I owe my sex education to Christine Keeler. Not directly of course: I was eleven years old at the time the Profumo scandal convulsed Britain in 1963.

These women knew how to do a sex scandal. Christine Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice Davies leaving Old Bailey

I was on a fishing holiday with my father, in a big house in the north of Scotland shared with two other families, including several teenage boys and girls.

In between tying flies and tramping across the heather, everyone – the adults and the teenagers – seemed to have only one topic of conversation, and Christine Keeler was it.

My seven-year-old sister and I were the only ones unable to keep up. I remember chiefly the frustration of hearing jokes and not being able to understand the punchlines.

But over the course of a week, and especially later when we got back to London and I was able to sneak a look at the newspapers, I started to get the gist.

Keeler was a call-girl. Once I’d worked out what that meant, I could start to piece together the rest. She’d been sleeping with a man called John Profumo. He was the Secretary of State for War in the Conservative Government of Harold Macmillan.

But Christine had also been sleeping with the Soviet military attache in London, Yevgeny Ivanov. Was he using her to prise Britain’s nuclear secrets out of the Minister as pillow-talk?

The possibility was high in the minds of Britain’s security agency MI5. The affair led to the suicide of Christine Keeler’s friend, and society pimp, Stephen Ward.

He died in St Stephen’s Hospital in London’s Fulham Road: it was at the end of our street, and I remember seeing the pack of Fleet Street reporters and photographers gathered outside.

But the scandal also claimed the political career of Mr Profumo – who lived out the rest of his life as a charity worker – and probably contributed to the illness and resignation of the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, later in the year.

Now that’s a political sex scandal.

Even in British politics, where repressed sexuality has been a feature of politics as long as there have been expensive boys’ boarding-schools, there has never quite been anything to match it. Yes, there was Lord Lambton, a junior Defence Minister caught sleeping with prostitutes and forced to resign in 1973.

The Thorpe Affair was admittedly spectacular: the leader of the Liberal Party. Jeremy Thorpe, accused of hiring a hit-man to shoot his homosexual lover Norman Scott. But, as they say ‘nothing was ever proved’:  a result which Peter Cook hilariously blamed on the judge’s summing-up.

If you think Peter Cook’s impersonation of a judge far-fetched, look no farther than the actual summing-up in the case of Jeffrey Archer, novelist and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, vs The Daily Star, which had accused him of paying a prostitute to go abroad (to silence her). The judge is instructing the jury on the credibility of Mr Archer’s wife:

“Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?”

And when considering Archer himself:

“Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?”

Archer won 500,000 pounds in damages: but twelve years later, he was proved to have perjured himself in the case, and sent to jail.

David Mellor was a Minister in John Major’s Government who had an affair with an actress. Er, that’s it ... except that he was the minister who had earlier told the press that they were “drinking in the Last Chance Saloon”, and that the actress’ press agent told the said press that Mellor made love wearing his Chelsea football strip. This was subsequently revealed to be a complete fabrication.

The tragicomedy continues with the tale of Stephen Milligan, another Major Government Minister. He was a former journalist, like me a former Brussels correspondent; one mutual friend once told me Milligan was the cleverest person he ever met. Not clever enough, however, to avoid death by auto-erotic asphyxiation, dressed in women’s stockings, tied up with bondage gear, an orange in his mouth and with a black plastic bag over his head.

It must be obvious by now what I’ve been leading up to.

Let me say that I do not know Mike Rann, beyond having interviewed him once or twice from our Adelaide studio, and I do not live in South Australia. I have no vested interest.

So when I say that I’m finding it difficult to understand why so many in that State are so fixated on the question of whether a man, single at the time, had an alleged affair with a woman who has never alleged that she was either paid or coerced, I am not pleading his side of the story.

Since Mr Rann has already declared his intention to sue for defamation, I don’t propose to discuss the rights and wrongs of the case; but I also doubt very much whether I should in any case.

The lessons I thought I’d learned as a London correspondent, that an affair becomes a scandal, and thus newsworthy, if it involves national security, or hypocrisy, or sexual shenanigans by someone who takes a high moral stance on sexual matters, just don’t seem to have applied here.

