Things Were Never the Same Again

It was, in its peculiarly British way, our first modern sex scandal, the one where nudges and winks between the lines on page three of the News of the World suddenly took over front pages everywhere.

Consider: naked romps in the pool at Cliveden, pretty young call girls named Mandy and Christine peddling their wares and wisecracks, loose lords and society hangers-on a’fornicating, a Conservative war minister married to a beautiful film star playing fast and loose and (haplessly) sharing Miss Keeler’s favors with a Russian military officer ... plus the all-purpose peg of lies to parliament. Who could ask for anything more?

The public interest, in every sense of the word, has seldom been more evident or more copiously served - with print taking the lead because the BBC of 1963 was a starchy, cautious follower of events.

No wonder that the tale we didn’t think of as Profumogate until much, much later set a new benchmark for postwar scandal.

No wonder that investigative reporters on red-top tabloids have striven vainly ever since to match its seedy majesty. Things were never the same again after this affair - and, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have observed, "Well, they couldn’t be, could they?"

But the impact, I think, went rather deeper than that in three precise ways.

One - because newspaper sales boomed amid during these Tory ides of March, up by tens of thousands in a trice - was Fleet Street’s realization that it could take on and the threat of mass TV by going into areas where Lord Reith’s boys couldn’t easily follow.

And so one upmarket bonk led to bonks by the million, sustaining the tabloids for decades until satellite television could bonk and strip in return.

Another repercussion was just as jolting and more immediate. Who’d known about the story as it developed? Who’d been in charge of events?

The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, looked a prize chump. He’d trusted and been betrayed. He’d lost his grip. He was old and far from super.

And soon - by that autumn - he lost his job, too. You couldn’t be out of touch with such scandal, you couldn’t be a gentlemen amongst these players.

The then editor of the Guardian, still working from Manchester most of the time, resolved sadly to move to London himself. London was where the action was.

And then there were the politicians, the MPs and the ministers. If one pretty minor Tory minister could cause all this grief, then what about the rest of them?
If this was the "ruling class", then could we all have a seat to spy on them below stairs?

Deference turned to cynicism overnight. The prospect of a new PM called the Earl of Home couldn’t put old Britain back together again.

Harold Wilson thickened his vowels and put on his raincoat. Times, like partners in the Cliveden deep end, were changing.