RIP: John Profumo

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...On June 5 1963 he resigned after admitting that he had lied to
Parliament about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a call-girl who had
been - separately - seeing the Russian naval attaché and spy, Yevgeny Ivanov...

...The author Peter Hennessy, a fellow trustee at a
charitable foundation associated with Toynbee Hall, described him as "one of the
nicest and most exemplary people I have met in public or political life; full of
the old, decent Tory virtues". Margaret Thatcher called him "one of our national
heroes". "Everybody here worships him", a helper at Toynbee Hall was once quoted
as saying. "We think he's a bloody saint."...

John Profumo
(Filed: 11/03/2006)

John Profumo, who died on Thursday night aged 91, was associated
in most people's minds with the scandal that bore his name and led him to resign
from the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963; but he also became
known, in the last 40 years of his life, as a tireless worker for charity and as
a man who bore his humiliations with enormous dignity and personal
integrity.

Profumo's story is of a man who made one terrible mistake but
sought his own redemption in a way which has no precedent in public life either
before or since. No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins; no
one behaved with more silent dignity as his name was repeatedly dragged through
the mud; and few ended their lives as loved and revered by those who knew
him.

Profumo's transgression came when the Tories had been in power
for 11 years. He was then a promising Secretary of State for War, married to the
actress Valerie Hobson, star of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets and one of
Britain's leading actresses of stage and screen in the 1940s and 1950s.

On June 5 1963 he resigned after admitting that he had lied to
Parliament about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a call-girl who had
been - separately - seeing the Russian naval attaché and spy, Yevgeny Ivanov.
The Macmillan government never recovered from the scandal and, for that and
other reasons, lost the General Election the following year.

Filled with remorse, Profumo never sought to justify himself or
seek public sympathy. Instead, for the next four decades he devoted himself to
Toynbee Hall, a charitable settlement at Spitalfields in the East End of London.
He began by washing dishes, helping with the playgroup and collecting rents.
Later he served with the charity's council, eventually becoming its chairman and
then president - the only other person to have held that office was Clement
Attlee.

From his tiny office at Toynbee Hall, Profumo kept up a ceaseless
flow of letters to anyone who might be able to speak, give money or do anything
to assist the charity in its work of helping the poor and down-and-outs in the
East End. Largely through his efforts, Toynbee Hall became a national
institution.

In his early days at Toynbee Hall Profumo played an active role
in fund-raising for the rebuilding after the war, during which half of the site
had been destroyed. He arrived at a time when the charity realised that there
was still a proportion of society that was not being served by the welfare
state; and over the ensuing years, with Walter Birmingham, he established a new
and creative programme of services for the local people. These included youth
training schemes and facilities for people of all ages.

When Toynbee Hall's centenary came up in 1984, the then editor of
The Daily Telegraph, WF Deedes, a former government colleague, persuaded Profumo
to mark it with an article for the newspaper, the first time he had written
under his own name since leaving public life more than two decades earlier.

Profumo's dedication and dignity won him enormous admiration from
people in all walks of life. The author Peter Hennessy, a fellow trustee at a
charitable foundation associated with Toynbee Hall, described him as "one of the
nicest and most exemplary people I have met in public or political life; full of
the old, decent Tory virtues". Margaret Thatcher called him "one of our national
heroes". "Everybody here worships him", a helper at Toynbee Hall was once quoted
as saying. "We think he's a bloody saint."

John Dennis Profumo, always known as Jack, was born on January 30
1915. His father was a barrister with a thriving practice, but the family money
was in insurance. The Profumos were descendants of an Italian aristocrat, Joseph
Alexander Profumo, who had settled in England in 1880 and owned the Provident
Life Association (which the family sold for £6 million in the 1980s). Jack
Profumo was the fifth Baron Profumo of the late kingdom of Sardinia.

He was educated at Harrow and at Brasenose College, Oxford.
Politically ambitious, he became chairman of the Fulham Conservative Association
by the age of 21. In May 1939 he was adopted as Conservative candidate for
Kettering, and on the outbreak of war joined the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry.
In 1940 there was an unexpected by-election at Kettering, and at the age of 25
he became the youngest MP in the House.

