THE MOMENT 60s SCANDAL BROKE Mother said: ‘Daddy told a lie so now he’s going to stop being a politician’
stairs,” said David. “He asked, ‘You’re Profumo? Christ, the Profumo Affair’. I said, ‘What’s that? Is it something to do with the Man from UNCLE?’”
When the snarling bully told him to ‘watch it’, a scared David said he didn’t know what he was talking about.
The bully replied: “Well, there were these two tarts…” David then read the whole story in the school library. He said: “This was an unusual way to discover details of your father’s sex life but I could see why my parents had not wanted to tell me about any of this.” His shock quickly turned to anger. David said: “I appeared to be the last person in the world to know. Broaching this with my parents never seemed an option. I began to regard them in a different and curious way and if I had been gutsier I suppose I could have confronted them.
“I loved my parents, but I must say this did come between us.” David endured the nickname Keeloid for the rest of his time at Eton – and old wounds were reopened when a year later in 1969 the News of the World published Christine Keeler’s memoirs.
But the Profumos still remained tight-lipped. David explained: “Their exemplary behaviour, which was to pretend nothing got to them, was hard enough for them to maintain – and it was naturally expected that I would emulate it.”
IMPULSE
And when it came to getting the other side of the story as he grew older, David again felt unable to follow up his burning curiosity by approaching the lover who almost destroyed his parent’s marriage.
He even spotted Christine a number of times in London’s Chelsea, before she died in 2017. “She and I have never met, though more than once I did walk past her in the King’s Road,” he revealed. “And I entertained a sudden impulse to introduce myself, but was never quite sure as to the precise etiquette.”
Throughout his memoir, David peppers his writing with love letters his mother – who died in 1998 – sent to his father. And he also talks of how he confronted him about the affair just before his death in 2006 at 91.
David had heard his lothario of a father had also been seeing a girl who worked in the Swedish embassy before the scandal erupted – and that one reason he “so brazenly denied any
misbehaviour with Miss Keeler was he was on some kind of final warning from my mother and couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. When I put this suggestion directly to him he blinked at me like some rabbit caught in the gamekeeper’s gaslight – and denied it as if it was an outlandish insinuation. Certain habits die hard.” David said he felt his father “had pretty much forgiven himself for his sexual infidelity”.
But he believes: “Even if his dalliances had driven a wrecking ball through their marriage he would have been helpless without her at that stage – and for all her anger she felt protective towards him.
“He always showed his little boy quality in times of trouble. I believe she loved him despite his infidelity.”
And in one of her letters, revealed in the memoir, Valerie tells how the events of 1963 eventually brought them closer together.
“He got himself into a frightful mess but deep, deep love came to us through the tribulations we shared.”