Even now, after more than 60 years and when it seemed every secret had been unearthed and every sordid detail pored over, the Profumo affair remains as murky and intriguing as ever.
The Mail on Sunday last weekend revealed that Prince Philip was named in FBI documents about this most enduring of British political sex scandals.
In a cable sent to the US Embassy in London in 1963, the bureau’s autocratic director J. Edgar Hoover suggested that Philip may have been ‘involved’ with the two women at the heart of the affair, models Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.
Speculation about the Prince’s supposed connection has been the subject of drawing-room gossip for decades and it was a scurrilous plotline in an episode of season two of The Crown, the controversial Netflix series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
But the revelation that his name appears in an official lengthy memorandum about the saga will cause discomfort on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hoover’s interest was hardly surprising. A notorious meddler and feared figure who for years orchestrated often illegal campaigns against suspected subversives and political foes, he had always been fascinated by sexual impropriety involving famous names.
All the same, the possibility of the Duke of Edinburgh, who died aged 99 in 2021, featuring in the FBI chief’s scheming – albeit indirectly – would have caused severe damage to UK-US relations at a time when the Cold War was at its height.
But the Profumo affair was not just a tawdry British scandal, but one with international consequences and that contributed to the fall of the Conservative government in 1964.
Remarkably, after an Old Bailey trial, parliamentary questions and an official inquiry, books and even a Hollywood film, successive governments have continued to protect certain people’s involvement in the sexual shenanigans from exposure by keeping one file about the case under lock and key.
Even though all the central players in the story are now dead it will be another 22 years before that file sees the light of day. But more of that later.
While many of the details have been contested over the decades, there is no dispute about the cast of characters.
Hellbound and Down 