Sex scandal of the showgirl, the Minister for War and Russian spy
Son reveals Profumo affair had left his mum ‘damaged’
CHRISTINE Keeler, whose affair with Tory cabinet minister John Profumo shook British politics in the 60s, has died.
The ex-model passed away aged 75 on Monday night.
She was propelled into the spotlight at the age of 19, when she had an affair with both the secretary of state for war and a Russian diplomat at the height of the Cold War.
Yesterday, Christine’s son Seymour Platt, 46, confirmed his mother died in hospital in Farnborough, Hampshire.
He said: “There was a lot of good around Chris’s rather tragic life, because there was a family around her that loved her.
“I think what happened to her back in the day was quite damaging.”
In 2013, Christine was snapped in public for the first time in seven years. It would be the last public photographs of the former model and showgirl caught up in a scandal that rocked the establishment to its core.
It led to Tory Harold Macmillan quitting as prime minister.
Christine was working as a cabaret dancer in London’s Soho when she met Stephen Ward, an osteopath, artist and “man about town”.
He introduced her to a VIP party scene and it was through him that she met Profumo, 46, and the Russian military attache Eugene Ivanov in 1961, having affairs with both men.
In her 2001 book Truth At Last, which was updated in 2012 as Secrets and Lies, Christine said: “Stephen Ward has been portrayed... as an immoral rascal. In reality, Stephen Ward was a spymaster who befriended hosts of prominent and powerful people in the British government, aristocracy and even the Royal Family.
“With associates, he lured many of them into compromising situations.”
After Christine split from another boyfriend, Johnny Edgecombe, her relationships with Profumo and Ivanov came to light in 1963 amid fears of a Cold War security leak.
Profumo, married to actress Valerie Hobson, told the Commons there was no “impropriety” in response to security concerns. But after more newspaper stories emerged, he quit.
Ward was arrested and put on trial accused of pimping Keeler and her teenage pal Mandy Rice-Davies.
The pair always denied being prostitutes and Ward took an overdose and died days later.
Describing Christine in a 2013 documentary, Mandy, who died the following year, said: “She was a free spirit and I’d never met anybody like Christine before.” But the pair had not remained friends after the scandal.
Christine had revelled in her notoriety. As well as writing two books, she sold her story to newspapers all over the world.
She wrote: “My life has been cursed by sex I didn’t particularly want. Profumo was all over me. There wasn’t much I could do about it.”
And on Lewis Morley’s iconic photo of her straddling a chair, she wrote: “I am always asked if I wore knickers. I certainly did, but it had been a battle to keep them on. Morley had wanted to photograph me without any clothes on but I used the chair to cover my bust.”
The Profumo affair gripped Westminster and, by the end of 1963, Macmillan had resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who lost the general election the following year.
Profumo, who died in 2006, kept quiet on the scandal and only spoke of it to his son David, who produced the memoir Bringing the House Down.
Christine wrote in Truth At Last: “Ever since the Profumo affair, I have never known if a man was capable of loving me for me and not for being Christine Keeler. I have survived and possibly I should not hope for more than that.”
She shied away from the limelight in her later years.
Seymour said he had last seen his mother a week ago. She had suffered from the lung condition chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.