'The press went absolutely mad': The 1960s sex scandal that rocked British politics

The Profumo affair led to a government minister's resignation on 5 June 1963. In 1983, Christine Keeler talked to the BBC about her part in a story of sex, lies and Cold War paranoia.

"For 20 years, I think I've just been a newspaper clipping, I've never really had my say," Christine Keeler told the BBC's Sue Lawley on Nationwide in 1983. She was recalling the notorious political scandal that had engulfed her life and made her a household name: the Profumo Affair.

The 21-year-old model found herself thrust into the media spotlight when, on 5 June 1963, John "Jack" Profumo resigned as UK Secretary of State for War after itting that he had lied to Parliament about having an affair with her. The press alleged that during their dalliance two years earlier, Keeler was also seeing a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, who was believed to be a spy.

The story seemed to have everything: sex, showgirls and the British upper class; lying, a shooting and Cold War spying. Keeler was unprepared for the scandal she was caught up in, and whose fallout would play a role in the collapse of the UK government. "I was an uneducated girl, and when I was 19, politics to me was something totally beyond my scope," she told the BBC in 1983. As the affair's details emerged, Keeler would find herself pursued and then vilified by the tabloid press, their coverage defining the public's perception of who she was. A photograph taken at the time of an unclothed Keeler posing on a chair, would become one of the defining images of London's Swinging '60s.

Keeler had already endured a hard and traumatic early life before the Profumo affair exploded. Born in Uxbridge, UK, in 1942, Keeler grew up in poverty after her father left the family when she was a child. She went on to suffer sexual abuse as a teenager at the hands of her stepfather and his friends. At the age of 17, she found herself pregnant by a US serviceman. After he returned to America, she tried unsuccessfully to give herself an abortion. She eventually gave birth to a son, who died six days later. 

Having left school at 15 with no qualifications, she worked variously as a model and a waitress, before landing a job as a showgirl at Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho, London. It would be at the club that she would meet a fellow model, the 16-year-old Mandy Rice-Davies, and befriend the man who would act as her gateway into the elite of British society, Stephen Ward.

Ward was a successful Harley Street osteopath whose clients included both of the aristocracy and some of the leading cultural figures of the early 1960s. This enabled him to socialise with some of the most influential people in the country. He also had a sideline as a portrait artist, often sketching those he came into with, including Queen Elizabeth II's husband Prince Philip and her sister Princess Margaret. "Stephen was himself a handsome man, intelligent, whose address book read like something out of Who's Who," Rice-Davies told BBC's Witness History in 2013. "His client list included Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren, half the aristocracy of England. In his own way, he was quite powerful." 

Ward had a habit of setting up his young female friends with older, more powerful men. After meeting the two showgirls, he took them under his wing, and Keeler moved into his flat. Their friendship, while close, remained platonic. The well-connected Ward then began to take Keeler and Rice-Davies to society parties, where he would introduce them to his many wealthy and influential friends and encourage liaisons between them.

"Well, anyone who met Stephen would understand that Stephen had a marvellous charm, and he had a way with him, and I was very close to him," Keeler told the BBC. "I suppose he was wrong with his attitudes, and he was a bad man – wicked to a degree, he was – but I don't know, I cared for him." It would be through Ward that Keeler would go on to have her fateful meeting with Profumo.

Among Ward's circle of friends was the former Conservative MP Lord Astor, who regularly hosted weekend parties at his Cliveden estate in Buckinghamshire. At one of these events on 8 July 1961, among the illustrious guests that Lord Astor had invited was Profumo and his actress wife Valerie Hobson, who was famous in her own right for starring with Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein in 1935 and in David Lean's Great Expectations in 1946.

Ward, who rented one of the estate's cottages from Lord Astor, was there with some friends, including Keeler, and they decided to make use of Cliveden's swimming pool. "We were all having a swim except Stephen, because he never went swimming, and I got one of the bathing suits that was too big and whatever," Keeler told BBC Woman's Hour in 2001. "And Stephen said, 'Take your swimming suit off, then, if you are complaining about it.' And so I did – because it kept virtually falling off, it was so big – and threw it to one side. And then Bill Astor and Profumo walked in." Upon seeing the naked teenager, the 46-year-old Profumo was smitten. 

However, also staying at the cottage was another friend of Ward's, Captain Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Russian embassy in London. "Yevgeny was a very charming man. I used to have conversations with him about the principles of Communism, he really was a nice chap," Rice-Davies told the BBC in 2013. "There were several moments when I would say to Stephen, 'Is he a spy">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });