister on behalf of the Soviet Union. She herself denied this.

In March 1963, Profumo declared in the House of Commons that there was "nothing in any way improper" about the relationship with Keeler. He announced libel suits if scandalous allegations were made against him or repeated outside the House. Profumo confessed in June that he had deceived Parliament and resigned on June 5th. The government received an official report from Lord Alfred Denning on September 25, 1963 , according to which there was no Soviet espionage assignment to Keeler and Profumo had not revealed any secrets.

Ward was charged with living from immoral income (see pimping ) and attempted suicide on July 30th , of which he died on August 3rd. Keeler was convicted of perjury and sentenced to nine months in prison.

The affair also strained Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's tenure . Macmillan resigned after an illness and an operation in October 1963 as a result of the scandal (see also British general election ). He was succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home .

Precipitation in popular culture

As early as 1963, the English actress Joyce Blair, under the pseudonym Miss X, had a notable success in England with the satirical song My name is Christine, which contains clear allusions to the affair.

In the by-election that became necessary as a result of Profumo's resignation , the rock musician Screaming Lord Sutch stood for the first time as a candidate, who later ran for a seat in parliament with satirical election campaigns and absurd demands until his death. Mandy Rice-Davies later appeared on Sutch's pirate radio station Radio Sutch and read from the novel Lady Chatterley, which was then regarded as pornographic .

Some of the aspects of the Profumo affair were portrayed in the 1989 film Scandal . Dominant characters are John Hurt as Stephen Ward and Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler. The role of John Profumo, who has a supporting role in the film, took over Ian McKellen . In addition, the Profumo affair is one of the events mentioned in the song We Didn't Start the Fire by singer and songwriter Billy Joel .

In the song Post World War Two Blues by Al Stewart is Christine Keeler mentioned.

In 2007 London's Greenwich Theater performed the musical A Model Girl , which portrayed the events of the affair from Keeler's perspective. 2013 was the musical Stephen Ward by Andrew Lloyd Webber in London's West End premiere.

The events surrounding the Profumo affair were the main subject of the last episode of the second season of the British television series The Crown in 2017 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ DR Thorpe: Supermac - The Life of Harold Macmillan. Chatto & Windus, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-7011-7748-5 , p. 544.
  2. ↑ MacMillan: Healing Disease . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1963, pp. 96-97 ( Online - Oct. 16, 1963 ).
  3. ↑ Nina Merli: "Every man who met her wanted her". In: Tages-Anzeiger of February 22, 2012