The year that was.(THE STRAGGLER)(John Profumo)

NEWS of the death of Jack Profumo the other day had the same effect on me as the scent of a cookie famously had on one of Marcel Proust's characters. The years fell away, and I was, in imagination, back in the mother country at the time of the Profumo scandal. "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three," observed Philip Larkin. I don't know about that; but for early British Boomers like myself, a great many other things began in or about that year.

Politics, for example. I had been aware of politics in childhood, but only as a sort of incomprehensible game that adults played. National elections had appeared to me a matter of cars going busily back and forth in our street, each car identifying its party affiliation by either a red or a blue window sticker. We did not often see so many cars, since no one in our street owned one and the street itself led nowhere. These Election Day vehicles belonged to party supporters from better-off neighborhoods. They made themselves available to ferry voters to the polls. We kids sat on our front walls like so many NASCAR fans, watching the cars race to and fro, cheering our parents' party and hissing at the other. My father, who loathed trade unions and Communists, looked down on the colored races, and thought the country would go better if it were run by a board of successful businessmen, was of course a Labour party voter, and so I cheered the red-stickered cars and hissed at the blues. (This was before the colors got reversed by a faulty computer program, or its history-illiterate programmer, in the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign.)

By 1963, the year I left home to go to university in London, I had attained a higher level of understanding. Something was rotten in the state of Britain, I perceived, and I felt pretty sure I knew where the problem lay. Too much power was in the hands of old-school-tie cliques, of the wealthy and privileged, of the entrenched upper classes, of Throne and Altar. The nation needed something brisker, more up-to-date, more efficient, less cobwebbed and tradition-bound. It was so obvious! I was, in short, a prototype Tony Blair: I believed that Britain needed re-branding.

The Profumo scandal seemed to validate all that. Here were the smug, corrupt elites in all their decadence. The roots of the scandal went back two years, to the moment in the summer of 1961 when a 19-year-old showgirl named Christine Keeler had emerged naked from the pool at Lord Astor's country house into the gaze of Jack Profumo, an old-school-tie type who held the splendid, now alas defunct, title of Secretary of State for War. Profumo was smitten, and an affair ensued. Unfortunately one of the other names on Ms. Keeler's dance card was Eugene Ivanov, an attache at the Soviet embassy. British Military Intelligence got wind of both affairs and warned Profumo to stop seeing Ms. Keeler. Profumo dutifully stopped. Rumors gradually leaked out, however, and Profumo spent the second quarter of 1963 insisting to his government colleagues and to the House of Commons that there had been no affair. At last he confessed his lie and resigned from public life; ...