In the vote of no confidence in Chamberlain's war leadership
after the Norway crisis on May 8 1940, Profumo was one of the 30 Conservative
MPs who joined with Labour in bringing Chamberlain down, thus ensuring
Churchill's succession.

Profumo had a distinguished military career, being mentioned in
dispatches during the North Africa campaign, and being appointed OBE (military)
while serving on Field Marshal Alexander's staff in Italy. He was present at the
surrender of the German forces in Italy and was later appointed Brigadier and
Chief of Staff to the British Liaison Mission to General MacArthur in Japan. He
also landed in Normandy on D-Day with an armoured brigade, and took part in the
fierce fighting at Caen and in Operation Goodwood.

As an undergraduate Profumo had shown a flair for amateur
theatricals and continued his interest during the war. He wrote and produced a
musical for Ensa, Night and Day, with Frances Day in the lead, which was a great
hit.

Profumo lost his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide and two years
later joined RA Butler's staff at Conservative Central Office as the party's
broadcasting adviser; he returned to Parliament as MP for Stratford-on-Avon in
1950. Two years later he was appointed a junior minister at the Ministry of
Transport and Civil Aviation, and in 1954 he married Valerie Hobson, whom he met
when she was playing the lead in The King and I at Drury Lane.

In 1957 he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary to the
Colonies and subsequently Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. Three years
later, in 1960, he became Secretary of State for War. This was shortly before
the three services and the War Office became merged in a new Ministry of
Defence. Profumo's responsibility was the Army, and his principal preoccupation
was helping to recruit and establish a regular volunteer Army after the
abolition of conscription.

To bring this to a successful conclusion was an important
achievement on Profumo's part. At the time the Army had to deal with trouble
spots in many parts of the world - among them the Cameroons, Aden, Yemen and
Kuwait - and the ending of National Service was in this context a considerable
risk. Only by recruiting sufficient young men of the right calibre could the
Army's commitments be met. Profumo was essentially laying the foundations for
the modern British Army.

Profumo was widely tipped as a future Foreign Secretary or
Chancellor, but in 1961 there began the chain of events that would cost him his
political career.

The Profumos had been invited by Lord Astor to spend a weekend on
his estate at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire. Astor had let a cottage on the estate
to Stephen Ward, a louche society osteopath whose client list included Winston
Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Hugh Gaitskell and Frank Sinatra, but who also
specialised in friendships with women of dubious virtue; one of Ward's guests
that weekend was the 19-year-old Christine Keeler.

Profumo first set eyes on Christine Keeler when she stepped naked
from Lord Astor's swimming pool, her costume having been snatched off her by
Ward. Keeler left Cliveden that weekend with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet attaché
and friend of Ward, but Profumo asked Ward for Keeler's telephone number and
afterwards began an affair that lasted several months.

MI5 apparently learned of the liaison from a tip-off by Ward, and
Profumo subsequently ended the relationship after being warned that Ivanov was
believed to be a spy. From then on Profumo sought to distance himself from the
Cliveden set.

Over the next two years rumours about the affair began to
circulate in Westminster, and on the evening of March 20 1963 the Labour MP
Barbara Castle stood up in the House of Commons and asked directly whether the
Secretary of State for War had been involved with Christine Keeler.

In the early hours of the following morning Profumo was summoned
from his bed by the Government Chief Whip to a meeting with some of his
ministerial colleagues at the House of Commons, at which he denied having had an
affair with Keeler. In the House of Commons chamber the following day, with
Macmillan sitting beside him, Profumo made a personal statement in which he
declared that there had been "no impropriety whatsoever" in his relationship
with Keeler.

For three months Profumo denied any impropriety; but his denials
were challenged by Stephen Ward (then facing trial for living off immoral
earnings), who wrote to Macmillan and the opposition leader, Harold Wilson,
giving his version of events; it was also rumoured that Christine Keeler had
made a series of taped confessions revealing their affair.

Eventually Profumo decided that he had no option but to come
clean. After taking his wife to Venice to confess his infidelity, on June 5 1963
he resigned from the government and from Parliament. In his letter of
resignation to Macmillan he expressed "deep remorse" at the embarrassment he had
caused his colleagues and his constituents. A few days later he arrived at the
door of Toynbee Hall and asked whether there was anything he could do to
help.

The Profumo affair was eagerly seized upon by the Labour Party as
evidence of sleaze at the top, and the satirists loved every minute of it. One
widely repeated limerick ran: "Oh what have you done?' said Christine. / You've
disrupted the Party machine; / To lie in the nude is not very rude, / But to lie
in the House is obscene." The affair precipitated a crisis of confidence in
Macmillan's leadership and helped to create the climate of opinion that led to
the Conservatives' defeat in 1964.

Although he never spoke about it, Profumo's friends believed he
seldom experienced a day when he did not feel a sense of shame for what he had
done. While he maintained a total silence about the affair, his friends sought
to shield him from prurient public interest. When two books on the Profumo
affair were published in 1987, Lords Hailsham, Drogheda, Carrington, Goodman and
Weinstock, plus Roy Jenkins and James Prior, sent a letter to The Times arguing
that "it is now appropriate to consign this episode to history".

Almost from the beginning, those closely involved in the events
that led up to Profumo's resignation began to feel uncomfortable about the way
it had been handled. WF Deedes, a colleague of Profumo in the Macmillan
Government, recalled being cornered by a group of Tory women at a party event in
Profumo's old constituency of Stratford-on-Avon: "Why did you let Jack go?",
they demanded to know. "He was popular here. We loved him. We'd have worked to
get him back. What a damned sanctimonious lot you are."

As one of those present at the late night meeting at which
Profumo had lied to his colleagues, Lord Deedes felt in retrospect that the
whole affair had been badly handled: "Was it really sensible to convene a
meeting of ministers at 2 am at the House of Commons and summon Jack Profumo to
this Star Chamber, instantly to answer 'yes' or 'no' to charges which Labour MPs
had been bandying in the House earlier in the night?" he asked in 1994.

Because the news media had been besieging Profumo's house,
Profumo had taken a sleeping draught not long before being awakened and reached
the Commons in a befuddled state. "I have often wondered whether in these
bizarre circumstances I would instantly have owned the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth," Deedes mused. "I doubt it."

In 1975 Profumo was appointed CBE on the advice of the Labour
Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had played no small part in exposing Profumo's
misconduct. The honour was intended as a tribute to Profumo for his outstanding
charity work and to his wife, Valerie Hobson, who had stood by him loyally
throughout all his difficulties.

After resigning from office Profumo did not withdraw from an
active social life. The Queen Mother was a friend, and the Profumos were regular
guests at Clarence House. When the film Scandal (about the Keeler affair) came
out in 1989, they were due to be guests at Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and
Ava's dinner for the Queen Mother. They offered not to attend, but the Queen
Mother insisted on their presence.

In recent years Profumo was often to be seen at memorial
services, such as those for Lord and Lady Callaghan, Sir Angus Ogilvy, Sir Denis
Thatcher and Sir Paul Getty. He was a guest at Lady Thatcher's 80th birthday
party in Knightsbridge last year.

Jack Profumo remained devoted to his family and was deeply
stricken by his wife's death in 1998. He is survived by their son, David.

The Duke of Wellington writes: I first got to know Jack Profumo
at Oxford in the 1930s, when I found myself sharing digs with him and another
Old Harrovian. As an Old Etonian myself, I suffered a great deal of good-natured
teasing, but in that house I spent two very happy years. The house was always
full of noise, music, pretty girls and parties. Frances Day, a leading actress
of those days, was a frequent visitor.

Shortly afterwards the war came and we went our separate ways.
After the war we met up again. By that time Jack was an MP, and I remember well
an occasion in 1961 when I was about to go to a military appointment in BAOR.
Jack said to me: "I shall be coming to Germany shortly," and added jokingly:
"You will have to salute me." Equally jokingly, I said that "nothing in the
world would induce me to salute you". But he was right, because not long
afterwards, as Secretary of State for War, he did come to BAOR; I did have to
salute him, and in fact he stayed with me.

Since those days we happily kept in touch, and last year I went
to his 90th birthday and he came to mine in July of last year.

He will be much missed by those who knew him, and especially by
those at Toynbee Hall, who benefited from his kindness and devotion to serving
others in the years after he left politics.

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