PROFUMO’S SON ON
HE was a bewildered sevenyear-old caught up in the biggest political scandal in British history.
And as the Sixties Profumo Affair grips the nation in a new TV drama, the son of the Minister of War brought down by his lust for a topless dancer has revealed his family’s hell at the centre of a storm that helped topple a government.
David Profumo, now 64, revealed in an explosive book how dad John and actress mother Valerie Hobson shielded their only child from the truth.
But five years later he learned about his father’s affair with teenage beauty Christine Keeler in sordid detail – from an Eton school bully.
David, a former teacher, journalist and novelist, has also told how he regularly passed Keeler on the street in London years later, but couldn’t bring himself to stop and tell her who he was.
And in a family memoir he lifted the lid on how his parents stuck together despite what happened – and how they faced the world with a stiff upper lip, refusing to ever talk about it in public.
SHooting
The 1963 scandal is back in the spotlight again as BBC’s The Trial of Christine Keeler depicts the 19-year-old model’s fateful meeting with Profumo, then 48, at an upperclass swimming pool party in the grounds of Lord Astor’s Cliveden country house.
She and her showgirl friend Mandy Rice-Davies had been brought along by her flatmate and probable lover, osteopath Stephen Ward.
But Christine was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attache, Yevgeny Ivanov, at the height of the Cold War.
A shooting incident at Ward’s London flat caused a press investigation, revealing her affair with Profumo. He at first denied it in the Commons – only to later resign after admitting he had lied.
David recalled the moment his mother calmly broke the news to him in his memoir Bringing Down The House, written with his parents’ permission.
“She said, ‘Daddy’s decided to stop being a politician. He told a lie in the House of Commons, so now we’re going to have a little holiday in the country. All together. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?’
“They kept me from it, but the continual flow of mail and special deliveries was reminding them of unwelcome developments.
“This was an astonishingly lonely time for my parents. Despite their display of solidarity in public, I
Despite their solidarity in public there was fierce emotional turbulence
DAVID PROFUMO On the true effect Of affair On parents
know there was fierce emotional turbulence.” He said they returned from their “holiday” to their London home two broken people and “they clung to each other like Hansel and Gretel”.
Their seven-year-old son went on with his life, blissfully unaware of the truth. Meanwhile his father, once tipped to be the next Tory
Prime Minister, reinvented himself as a charity worker in the East End after the scandal which helped bring about the fall of Harold Macmillan’s Government in 1964.
It was only when David was 12 and starting at Eton that he found out the truth about his father’s affair – from a school bully called The Butcher. “I encountered him on the