So wrote Liesl Schillinger in this past weekend’s New York Times Book Review (June 5). Like J. Edgar Hoover in a blue evening gown, the notion that the Profumo affair “brought down” the British government of the day is one of those urban myths of journalism that show no signs of going away. Which is no surprise, really, since they constitute a mythology that journalists like to believe.
The Hoover example is a case in point. The press, in Hoover’s time and ours, was generally hostile to the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—who never married and whose only close, enduring friendship was with his FBI colleague, Clyde Tolson. The idea that the severely buttoned-down Hoover was a secret cross-dresser—for which there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever—is too delicious for most journalists to resist.
So, too, is the idea that the starchy Conservative government of Harold Macmillan was toppled by a push from a London party girl who liked to swim naked in the pool at Cliveden. It is true that the Macmillan government was politically weakened by the spring of 1963, when the Profumo scandal broke; but its weakness derived from its budgetary policies and the standard habit of Tory governments to squabble among themselves. The scandal did lead to Profumo’s resignation from his sub-cabinet post, and provided a riotous few months of charges and tabloid headlines and ancillary court cases involving the party girl in question (Christine Keeler) and assorted characters from Britain’s pre-Beatles demi-monde.
But by the end of the summer, the story had exhausted itself, and the official inquiry conducted by a prominent judge put the “scandal” in some perspective and largely exonerated the Macmillan government. Macmillan weathered the storm politically, and a few months later in October 1963, sent word to the Tory conference, then meeting in Blackpool, that he would lead the Conservative party in the next year’s general election.
Almost immediately, however, the 69-year-old Macmillan underwent an emergency operation for prostate cancer in London—and believing that his health was worse than it was, resigned as prime minister. In the midst of the Tory conference, his successor, the Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home, was chosen from a wide field of candidates in an atmosphere of high drama and excitement.
So while it is fair to say that the Profumo scandal did Harold Macmillan some political harm, it did not bring his government down—and in the fullness of time, might well have done the Conservative Party some good. For when the 1964 general election took place, after 13 long years of Tory government, Labour just scraped into power with a bare majority of four seats in the House of Commons.
