Home and free from demons

IN death, Christine Keeler was finally treated with the dignity she never received in life.

On a sub-zero morning, beneath a low, dazzling sun, she was cremated in a quiet family ceremony in northwest London, under the name Christine Margaret Sloane.

There was little mention of the 1963 Profumo Affair, when her liaison with John Profumo, the War Secretary, rocked the country.

Forty close friends and family members gathered at West London Crematorium in Kensal Green Cemetery to hear Seymour Platt, her son, pay tribute to his mother.

Platt, who works in Ireland as a business analyst for an engineering firm, had arranged the funeral with Lorraine, his wife. “I never knew Christine Keeler,” he said. “I knew her as Mum, and then as Chris.”

Platt recalled his mother’s intense laugh and her great commitment to fairness, to standing up to anyone, however big.

Desmond Banks, her friend and lawyer, remembered how much she loved reading.

“She had been reading Zola and Daphne du Maurier – but she couldn’t stand Steinbeck,” he said, “She’d just read The Scapegoat by du Maurier. ‘That’s significant!,’ she said to me, laughing.”

Banks recalled how, over the last year, Keeler had increasingly suffered from emphysema at her home in Bromley. But, still, she was full of plans to move to Notting Hill and go on a cruise.