PM’s wife leaves Profumo affair secrets to her historian chum
SHE was the niece of one prime minister, Winston Churchill, and wife of another, Anthony Eden; dined with director Orson Welles; and befriended Greta Garbo.
She also celebrated her 90th birthday with a party attended by everyone from artist Lucian Freud to Dame Edna Everage comedian Barry Humphries, before dying last November aged 101.
But the secrets of Clarissa Eden’s long and extraordinary life did not die with her.
I can disclose that she appointed royal commentator and acclaimed author Hugo Vickers to be her literary executor.
It means that he will in due course be able to reveal Clarissa’s insights into one of the most lurid scandals of the 20th century — to which Vickers teasingly referred when paying tribute to Clarissa on her 100th birthday: ‘One day, not now, her resumé of the Profumo affair will make fascinating reading.’
The episode — centring on the affair between Cabinet minister John Profumo and nightclub dancer and model Christine Keeler — generates enduring controversy.
This is not least because of the fate of Stephen Ward, the man who introduced the teenage Keeler to the married Profumo, only to be prosecuted for living off ‘immoral earnings’. He took an overdose of sleeping pills before the guilty verdict was announced, dying three days later.
Old Etonian Vickers tells me that he does ‘control some papers’ and ‘Clarissa’s copyright’. Now 70, Vickers was still in his 20s when, in the words of one reviewer, he became ‘the darling of the elderly’ — including the then recently widowed, but still beautiful, Clarissa, who was a friend of his aunt.
Clarissa subsequently invited him to house-sit at her Wiltshire manor, only to decide at the last moment that she would not be going away after all.
But, rather than sending the youthful writer home, she assured him that he was welcome to stay — which he did, for a fortnight.
So began a friendship which lasted for the rest of her life.
THERE was glamour and laughter aplenty as model Jacquetta Wheeler and her sisters, Sarah and Charlotte, celebrated the life of their father, spread-betting tycoon Stuart Wheeler, at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in London yesterday.
Among hundreds of family and friends was Boris Johnson’s former right-hand man, Dominic Cummings, who gave the eulogy, and Sir Roddy Llewellyn, the former lover of Princess Margaret.
In the 1970s, Llewellyn lived in a commune at Surrendell Farmhouse,
Wiltshire with, among others, Helen Mirren, ‘lion man’ John Rendall — and Tessa Codrington. She later married Wheeler, who died in 2020 aged 85.
There was nothing hippyish about Wheeler’s meticulous approach to family life, as Jacquetta told the congregation: ‘From the age of 14, I was asked to produce annual spreadsheets of my anticipated wardrobe and other expenses — to ensure a fair and accurate amount of pocket money was deposited each month.’