What merits an obituary is a long-standing Fleet Street quandary. Is it a life of blameless competence, or a flash of momentary fame? John Profumo was for 40 years a social worker at Toynbee Hall in the East End, after an undistinguished career as a politician. He would barely deserve an obituary but for one act of recklessness in 1963. Does he really rate a biography, and one that adds nothing to what we already know?
Profumo’s son, David, is an accomplished novelist, whose Sea Music is a delightful work. As a regular writer on fishing he has achieved the minor miracle of engaging even me in the sport. At the age of 55, when his father was ailing (he died in March), Profumo Jr clearly felt an urge to write an account of being John (or “Jack”) Profumo’s son. Given the constant references in the book to the pain and embarrassment each resurrection of “the Profumo affair” caused him and his family, the decision is baffling, the more so given the hype needed to sell this hoary old story “by the son who was last to know”. Hence the exclusives, the legal embargos, the review copies denied and the leaks placed. The book is useless for reference since it has no sources or index. It is a classic instance of a work published only for its serialisation rights.
As if guarding against such criticism Profumo assures readers that this is not a case for the defence but rather a “scruff-order biography”, whatever that is. He ladens his prose with allusions to his academic and literary credentials, including that upper-crust tic of lapsing into French or Latin when the going gets delicate (scandal becomes scandalum). The first two dozen pages alone cite Graham Greene, Talleyrand, Thoreau, Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Nietzsche. A later page offers Pelagianism, cacoethes scribendi, formicarium, costive and homiletic, plus a regular outbreak of prep school and Old Etonian jargon. This exotic literary bordello soon begins to echo the father’s love of upmarket lowlife.
Profumo is undeniably successful in his objectivity. Neither of his parents — his mother was the actress, Valerie Hobson — seems to have been forthcoming with titbits. He clearly prefers the company of his father, mildly roué to the end, who gave him some “interviews” but no significant secrets. Perhaps the best explanation for the book is that, having lived with “the name” for so long, Profumo wanted to exorcise the ghost. He subscribes to Shaw’s maxim, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”, adding for what it is worth that “I’m also doing it for the money.”
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Does the skeleton dance? Not really, although Profumo is an honest broker and a good enough writer to make a decent fist of it. The truth is that the affair was seismic for its politics and little else, and this is not a politics book. If the parents never come to life it is because, apart from their celebrity, neither was remarkable.
We follow Valerie through her career as an actress of great beauty but little charisma. The pages are propped up with such famous names as Alexander Korda, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Michael Redgrave, Trevor Howard and Alec Guinness. Hobson marries a fellow actor, they both have affairs, she has two children, is divorced, meets and marries John Profumo, has a child, walks out of The King and I and gives up acting for good. John is a young man of caricature gilding. The son of a Warwickshire grandee of Sardinian origins, he is sent to Harrow, tours the world, goes to Oxford and joins the army. His chief claim to fame is in being elected to parliament at 25 while seeing active service in North Africa and Italy.
He joined the Conservative government in 1959 and rose to army minister in the defence department when the Keeler affair broke in 1963. He lied about it, late one night in the Commons, and had to resign. He was no high flyer and it is doubtful he would have progressed much further, being regarded as a man whose love of politics (largely ignored in this book) was endangered by his raffish tastes. His best friend was the utterly unstable Randolph Churchill. Luckily, the Profumos always had stacks of money, though from where we are not told.
Conventional wisdom holds that Profumo’s brief dalliance with Christine Keeler (allegedly a prostitute but whom he does not appear to have paid) would not turn a hair today. This is not true, especially as he possibly shared her with a Russian military attaché and a sinister osteopath, Stephen Ward. The impact of Profumo’s fall lay in the shambolic political management of his denial and retraction at a time when the Macmillan government was in trouble. Such shambles still come by the dozen. While his resignation as a minister was inevitable, Profumo could have shown due penance and continued as an MP. Nor was it necessary for him to go into theatrical retreat at Toynbee Hall for the rest of his life, making “Profumo” as much a byword for atonement as it was for political scandal. Running a small institution was probably about his speed, and he was clearly good at it. He was good company and a frequenter of nightclubs to the end of his life.
Larkin’s remark that “sexual intercourse began” in 1963 (others thought it began with Virginia Woolf) was always a joke. Profumo struggles to analyse the hoo-ha from the standpoint of 40 years on. He is good on Profumo humour and irony, smiling at Lord Hailsham’s complaint that his father should dare to “lie to his lawyer”. But the conclusion is only that the affair had the right mix of “sex, lies, drugs, espionage, violence, race, hypo-crisy and a complicated class element” for its moment in time. It is a long-dead cliché that it appeared to clear the moral playing field of what the post-war generation saw as the hypocrisy of the prewar one.
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Profumo is best in personal-memoir mode, that of a privileged youth with genteel anecdotes of nannies, butlers, shooting weekends and Eton. He was just seven in 1963, and the episode was clearly a daze. His retrospect is thus that of a semi-outsider, observing the wounded after battle and with a novelist’s capacity for empathetic distance. Citing Brueghel’s Icarus, he notes how the young man falls to earth while the world goes about its business unconcerned. It may have been a disaster for Icarus but for others “it was just another bloody hot day in Ancient Greece, and there was work to do”. Quite so. I ended by rather liking this book.
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