Free An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines Page A

osteopath Stephen Ward – watched couples performing on a bed. Ward, the scapegoat of the Profumo Affair, spent the night before his show trial opened at the Old Bailey in a friend’s flat in Montagu Square: tabloid newspapers blared that he slept in blue silk pyjamas with a pink curtain in a gilt frame behind the bed. This, indeed, was soft living. Another block to the south-east was Portman Square, where Paul Raymond of Raymond’s Revuebar bought the penthouse which he shared with the glamour model Fiona Richmond. Ringo Starr, whom Raymond employed as his interior decorator, rewarded him with a panoply of James Bond gadgets and parvenu glitziness.
    At the time of her temporary disappearance in March 1963, Christine Keeler lived at Flat 164, Park West, Edgware Road, three minutes’ walk from Bryanston Mews West, and a minute further from Montagu Mews West. For a time my father kept a leggy brunette in a flat in Park West. He took me there once in 1963, bounding up to the front door, which he opened with a flourish of his key chain. I asked him why he had a key to the woman’s flat. ‘I have a key,’ he replied with immense satisfaction, ‘that opens every door in London.’ He meant money. The Edgware Road flat was my induction into sexual deception, duplicitous lives and double standards. I have been standing on tiptoes, trying to peer into secret compartments, ever since.
    The irritability of London motoring is a misery that I remember too well. My father bought his first car before driving tests had been devised. His school of motoring was Toad of Toad Hall’s. His spiritual home was the fast lane: he never felt more himself than when he was behind a steering wheel with his foot hard on the accelerator. As a Christmas treat for 1959, just after the M1 motorway had opened, he took me for a quick run north from Watford, which I believe may have turned into a dashing ‘fun-drive’ all the way to Rugby and back. Certainly I recall him saying on the interminable return journey that he would write to the Minister of Transport to complain that trees had been left standing beside the motorway, and might cast dangerous shadows by moonlight. He liked high-velocity travel to lay waste to the landscape.
    The speed limit of seventy miles per hour was introduced as a temporary measure in 1965 to cope with enthusiasts like my father. Every few months he would take me to Jack Barclay’s car showroom in Berkeley Square. The salesmen were thin men with thin moustaches, sharp suits and sharper eyes. They stood apart from one another, idling by the polished bonnets and winged mascots, but were swift and implacable as they headed for their prey when a customer stepped inside the plate-glass windows: lone sharks, one might say. Sometimes my father drove a Bentley, sometimes a black Alvis. One thing all his cars had in common was no wing-mirrors. Wing-mirrors, my father often told me, spoilt the line of a car. They were effeminate. A good driver, a real man, did not need to look behind him. This creed led to several accidents, many altercations and, for me, one Copernican moment of political revelation.
    On a Saturday during the summer after Miss Groom sent me to be beaten, and Mr Wilcox denounced the sadism of James Bond, and Mrs Soskin deplored the breakdown of Public Morals, my father sped me to Park Lane. It was August 1964, and we were in a black Alvis with the hood down. A year earlier workmen had finished converting the sedate old carriage road of Park Lane into a dual carriageway with four lanes on both sides. Old avenues of trees were felled, the eastern meadows of Hyde Park put under macadamised tar, and concrete burrows were excavated so that Mayfair businessmen could park their Jaguars in strip-lit subterranean hideaways. Thinking of Hollywood rather than Paris, Whitehall officials had wanted to foist the name of Park Lane Boulevard as a cosmetic to cover the scars of their vandalism. My father loved the swift new Park