Mandy Rice-Davies saw the Profumo affair as an adventure, not a scandal

In the decades since the Profumo scandal gripped a nation, Mandy Rice-Davies has been fixed in the public imagination largely in the form of one verbal comeback and a photo. The comeback – ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ – came after being told by a barrister in court that Lord Astor had denied sleeping with her. The photo was of an 18-year-old Rice-Davies, sleekly cat-eyed and beehive-haired, in the back seat of a car with her friend Christine Keeler, who had triggered a public frenzy by sleeping with the war minister John Profumo at the same time as a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov.

Rice-Davies said the events of 1963 followed her around ‘like a poodle’ – yappy, but much smaller than her

She died in 2014, so it’s something of a revelation to hear her voice arising so confidently from the radio, in a programme hosted by Kirsty Wark and based on Dictaphone tapes discovered by Rice-Davies’s daughter. These are the older Mandy’s hitherto unheard reflections on the seedy, glamorous world that circled the house of the society osteopath Stephen Ward and his high-profile connections. Its antics became public in 1963, with both Keeler and Rice-Davies – models and good-time girls – smeared as prostitutes by an indignant press that couldn’t get enough of them.

Listening, you begin to understand why, despite the fierce media heat, some inner Teflon prevented Rice-Davies from being badly burned. Arriving at court for Ward’s trial (he was charged with allegedly living off the girls’ immoral earnings), she saw some people throwing eggs at Keeler, and decided the same thing mustn’t happen to her: ‘So when I got out of the car I put on a big smile and waved and nobody threw any eggs.’