An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines: review If sexual intercourse began in 1963, as Philip Larkin famously maintained, much of the credit must go to John Profumo, womanising war minister in Harold Macmillan's cabinet, and Christine Keeler, sometime bare-breasted showgirl in Murray's Soho cabaret. In truth theirs was a fleeting liaison. But rumours spread that Profumo "shared her favours" with the Russian naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, whom he had met at a louche party given by Keeler's Svengali, the fashionable osteopath Dr Stephen Ward, at the cottage in the grounds of Cliveden lent to him by Lord Astor. Profumo assured the Commons that there was no impropriety in his relationship with Keeler. But he was soon obliged to confess and resign. Ward, who was prosecuted for living off immoral earnings and pilloried as a "filthy fellow," committed suicide. The Profumo imbroglio suggested that the British fish stank from the head down and that pieties from on high were humbug. And it must be said that few of Davenport-Hines's dramatis personae emerge from the story with much credit. Humiliated by his wife's unabashed adultery with Lord Boothby, Macmillan was unnerved by the crisis. The self-righteous Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, was determined to nail Ward as the incarnation of vice, even though Keeler had actually been living off his earnings. Other Tories were equally vituperative, nicknaming Profumo, on account of his Italian antecedents, "the Head Waiter." The leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, knew that Keeler (who probably never went to bed with Ivanov) posed no threat to national security but, at a time of Cold War spy fever, he ruthlessly exploited the issue. In this he was abetted by Dick Crossman, Barbara Castle and Colonel George Wigg, whom Davenport-Hines identifies as "a suspicious, slippery, vindictive man with the mentality of a police grass." Despite their flagrant opportunism, they had some success in portraying the Conservatives as decadent, caste-ridden amateurs. This was also the message of the Daily Mirror, as directed by Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp. They peddled populism but aped the aristocracy, imposing an elaborate system of privileges to denote gradations of status in their offices. Even less trustworthy was the News of the World, which invented stories about naked bathing romps at Cliveden and Ward leading Keeler around London on a dog-leash. Responding to Home Office pressure, the police threatened witnesses, forced Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies to commit perjury and framed Ward for a crime of which he was innocent. When the chief inspector in charge of the investigation died three years later he was found to possess the huge sum of £30,000. Other unsavoury characters abound in this rogues" gallery, among them the rapacious tycoon Charles Clore and the vicious slum landlord Peter Rachman. Of the latter Keeler memorably said that sex to him was like cleaning his teeth, and "I was the toothpaste." Yet even Rachman had a saving grace: he let rooms to black people at a time when it was hard for them to find accommodation. Davenport-Hines awards the palm of nastiness to Lord Denning, whose prejudices included an aversion to mixed-race juries. Denning's bestselling report on the Profumo affair was a disgraceful investigation, slipshod, sensational and "awash with the spite of a lascivious, conceited old man." Such trenchant verdicts make this book a delight. An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines 416pp, Harper Press, t £18