In London in 1963 sex and espionage were two fashionable subjects. Sex was still a matter associated with scandal in a society that was beginning to try to free itself from the still prevailing taboos; and in terms of espionage, the scandals of the defection to Moscow of the members of the Cambridge Circle who had brought to the USSR the main secrets of British espionage since the Second World War were very recent.
For this reason, the stage was set to give absolute prominence to an affair in which sex and espionage went hand in hand. If to both factors it was added that the protagonist of the story was a member of the British parliament and government, the scandal was irresistible for public opinion.
In 1963, after a dedicated career of service to his country on the battlefield and in parliament, John Profumo held the position of Secretary of War. Married with children and well liked by his constituents in Stratford-upon-Avon, Profumo had a little secret, however. In 1961, at a party given by Lord Astor at his Backinghamshire estate, he had met a beautiful and attractive young prostitute named Christine Keeler and the two had become lovers for a short time.
The affair would probably have gone unnoticed had it not been for a dark incident in late 1962, in which Keeler had been shot several times in his Marylebone flat by one of her lovers, a Caribbean immigrant named Johnny Edgecombe. When he was brought to trial, Keeler was evidently the main witness to the crime.
However, the young woman had disappeared from the country and little by little the rumor began to spread that it had been at the request of a member of the government who wanted to avoid compromising questions in the trial about another of Keeler's lovers, a naval attache from the Soviet embassy named Eugene Ivanov, closely associated with Keeler's pimp, Stephen Ward. The implications of this were sensational, as rumors began to spread that Keeler had passed on to Ivanov, a Soviet agent, the bedroom secrets entrusted to him by Profumo.
Ward and Ivanov were old acquaintances of the British intelligence services, MI5, which had both subjects under surveillance, but had refused to investigate their relationship with Profumo through Keeler, understanding that it was a matter of a purely sexual nature and that did not threaten national security. In any case, Profumo was warned of the intimate relationship between Ward and Ivanov and, alarmed, ended his relationship with Keeler in a letter in which he called her "my dear".
On 21 March 1963, in a session of the House of Commons, Labor MP George Wigg loudly raised the question that had long been the talk of the capital's political gossips, pointing out that it was necessary to know when a member of the government whose behavior was being the subject of various rumours, was going to confirm or deny them. Profumo was forced to face the next day in Parliament and Prime Minister McMillan and denied having any relationship with Christine Keeler, whom he only knew from having met at social events but never in private, as well as with Ivanoff; he also denied that he had told Keeler any state secrets that had reached the Russians through her mistress at the Soviet embassy.
But McMillan, as much as he wanted to believe Profumo, had received a copy of the letter in which Profumo called Keeler "dear." The pressure on the Secretary of War became more and more insistent. When Keeler returned to England from Spain where she had settled, she was attacked by another of her mistresses and her trial was scheduled for June. It was more than foreseeable that Christine's private life and, with it, the name John Profumo would be the subject of debate at trial.
Thus, on June 4, John Profumo sent a letter to Prime Minister McMillan announcing his resignation as Secretary of War and as a member of Parliament, acknowledging that he lied in his previous statement in March in which he denied having had a relationship with Keeler and that this could lead to a breach in national security. The next day McMillan accepted the resignation and gave a copy of the letter to the press, which was baited with Profumo under the headline "Lied". It was no longer a question of whether there had been a transmission of secrets to the Soviet side (which in reality was not proven) but of a lie to the government and parliament, something that in British democracy supposes the political death sentence for which the commits, in this case for John Profumo.
The implications of the Profumo case marked the beginning of a difficult moment in relations between the British secret services and their American allies… but that is another story.