Dirty tricks campaigns

There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English Affair, which is set to become the standard work.

He has found new material — the police files on Perec Rachman and Charles Clore, for example — and, as his subtitle suggests, he is big on historical context. His book is elegantly arranged in two parts, the first and longer of which is devoted to setting the scene and introducing the cast (‘Good-Time Girls’, ‘Hacks’, ‘Spies’ and so on), before the curtain goes up on the drama itself, which he calls a ‘corrupt, contemptible sequence of events’, involving prurience and snobbery, ‘insolence, envy and the politics of revenge’.

For all its perspective and nuance, though, it is a surprisingly personal and angry book. Davenport-Hines grew up in Marylebone, where his rich father kept a mistress on the Edgware Road. In 1963, when he was nine, he learnt a new word from the cook’s Daily Express — ‘orgy’ — and when he repeated it at school he was caned. Soon afterwards — ten days after Jack Profumo’s resignation as Minister of War — the speaker at his school prizegiving warned the boys about the ‘deplorable breakdown of public morals’. Davenport-Hines decided that public morals meant pompous hypocrisy, and that he urgently wanted their breakdown. It became inevitable then, as he now sees it, that he would one day write about ‘the sexual oppression, guilt and bullying, the whitewashing and blackballing, the lack of irony and absurd confused anger’ of Harold Macmillan’s England.

It was an England, he recalls, ‘more drilled and regimented than at any time in its history’, where ubiquitous gravy made everything taste alike, and women were either ‘gentle daughters or dewdrops’, or ‘Wimpy Bar sluts or bossy-boots’.