HISTORY NOW
New research suggests that the Cold War political affair posed a significant intelligence risk to the UK. David Keys reports
11 The latest history news 14 Backgrounder: the North 16 Past notes: Britain’s roads
ne of Britain’s most famous political scandals, the Profumo affair, posed a much more serious security threat than has previously been believed, new research shows.
The 1961 scandal was caused by the sexual relationship between junior British defence minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler. It subsequently emerged that Keeler, and later Profumo, were also friends with a Soviet embassy official Yevgeny Ivanov, leading to speculation that the relationships may have led to a security breach.
Until now, historians thought that Profumo’s work focused on the end of army conscription, meaning that he possessed no major defence secrets and had therefore not been responsible for a major security breach. Yet, according to new research by University of Cambridge historian Jonathan Haslam, Ivanov was able to photograph important top-secret documents in Profumo’s house.
What’s more, the research also reveals that, for a crucial period at the time of his relationship with Keeler and friendship with Ivanov, Profumo had been helping to arrange the acquisition of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, Polaris, from the United States.
Haslam’s work shows, for the first time, that Profumo was privy to the highly secret and geopolitically sensitive negotiations to allow West Germany to share in
any decision to use its territory to fire nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union.
Russian material studied by Haslam – details of which are included in his book, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, soon to be published by Oxford University Press – also shows that Ivanov penetrated Profumo’s personal study and photographed US specifications for the topsecret X-15 experimental high altitude hypersonic American plane. In addition, he was able to photograph key allied contingency plans for the Cold War defence of Berlin, as well as secret records about US tactical nuclear weapons.
This extraordinary security breakdown appears to have occurred due to a lack of office organisation on Profumo’s part. The revelations show that he left secret documents on his desk in his house while he was out of his study, and that he failed to lock the room or instruct family members not to allow people to enter it unaccompanied. As a result, when Ivanov visited the minister’s home, Profumo’s wife merely asked him to wait unaccompanied in her husband’s study.
Even after the scandal broke, it appears that the British security services – and, presumably, Profumo himself – were completely unaware that the crucial photographs had been taken and that top military secrets were in the hands of the Kremlin. Indeed, historians have often defended Profumo, partly because the full extent of the security breaches had not been uncovered until now.
The study also reveals that even the fact that Ivanov was a Soviet agent was kept from prime minister Harold Macmillan, either deliberately or due to government incompetence. Haslam’s research reveals that the police knew that Ivanov was a spy (because they had been told so by Keeler) and that they almost certainly told the home secretary – but that Macmillan was kept in the dark for several months. When the PM was finally told, he realised that his junior defence minister’s knowledge of so many US and UK secrets made the situation more perilous than he had been led to believe.
“Our new understanding of what actually happened during the Profumo affair shows that it was much more serious than has been thought until now,” Haslam told BBC History Magazine. “What’s more, the new evidence shows how the affair undermined US confidence in Britain’s security abilities at the very height of the Cold War. Washington was furious that what they perceived as British incompetence might be putting US security at risk.”
“The research shows that Profumo was privy to highly secret and geopolitically sensitive negotiations”
Wemay now see slavery as an unacceptable social evil – yet many 18th-century people regarded it as a positive force, a fact highlighted by a collection of documents newly acquired by a University of Cambridge college.
The set of letters and business records relate to the running of the Jamaica sugar plantation of wealthy English landowner William Philip Perrin from the 1760s until the 1790s – the same period in which the abolitionist movement was being founded.
The very fact that these documents are so unremarkable says much about how slavery was regarded, says Ryan Cronin from St John’s College, where the records are now held. “Perrin owned the plantation but lived in England, and hired managers to oversee the running of the estate,” he said. “They would correspond about profits, acquiring land, buying cattle and buying slaves to work on the land. Slaves would be described in the same terms as any other commodity: letters detail how a certain amount of sugar has been sold, that there’s been a property dispute, and by the way do you want me to buy 60 slaves? It’s quite shocking, to modern eyes, how commonplace transactions were that featured this human commodity.”
One particularly striking entry sees Perrin’s estate manager advise him to buy 60 or 70 slaves to work the land for sugar – because it would be cheaper than hiring cattle to do the same job.
“These records are fairly typical, although a lot of similar documents don’t seem to have survived because they’re quite ephemeral: they are just correspondence, after all,” says Cronin. “But I think they are outstanding in that they’re not outstanding. They’re shocking in how commonplace and ordinary these things would have been.”
Indeed, Cronin is eager to emphasise that it wasn’t just the wealthy who stood to lose out if slavery was abolished. “It’s easy to paint it as rich, influential figures campaigning to keep slavery for their own interest, but people such as Perrin didn’t run plantations alone: he had estate managers, farmhands and sailors to work for him. This vast workforce was dependent on the trade. Workers could be earning a pittance – but without the slave trade they would be out of a job. That’s why there was a lot of popular opposition to abolition: it’s not as straightforward as thinking of it as the rich versus the abolitionists.”
Given the ‘ordinary’ nature of the trade, the work of abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson – both of whom were students at St John’s College – appears even more remarkable. “Looking back centuries after the abolition bill, it’s easy to construct a triumphalist narrative: it’s obvious that the abolitionists were on the right side of history, and it seems almost inevitable they would succeed,” says Cronin. “That’s not a bad way of looking at it: the slave trade was an appalling moral evil, and a very dark chapter in British history, but it was more complex than that.
