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

Lane as a reminder that England was finished with slowcoaches.
    There were other signs of change. Sir Philip Sassoon’s great house overlooking the park had lately been torn down, and replaced by a monstrosity that housed the Playboy Club. The developer of the site, Jack Cotton, who lived on Park Lane himself, had, in a show of braggadocio, paid Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus architect, to advise on the redevelopment. Gropius’s inspiration, with which London was learning to live, was to assert the unyielding modernity of the new building by cladding it in concrete rather than the original plan of Portland stone.
    We stopped at the Hilton hotel. Its thirty storeys and jutting gimcrack modernity had been opposed at planning stage by ‘stick-in-the-muds’ whom my father had rejoiced to see quashed. The hotel towered over the rest of Park Lane, and could be seen in its unwieldy disproportions from the far end of Kensington Gardens. It was the first building in London to overlook the gardens of Buckingham Palace, and this objection, too, had been quelled to my father’s pleasure. (Thirty years later I was to read the minutes of the Cabinet meeting at which Harold Macmillan’s government endorsed this encroachment on the Queen’s privacy: the justification given was that American holiday-trippers staying in the Hilton would bring badly needed dollars to revitalise the ailing English economy.) The site had belonged until 1956 to an old banking family, the Abel-Smiths, who had a mortgage on it. This was a period when debt frightened most people as a weir would scare steady ferrymen, but spurred a bold minority rather as the wide oceans excited fearless privateers. The Abel-Smiths had therefore sold their plot for £550,000 to a property developer called Charles Clore, who bedded Keeler, as it happens. Clore, who borrowed heavily, spent another £5 million turning the site into the Hilton. In the hotel my father and I went to the American coffee shop: he gulped scalding black coffee while I spooned my way through a banana split or knickerbocker glory. I cannot imagine why we were there: perhaps a rival for the brunette was in the offing.
    Afterwards, back on wheels, the Hilton behind us, my father stopped his car outside a large, abandoned house of dilapidated stucco on the corner of Hertford Street and Old Park Lane. It was awaiting demolition, he explained. Londonderry House, he added, had belonged to a proud, stupid family who had been friends of Hitler, but the last lord had been a helpless drunk who had died young. Now their day was done, the old house where prime ministers once dawdled on the marble stairs had been sold and was to be torn down. Londonderry House would be smashed for good. It represented a world that impeded progress. My father told me that another hotel for Americans was planned for this site next to the Hilton. It was glorious what competition was going to do. It was marvellous what future prosperity was promised to those who were quick to snatch their chances.
    Then my father swung the car round into a full U-turn to head back to Park Lane: no unmanly glances back over the shoulder, no effeminate wing-mirrors to look in, just my father’s iron resolve as he pulled out. There followed an almighty screech of brakes, a squeal of tyres, and the sound of a horn held down hard. A black taxi cab behind us had made an emergency halt. As we completed the U-turn and passed the stationary taxi, my father stopped, looked at its driver and gave a harsh, defiant laugh: he was proud of having a chuckle that made people lose their temper or, if they were already angry, re-double their rage. The taxi driver was furious, temporarily powerless, but not, he reminded us, permanently disempowered. As my father drove off chortling, his victim shouted after him the deadly threat: ‘Wait until October!’
    Everyone knew there was going to be a general election in October. ‘A Labour voter,’ my father said witheringly. He