Great Britain: The Lost Leader

As the House of Commons clock ticked toward starting time for the great debate, there were only two empty seats in the jammed, expectant chamber. The first was filled, with four minutes to spare, by Harold Macmillan, who sat down stiffly on the government’s front bench, looking as chill and wan as his effigy at Madame Tussaud’s.

Two minutes later, a short, plump man in a shabby grey suit bustled expressionlessly down the gangway, sank into the Opposition front bench facing Macmillan, and fingered a cardboard file. As the clock struck, Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson rose to his feet and for a second savored the tingling silence before breaking it with his flat, nasal Yorkshire voice. “This is a debate,” he began, “without precedence in the annals of the House.”

The two men were the products of two remarkable political careers and also of two Britains: Macmillan, the skillful, courageous and often ruthless patrician who had rescued his country from the debris of Suez and led it into an era of unprecedented prosperity; Harold Wilson, the dry, diligent and often devious son of a provincial chemist who had risen by hard work and chance (including the death of the man he succeeded, Hugh Gaitskell) to the top of the Labor Party. As he faced Macmillan, who had gone to Oxford by family tradition, Harold Wilson, who had gone to Oxford on a scholarship, strove to embody a new, impatient, class-defying England. The moral decay surrounding the Profumo affair, he tried hard to suggest, must be blamed on the Tories. Referring to Christine Keeler’s reported $14,000-a-week nightclub contract, Wilson declared: “There is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its Prime Minister.”

For the rest, Harold Wilson stuck to the security issue and the government’s handling of the Profumo case, which he attacked as either dishonest or incompetent, or both.

Let Down. The once unflappable Macmillan fidgeted in his seat and kept dabbing at the pouches beneath his eyes with a crumpled handkerchief. When he rose, he openly played for the sympathy of his colleagues. “What has happened,” he said, “has inflicted a deep, bitter and lasting wound on me.” Essentially his defense was that he had been grossly deceived by Profumo—an “almost unbelievable” culprit—and badly let down by his subordinates, who failed to keep him informed. From the back benches came a rude gibe of “Nobody ever tells me nuffin!”

By the time Macmillan finished, the House was prepared to acquit him of personal dishonesty and moral turpitude, but he had convicted himself of negligence and naivete—or perhaps simply of a fatal ability to avert his eyes from what he did not wish to see. In the vote following the debate, 27 Conservatives voted against Macmillan or abstained. On all sides there were cries of “Resign, resign,” and this is what Macmillan will almost certainly have to do—the only remaining question being when.

The Warning. The long debate served to fix government responsibility, or the lack of it, and illustrated the odd nature of the British security system, compounded of shrewdness, inefficiency, and an often misguided sense of sportsmanship that goes to extraordinary lengths in protecting members of the club. The case, as it emerged from the debate, falls into four phases.

First, there was the Christine-Profumo affair itself, which, according to Profumo, lasted only a few months, from July to December 1961, but by other evidence possibly lasted longer. During those same months, Christine also entertained Russian Assistant Naval Attaché Evgeny Ivanov, who had been pals for some time with her mentor, Dr. Stephen Ward. M15, British intelligence, apparently discovered only half of what Wilson scathingly called “this dingy quadrilateral.” In August 1961, according to the Commons debate, Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook warned Profumo that it would be better for the Secretary for War not to be too friendly with Ward; he did not mention, and evidently did not know about, Christine. Nothing of this was reported to Macmillan.

In the second phase, which covers most of 1962, rumors of the affair kept reaching the newspapers, Tory and Labor politicians, but apparently not the Prime Minister. During the Cuba blowup, Ward was all over the place, suggesting to the Prime Minister’s office and to the Foreign Office that his friend Ivanov be used as an intermediary to help settle the crisis. But, said Macmillan, a lot of people were then trying to get into the act “to weaken our resolution.” A little later, Wilson himself got a letter from Ward, boasting of his supposed help in settling the Cuba matter, but filed it away as coming from a crank. Before Ivanov was recalled to Moscow* in January 1963, he aroused suspicion in other ways. A bridge player who took a hand in some very high-level games, he lost steadily, as much as $140 a night. “I do not believe the Soviet embassy’s petty cash would stand such losses every night,” said one Labor M.P. caustically, “unless they got something for it.”