In my view, this isn’t a political scandal, it’s a media one. Australian journalists have tended to leave politicians’ private lives alone in the past.

They left Curtin and Chifley alone, and plenty of more recent political leaders have had the benefit of versions of the ‘rules’ I outlined above.

The rule may end after death - the headline “BILLY SNEDDEN DIED ON THE JOB” being a good example – but most political indiscretions get left alone.

I’ve always suspected that it was partly because of the libel laws, but also because few of us journalists have lived lives of saintly virtue, and people in glass houses ...

But honestly, if no laws have been breached, if there’s no hypocritical moralising in the politician’s background, and there’s no security implication, why is it any of our business? Shouldn’t we be judging our politicians on how they actually govern when we’ve elected them to do so?

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10 comments

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    • Bob H says:

      07:56am | 25/11/09

      Politicians are notoriously sexual - I am sure we only get the stories that are unstoppable.  Mr Rann did a great disservice to South Australia and should have been attending to some quality poli-groupie babes, which are numerous, otherwise the notion of “its good to be the king”  is pretty hollow.

    • delperro says:

      08:00am | 25/11/09

      First comment FTW.

      Rann’s denial was best covered by Penberthy. Plausible deniability.

    • Nathman says:

      09:32am | 25/11/09

      Hear hear! (I think that’s the right spelling…) Well written.

    • Liz says:

      09:33am | 25/11/09

      Look at it this way folks…who goes for defamation if it’s true? There is much more to this than the usual media beat up..$100,000 for starters,an angry husband and a disempowered woman who is possibly a fantasist or been manipulated in a way she may one day regret.Possibly,maybe and we’ll see.

    • Stretch says:

      12:06pm | 25/11/09

      OMG, a South Australian premier stands accused of having sex with a woman - how standards have fallen! Don Dunstan would never have been accused of this.

    • Julia says:

      01:28pm | 25/11/09

      First, it’s great that there’s finally a definition of what constitutes a political sex scandal. But should we add something about costing the taxpayer? I mean, if the fornicator is using parliamentary entitlements to pay for another house for a mistress or gigolo, then that should be included.

      Personally I think any MP who’s ever stuck his nose into the business of the electorate, eg voting for a bill that restricts the rights of people with certain preferences with regards to males/females, then they should be exposed and asked to resign. Particularly if they’ve made huge gains in their electorate because of their anti-homosexual or pro-family stance.

      That said, the Lewinsky matter was gosh darned good reading. And I think that’s because there were some very very good journalists covering a very very seedy story.

      Was it John Brown who’s wife left her undies in the out tray?

    • John A Neve says:

      02:59pm | 25/11/09

      Julia @ 1328hrs.

      Sorry Julia, but I think you have it all wrong. The undies were left in the IN tray.

    • H of SA says:

      03:44pm | 25/11/09

      Spot on Mr. Calvin. The real story is that the Advertiser has gotten even lower in standard than we thought. It’s pretty much a gossip magazine on cheaper paper. We aren’t far off having page 3 girls.

    • Stefano says:

      07:58pm | 25/11/09

      As a youngster of 15 or so, when I saw pictures of Randy Mice Davies and understood that you could have sex with her for a price, I went out and got an after-school job and saved my money like buggery, just in case she came to Oz and was at a bit of a loose end. She kept me awake and then rocked me to sleep for ages.

      And you’re right, that was a fair dinkum scandal. Unlike the wimpish, equivocating Clinton, the Poms really knew how to let it hang out and how to take their medicine.

    • Dimi says:

      08:43pm | 07/02/12

      Brian,You ask how “we” can ask for alicuntabicoty. Did I miss something, or isn’t there an ongoing gov’t investigation? If alicuntabicoty/restitution belongs to current AA staff, then that is where the investigation will lead. Ditto for if it lands at Cohen’s doorstep, or perhaps the whole thing isn’t actually criminal. Accountability is what our legal system is supposed to enforce, not a blogger.

 

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