Keeler’s story exposes the absurdity of Westminster sex hysteria

CHrisTiNe Keeler, who has died aged 75, was one of the most iconic faces of the 20th century.

in her prime, she was up there with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, possessed of that same kind of disturbing sexuality, half-child, half-woman — the kind that can drive ordinarily sane men out of their senses.

it was this seemingly irresistible allure that brought Keeler — and the subsequent sex scandal that almost destroyed the government — to the attention of the authorities: two of her lovers got involved in a bitter feud that ended in gunfire.

it also caused her untold damage at a very young age. in her autobiography, she wrote about her stepfather who molested her at the age of 12, urging her to run away with him. she also attracted the attentions of the men whose children she babysat, and had her first illegal abortion aged 17.

Her real father abandoned Keeler’s mother when Christine was very young, and it is clear her willingness to be seduced was more to do with an eternal search for a loving father figure than any sort of sixties enthusiasm for free love.

The Keelers of that world were not the ones to find liberation in the new sexual freedoms of that era; those privileges belonged to women of a more ideological class, imbued with the confidence of status and money.

For working-class girls like Christine, the spirit of the age took away the few protections afforded them by marriage, since the men who exploited them no longer even had to do the courtesy of making honest women of them.

Thus stephen Ward, the society osteopath who ‘discovered’ her as a teenager dancing in a bar in soho, found a girl already bruised by life and willing to act as his sexual pass to powerful men looking for a ‘ good-time’ girl with no strings attached.

And Keeler, already sexually desensitised and in modern parlance ‘groomed’ to perfection, went along with it. What else could she have done? she was passed around from man to man like a broken doll, damaged but still beautiful enough to play with. Had she been born in a different time or place, she would have emerged the victim in the subsequent scandal.

instead, while the men in her story — disgraced Minister John profumo and Ward — have, to a certain extent, been rehabilitated by history, Keeler, as she herself put it rather sadly not long ago, remained characterised as ‘that bloody whore’.

But Keeler’s story is not just one of a beautiful girl who became a pawn for powerful men. it also lends proportion to so much of the modern morals and attitudes that surround Westminster today — and shines a light on the absurdity of some of them.

How different Keeler’s experiences — her bottom red from being pinched, her virtue shamed in public, raped by one of her suitors — were from those who currently claim abuse at Westminster, where a mere invitation to dinner is met with hysteria and a MeToo hashtag, and where remarking favourably on someone’s appearance risks bringing down a career.

Consider her exploitation in the context of the minor infractions that these days seem to constitute sexual assault, and it almost feels like an insult to her memory.

As women, we have thankfully come a long way since Keeler’s day. But so much of the hysteria that now surrounds the debate around sexuality in public life risks detracting from the real abuse that still exists in society and the modern-day Christine Keelers who are still suffering at the hands of wicked men.

Keeler was not the first great beauty to have wielded so much power over influential men, yet enjoyed none for herself. Let’s hope she has finally found some peace.