The Vigil. In the third and most remarkable phase, Macmillan finally became aware that there was such a thing as a Profumo case. In January 1963, as Macmillan told Commons, police learned from Christine that Ward had asked her to find out from Profumo when the U.S. was to deliver certain nuclear information and warheads to West Germany (she said that she refused to do it). Macmillan was not told of this either. But while he was away in Italy, the general manager of the huge (circ. 6,500,000) News of the World reported the Profumo rumors to Macmillan’s principal private secretary. Confronted with the story, Profumo denied everything to several officials; the relationship had been innocent, he said, and anyway had ended long before. Why didn’t the Prime Minister question Profumo himself at any time? Macmillan’s lame answer: he assumed that Profumo would speak more freely to others, and furthermore such an interrogation would have made “social relations” between himself and Profumo highly embarrassing. And why didn’t anyone attempt to interrogate Christine herself to check out Profumo’s denial? To this, Macmillan had no answer at all.

After Christine failed to appear as a witness last March in the trial of a jealous Negro lover who had tried to shoot her, questions were finally raised in Parliament. Macmillan asked for action, admittedly hoping for a statement from Profumo that would quell further rumors in the press through fear of libel. When the House adjourned after midnight, Profumo was awakened, and at 1:30 a.m. came to Chief Tory Whip Martin Redmayne’s Commons office with his solicitor. He was confronted by Redmayne, Tory Chairman Iain Macleod, Minister without Portfolio William Deedes, Attorney General Sir John Hobson and Solicitor General Sir Peter Rawlinson. Two of Profumo’s interrogators had been at Harrow with him.

The Letter. Under friendly questioning until 5 a.m., Profumo denied misconduct with Christine. He agreed to make a sacrosanct “personal statement,” assuring the House that he had committed “no impropriety whatsoever” with Miss Keeler. His fellow ministers suggested that he admit at least to being “on friendly terms with her,” although it “sounded so awful,” as Profumo put it. “We insisted that it must be included,” explained Macleod fatuously last week, “because it was part of the truth.” Against himself and the four other ministers, Macleod added, “two possible charges can be brought. First, that we were conspiring knaves, and secondly, that we were gullible fools.”

They were indeed gullible—but obviously they wanted to be. Even the most cursory checking would have disclosed that while Christine may have had joie de vivre, she had little discretion. Profumo’s interrogators knew by then about a letter he had written to Christine in 1961 beginning “Darling . . .” Profumo explained, as Macmillan put it, that in his circles “it was a term of no great significance. I believe that this might be accepted. I do not live among young people fairly widely.” But if it was acceptable to Macmillan, at 69 a little remote from reality, it should not have fooled the others. “We were a bunch of ninnies,” admits one of the five privately, and adds with extraordinary logic: “We recalled that earlier case,* in which ‘My dear Vassall’ proved to be harmless, so we were bound to feel that ‘Darling’ might well be similarly harmless.”

The Exit. The last phase of the case began after Profumo proclaimed his purity to the House, was warmly patted on the back by the Prime Minister, and with his wife, Actress Valerie Hobson, went off to the races with the Queen Mother, and later attended a Tory ball at Quaglino’s, a West End nightclub.

But there were editors and M.P.’s who knew by now that he had lied, and Profumo showed himself both arrogant and stupid in thinking that he could suppress the truth indefinitely by libel suits. (In fact, he sued Paris-Match for libel and collected out of court from Italy’s Tempo Illustrato).) Besides, Ward began to talk, and to Labor M.P. George Wigg he unfolded a tale, as Wilson described it in the Commons, that “took the lid off a corner of the London underworld—vice and dope, marijuana, blackmail and counter-blackmail, violence, petty crime.” Added Wilson gratuitously: “If Ward’s statement had been published as a fiction paperback in America, it would have seemed overdrawn and beyond belief.”*

Wilson sent an account of the Ward-Wigg conversation to Macmillan, who turned it over to the “appropriate authorities,” who found nothing disturbing in it. Prodded further, Macmillan wrote Wilson: “There seems to be nothing in the papers you sent which requires me to take any action.”

