IT’S A SCANDAL!
Illicit sex, spying, embezzlement, perjury and murder conspiracies — from Profumo to Jeremy Thorpe, why ARE politicians so very self-destructive?
BOOK OF THE WEEK FIGHTERS AND QUITTERS by Theo Barclay (Biteback £20) ROGER LEWIS
Nothing becomes a political career better than the melodramatic ending of it — or the seeming ending of it. Peter Mandelson resigned from high office twice (the undeclared £373,000 mortgage loan from a less-than-usual source; the passport application for businessman Srichand hinduja), yet he was still granted a peerage and elevated to the Lords, and sat on 35 of the 43 Cabinet committees. As Mandelson memorably said: ‘i’m a fighter, not a quitter.’
one of my favourites is Mark harper, who ‘managed to hire an illegal immigrant as a cleaner while serving as Conservative Minister of State for immigration’. he resigned, and was soon promoted to Chief Whip.
nevertheless, how we always relish the spectacle of smug ministers squirming before the firing squad of public opinion, amid scandalous revelations — orgies, corruption, snobbery, even outright criminality.
our ‘insatiable appetite for outrage’, as theo Barclay describes it in these brilliant and pithy summaries of great political resignations, always makes me, at least, feel better.
the Profumo Affair of 1963, a notorious orious tale of randy aristocrats, call girls and d Russian spies, remains a turning point. After r that, the public never again gave politicians ‘the benefit of the doubt’.
nineteen- year- old Christine Keeler was easily and callously seduced by the womanising John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, who ‘gave her a surreptitious grope behind a suit of armour’.
other assignations took place in a Mini Cooper and a Bentley. With hindsight, she was no vamp, but ‘a troubled and vulnerable teenager’, procured by osteopath Stephen Ward, who derived ‘ “immense excitement and satisfaction” from organising orgies’.
Unfortunately for Profumo, Keeler was also sleeping with Eugene ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché and spy. the security services monitored the hankypanky and harold Macmillan was informed. Questioned by the PM, Profumo said later: ‘i felt i couldn’t tell the truth at that stage.’
his embarrassment compounded the volume of lies, and he left the Commons ‘in total disgrace’.
MENDACITY — as this book demonstrates time and again — is always the unforgivable sin.
Secretary of State Chris huhne, who ‘was willing to lie in public to save his own skin’, was sentenced to eight months in prison. he’d asked his wife, years before, to take his speeding points, and she suddenly remembered this during their acrimonious divorce battle.
huhne’s chief crime wasn’t the speeding: it was that by misleading the police, he was guilty of ‘perverting the course of justice’.
Perhaps the funniest story in this book concerns the plight of Lord Lambton, Minister for the Royal Air Force, who, using the alias ‘Mr Lucas’, visited call girls in Maida Vale in London.
his marriage was disintegrating, not least because his wife, Bindy, after she left hospital having broken both legs go-karting, ‘ drove the wrong way down the A1 and veered straight into the path of a lorry’. nearly every bone was shattered.
in Maida Vale, a tabloid newspaper, tipped off by Lambton’s pimp, concealed tape recorders and cameras in the walls and ‘inside a teddy bear on the bed’ bed’. Photographs were passed to the police, who were upset to see Lambton smoking cannabis. Upon being cautioned, Lambton said that ‘ the sheer tedium of his ministerial job’ had driven him into the arms of prostitutes.
‘Surely all men visit whores?’ he asked an incredulous Robin day in a television interview.
Lambton moved to italy and held spectacular parties where tony Blair and Kate Moss were among his illustrious guests.
Also roped into the scandal — by mistake — was Lord Jellicoe. the police had uncovered a document from Lambton’s favourite call girl with repeated references to the word ‘Jellico’, which, in fact, referred to the Jellico hotel where she met her clients.
Lord Jellicoe confessed anyway, because he had also used sex workers. Friends later called it ‘damned hard luck’.
the Jeremy thorpe business was less comical. though exonerated in court, thorpe, MP for north devon and leader of the Liberals, remained a sinister person, who perhaps used a murder conspiracy to hide the extent of his homosexual relationship with norman Scott, a stable lad and male model whom thorpe introduced to people as ‘a cameraman on a current affairs programme with which he was collaborating’.
When Scott began to make blackmail threats, thorpe’s peculiar friends moved into action, though the assassin they hired was not exactly top-notch. he went to dunstable instead of Barnstaple, missing the target by 162 miles. on a second attempt, instead of shooting Scott, he shot Scott’s dog, Rinka, before the gun jammed.
Almost as bizarre is the saga of former Postmaster general John Stonehouse, who faked his own death in 1974. he’d been spying for the Czech secret service, embezzled money and was deep in debt.
he travelled to Miami — and apparently drowned.
in fact, Stonehouse had made his way on a fake passport to Australia, where police suspected he was Lord Lucan, who had vanished two weeks before Stonehouse.
Extradited back to the UK, he claimed he was still legally the MP for Walsall north and attended the house. only when imprisoned for fraud in Wormwood Scrubs did he resign. in prison, he once played chess with ian Brady.
on the other hand, in fairness, there are the plethora of honourable resignations and Barclay gives them their due. geoffrey howe and many others in Margaret thatcher’s Cabinet could no longer tolerate being treated ‘like a cross between a doormat and a punchbag’.
Robin Cook and Clare Short quit the Blair administration because they were unconvinced by the case for the iraq War. E
DWINA CURRIE went because her remark that eggs were contaminated with salmonella meant egg sales dropped by 60 per cent.
Four million hens were destroyed, and farmers demanded a £19 million rescue package. Subsequent independent medical studies, however, showed that Currie was correct — she was sacrificed by the government, which stood by the Ministry of Agriculture, rather than the department of health.
A story new to me is that of Katherine Ramsay, duchess of Atholl, the first woman MP in Scotland, who was uniquely alert to foreign totalitarianism. She translated Mein Kampf into English and discovered the extent of hitler’s militarism. Along with Churchill, she saw ‘ the imminent danger posed by the german dictator’.
in 1938, she publicly criticised neville Chamberlain for his appeasement policies and was threatened with deselection by her tory constituency. the duchess immediately resigned, forcing a byelection, which, after standing as a single-issue candidate, she lost.
Everything she (and Churchill) foresaw came to pass.