“Letters such as these show the opposition’s human side, and their day-to-day concerns. They weren’t pantomime villains: they were making a living in an absolutely terrible way, but they were still just people making a living. Without sounding as if there’s any sympathy for the slave trade, these letters show the real-life issues of both sides.”
“These letters show the human element of the opposition to abolition, and the daily concerns that they had”
The most notable precedent for the government’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ initiative was a series of measures in the 1930s that designated Tyneside and Cumberland as ‘special areas’, and employed government funds to build Team Valley trading estate and encourage new industries. These have rarely been remembered for bequeathing positive legacies, but rather as marking the north as an area of industrial blight and high unemployment.
This image has proved difficult to shake off, and was often misplaced, especially as the ‘north’ is a surprisingly diverse region. The Special Areas recommendations of 1934 excluded Middlesbrough and Darlington because they were bucking the regional unemployment trend thanks to industries ranging from electrical engineering to brewing and retailing. Many of these provided new work opportunities for women, a fact often overlooked in the familiar story of the north as a region of depression and unemployment.
There is still a disproportionate focus on health, deprivation, poverty and poor life chances in the north. This reflects the legacy of relative economic backwardness and hardship. That said, the Nissan plant in Sunderland routinely outperforms Midland and southern-based motor manufacturers. Yet the press rarely picks up on northern success stories – it is far more seduced by the image of ‘Benefits Street’.
Just as there is a new minister for the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ today, past initiatives often involved nominating someone to take a special interest in the region. In the early 1960s Harold Macmillan, former MP for Stockton (who retained an affection for the area) gave Lord Hailsham/Quintin Hogg responsibility for the North East. His famous arrival at Newcastle Central station wearing a flat cap became iconic, but in the region he was largely viewed as a Tory buffoon.
Homegrown Labour figures were more successful, particularly T Dan Smith, head of the Northern Economic Planning Council. Yet he was jailed for corruption in 1974 and, since his downfall, many voters have been suspicious of individual leadership and local politicians. This resurfaced during the campaign for regional devolution in the early 2000s. In the North East there was, and continues to be, hostility to the idea of powerful local mayors.
There’s been a great deal of talk about a cultural revival in the wake of deindustrialisation. For example, Gateshead hosted the National Garden Festival in 1990, an event that is regarded as a pivotal moment in the culture-led regeneration of Baltic Quays.
Since then, press coverage has been dominated by tales of northern cities rising as cultural phoenixes out of the ashes of industry, transformed by gleaming art galleries, post-modernist architecture and huge shopping malls. Has this worked? Jobs in art galleries haven’t compensated for the huge losses in manufacturing. Culture-led regeneration has often been superficial. But the North East has one of the UK’s fastestrising technology clusters. And local businesses and politicians are optimistic that the creative and digital sectors will help deliver the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.
Press coverage has been dominated by tales of northern cities rising as cultural phoenixes out of the ashes of industry
What we have with the government’s Northern Powerhouse initiative is the idea of an economic hub to rival the power of the south, with science, technology, culture, tourism, finance and transport serving as foundations for the regional economy.
While the idea of the Northern Powerhouse is clearly intended to encompass several northern cities, there is no question that Manchester dominates. The extent to which this is good for the wider region is open to debate. All that I can say is that, while Manchester’s pre-eminence here has not gone uncontested, we should not ignore the city’s historical position as a powerhouse of economic, social and political developments.
Manchester is used to collecting titles, famously ‘Cottonopolis’ or the ‘shock city’ of the industrial revolution – and, with ‘Northern Powerhouse’, the city has another title to add to the list.
How novel is this government scheme? The idea of a Northern Powerhouse is the culmination of a number of local initiatives developed in recent decades. Though deindustrialisation in the 20th century did inspire some state intervention, this isn’t an area in which central government has traditionally taken the lead.
In Manchester, it is possible to trace these local initiatives back to tough decisions made over the past 30 years in response to the city’s post-industrial decline. We have here a story of a city council abandoning municipal socialism and replacing it with an entrepreneurial strategy designed to grasp opportunities for regenerating the city as a vibrant business and cultural centre. Such local strategies for investment, regeneration and growth – developed from the mid-1980s onwards – are important in understanding much of what has led to today’s situation.
And this has even deeper roots. The story for Manchester since the 1980s has been one of economic self-determination and a renewed appreciation of the relationship between the local and the global. The obvious historical examples here are the self-made Manchester merchants whose enterprise, ambitions and strength of governance forged the city’s links with the global economy through the movement for free trade and the development of the cotton industry during the 19th century.
Yes, these merchants found it very difficult to respond to the loss of once-secure textile export markets following the First World War. As a consequence, the mid-20th century saw Manchester identified as the symbol of post-industrial decline. Yet the story today, for the city and the wider region, is clearly one of Manchester’s political and business elite finding new responses to opportunities as they present themselves. In doing so, they’ve shaped the city’s economic reinvention and her links within the global economy.
The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England
by Helen M Jewell (Manchester, 1994)
The enterprise of Manchester’s self-made merchants in the 19th century forged the city’s links with the global economy