David Profumo most certainly has a justified grievance. With almost incredible lack of sensitivity or consideration, his parents allowed him, aged 12, to go to Eton in complete ignorance of the father’s scandal which had happened five years earlier, leaving the truth to be broken to him brutally by his less than sympathetic fellow schoolboys. It was a terrible thing to have done, and although David generously enumerates a string of possible excuses, his pain is unmistakeable. It seems he was always aware of a worrying reticence on his parents’ part to talk about the past, preferring to assume, without daring to ask, that this must be because he was illegitimate. Incredibly enough, none of the many family servants, discreet to a fault, or any of his prep-school masters and fellow pupils ever gave him the slightest idea of the true explanation. Or could it be that he himself turned a blind eye and a deaf ear?
The least interesting part of the book is given over to the scandal itself and includes unnecessarily long and detailed biographies of the author’s mother and father, neither of whom — the unloveable actress no more than the undistinguished politician — would be remembered had it not been for the scandal. My only meeting with J was when he was still a minister, a few weeks before the scandal broke, at a party given by my pre-lapsarian Telegraph boss’ wife Lady Pamela Berry. Eavesdropping on a conversation with his fellow minister, the laddish Christopher Soames, in the hope of picking up a political scoop, I was disappointed to hear them talking only about Christine Keeler, a name that meant nothing to me. Impatiently, I soon turned away in search of richer pickings.
Where the book excels, however, is in its asides. Once again the devil is in the detail — hypocritical snobs in high places, the awful Bill Astor of Cliveden, the cowardly prime minister Harold Macmillan who never confronted Profumo, the names of those who bravely refused to ostracise Profumo, including Alec Douglas-Home, Randolph Churchill, Iain Macleod and, above all, the Queen Mother and Noël Coward.
This book is hugely literate and sophisticated, full of (untranslated) classical quotations and witty and learned references, among many others, to Wittgenstein, Plutarch, Dean Swift and Gore Vidal. After finishing it, the squalid scandal seems very far away and long ago.
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