The late Christine Keeler was more than yesterday’s victim of sexual exploitation

Is it right to depict the late Christine Keeler as an almost innocent, teenage victim of power politics in the 1960s? Joyce Mcmillan chose to set her legacy in terms of the current furore about sexual harassment by prominent figures in entertainment and parliament (Perspective, 8 December).

For those of us who can remember those heady days of the Profumo scandal it is only right to look more widely at her role in 20th-century post-war history.

She may have been described simply as a “slut” in some quarters; however, in an age when satire was given a welcome renewal in television and theatre, she came to symbolise someone who in her own way could thumb a nose at a motheaten Establishment.

Christine Keeler may only have been around 20 when the controversy broke but she was well aware of what she was doing, seemed to relish the limelight, and displayed a political maturity beyond her years.

It could be argued that she was successful in doing what more than a decade of Labour opposition had failed to do – denting the credibility of the Conservatives and many of their associates in the legal and medical world. She may well have laughed at the idea she was harassed.

In 1963 changes in musical taste, fashion, literature, television output and sexual mores were causing Establishment values to creak at the joints. It is important to remember that we were then at the outset of an era of remarkable changes in the law relating to abortion, divorce, homosexuality, censorship in films and theatres, access to higher education, citizens travelling abroad and so on.

Perhaps Christine Keeler could not quite articulate her role in the turbulent changes of the time. There can be no doubt, though, that her image personified, for good or ill, a lot of the changes in social attitudes of the time.

To see her simply as yesteryear’s victim of sexual exploitation is both mistaken and narrow.