Even after Ward sent Wilson, the Home Secretary and the entire British press a letter announcing that Profumo had lied to the House of Commons, the disclosure “did not seem to make any impression” on the Prime Minister. While ordering the Lord Chancellor to investigate Ward’s charges, Macmillan assured Wilson he was confident nonetheless that the security question had been “fully and efficiently watched”—although, as Wilson accurately pointed out, MI-5 men apparently knew nothing about Christine until they read about her in the papers.

As the dismal facts and alibis tumbled out in the Commons, the adulation and affection the Tories had once bestowed on “Macwonder” turned almost visibly to a kind of stupefied pity. At the end of his defense, Macmillan pleaded: “I am entitled to the sympathetic understanding and confidence of the House and of the country.” But from the Tory benches, as he sat down, came a sound that was more sigh than cheer. By twos and threes, perturbed backbenchers went out to argue in the lobbies while several Tory speakers caustically condemned the Prime Minister. Macmillan rose and with bowed head left the chamber.

Who Next? Some angry Tories felt that Macmillan should resign at once, but at a backbenchers’ meeting the view prevailed that, as one Cabinet minister put it, “the country must not get the feeling that he is being hounded out because of Christine Keeler. Our party would never recover from that.”

The present consensus is that Macmillan will be allowed to retire rather than to resign, some time this summer or fall. In perspective, he may well remain one of the most successful Prime Ministers in Tory history, but few Conservatives want him in command of their next election campaign; even pre-Profumo, the party had been in bad trouble over defense muddles, Britain’s failure to enter the Common Market, and above all Macmillan’s stop-and-go fiscal policies and a sluggish economy.

Although Macmillan has systematically eliminated rivals by giving them thankless tasks or sacking them, the Tories have a number of highly plausible successors. Currently in the lead (Daily Express odds: 4-7) is Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, who is youthful (46) and ready to take credit for a predicted economic spurt this summer. He is also happily married, a particularly useful qualification right now. Next are Deputy Prime Minister “Rab” Butler (2-1), who has all the necessary experience, but at 60 may have been around too long; and Lord Hailsham, bellicose, blimpish Science Minister, 55, whose hopes faded rapidly when the government said that its lords reform bill, which would permit him to sit in the Commons, would not be introduced this summer. Ted Heath, 46, is generally ruled out because he is associated with the Common Market failure, and besides, he is a bachelor.

What Next? Any one of these Tories could give Labor a good fight in the next election, which does not have to be held till the fall of 1964. But Laborites feel themselves closer to power than they have at any time in the last dozen years. At week’s end Harold Wilson returned to the attack in the Commons, demanding an investigation of the Profumo case by a parliamentary select committee with sweeping powers. The more limited judicial inquiry proposed by Macmillan, cried Wilson, was merely “a cover-up,” because, without authority to compel proof or the attendance of witnesses, it would have to collect evidence “from some of the most unmitigated liars in this country.”

Were there any more revelations to come? Wilson wanted to know. Nothing he knew of right now, said Macmillan, but he added: “I have heard terrible things said of all sorts of people.” The most authoritative source of all, Christine herself, volunteered: “Apart from those I have already mentioned in my story, I do not know and have not met any ministers.”

Macmillan recovered his composure. “They have deeply wounded me,” he told a Tory rally, adding: “It will not break my spirit.” But the House still remembered the words of Tory Rebel Nigel Birch, who during the big debate had quoted Browning’s The Lost Leader at Harold Macmillan:

Let him never come back to us!

There would be doubt, hesitation and pain.

Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight.

Never glad confident morning again!

* Where last week he was expelled from the Communist Party, dismissed from the intelligence service, and sent to a mental hospital. * When John Vassall, a homosexual Admiralty clerk, was convicted last October of spying for the Russians, Macmillan summarily fired the clerk’s superior, Thomas Galbraith, who had written the clerk some letters starting “My dear Vassall.” Galbraith was later wholly exonerated. * Though possibly not in Britain, where Tropic of Cancer has been a bestseller for months and the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover has sold 3,500,000 paperback copies.