Ward of court

David Sexton

AN AFFAIR OF STATE: THE PROFUMO CASE AND THE FRAMING OF STEPHEN WARD by Philip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy

Cape, £12.95

HONEYTRAP: THE SECRET WORLDS OF STEPHEN WARD by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.95

To the left, An Affair of State, on which the Sunday Times claims to have spent £850,000. To the right, Honeytrap, on which the Mail on Sunday has definitely splashed £100,000. In the middle, the corpse of Stephen Ward. On the sidelines, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies at rather less — about £15 a time in the early Sixties.

• Both of these Profumo books are aimed at exploiting the new spy paranoia, as well as feeding the permanent appetite for sexy details. Both are based on newly-released FBI files and interviews with the more amenable survivors of the affair. Both come to the same conclusions.

They assert that Stephen Ward had indeed been recruited by MI5, as he claimed at the time, and that he was later ditched by the service when things went wrong. They both contend that his trial was a fix-up, by the police, by the judiciary and by somebody behind the scenes.

They are not both, however, equally good. An Affair of State is the nadir of the Insight (or, as it is properly known, Hind- sight) style — by Balzac out of a thousand `At hacks. Its sentences all go like this: At one o'clock on the afternoon of Friday, 14 December 1962, a minicab drew up outside Ward's flat at 17 Wimpole Mews, Marylebone, and Johnny Edgecombe got out.'

This sort of gratuitous circumstantiality (exactly one o'clock?) and laboured se- quencing (he astutely got out after it had drawn up, you see) assumes the existence of an absurd degree of concern in the reader. It also attempts to browbeat him into belief — not only into believing that this particular incident has been accurately and insightfully described, but into credit- ing the authors' overall truthfulness too. If they've got it right about how to dismount from a cab, then surely they've got MI5 sussed too.

It is a similar wish to create an aura of authoritativeness that must explain why these books invariably boast more than one writer. Just how, for heaven's sake, do two people write a book? Two right hands on the keyboard? One investigative hand on the shoulder or knee? Taking it in turns to pour the drinks? One to stay sober at all times? I think not. Probably only an Insight team could tell us. Obviously we are supposed to think that this plurally-authored, fact-jammed lecture is descending to us, mysteriously, infall- ibly, from a realm of higher knowledge. However, at this length the bluff induces not attentive enthralment but carefree coma. An Affair of State is unreadable, like a computer manual, despite being so much about sex.

One can sometimes wade bravely through duff writing to get at new facts, but there are few here. Ward's claim that he was under MI5 instruction was substanti- ated by Nigel West in 1982. That the trial was unfair was demonstrated by Ludovic Kennedy 20 years ago. Although expand- ing a bit on what was previously known, An Affair of State has developed its case much less than Honeytrap.

It is also more timid about naming names. The authors make a great fuss about identifying the 'Man in the Mask' who was supposed to have waited on a high- class dinner-party wearing little else. Turn- ing eagerly to the relevant section one finds this weedy, pompous sentence. 'We have established that the man in the mask was not one of the famous people it was rumoured to be at the time, but an unimportant Yorkshire businessman' (as if somehow the adjectives were mutually confirmatory).

`Woods', the MI5 officer who recruited Ward, is weakly allowed his pseudonym, despite the fact that H. Montgomery Hyde had already named him in his 'Tangled Web' sex scandal book last year. In Honeytrap he is firmly fingered as Mr Keith Wagstaff, now retired to the south coast.

Knightley and Kennedy try to bulk out their book with the news that Macmillan knew Profumo was lying when he made his famous Commons statement. This has always been suspected and it is still not proven. Both combos offer the same evi- dence for it: information from the FBI files that an American friend of Ward's called Corbally told the American ambassador about the Profumo-Keeler liaison, and that the ambassador then told Macmillan, two months before Profumo's speech. The problem with this as proof is that, if Macmillan truly did not believe the rumours later, why should he have be- lieved them earlier?

The way Macmillan commented on Pro- fumo's denial in his autobiography does suggest that he had guessed the truth. 'This categorical statement in my eyes settled the matter', he wrote. It sounds like a practical calculation: not the same as saying he believed him. Summers and Dorril blandly hint that Macmillan played the ostrich. It is all that can be said.

Another 'revelation' from the FBI files is the supposed involvement of the Kennedy clan. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was greatly exercised by the Profumo affair, since he believed there to be a worldwide KGB call-girl and blackmail operation. Naturally he was supplied with all sorts of exciting material on goings-on in London by his agents. This is what has now been served up. '

One of the less truthful call-girls on the edges of the affair, Mariella Novotny, claimed to have serviced JFK at a New York party in 1961. Not satisfied with this, both teams have made valiant efforts to tie in the stars of the affair, despite geog- raphical difficulties.

Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keel- er visited New York for a week in July 1982. An Affair of State tells us gleefully that when the scandal blew up, Robert Kennedy, aware of his brother's propen- sities, actually asked Hoover to check whether, having been within continental range, they might not have slept with him. Though it might have seemed simpler just to have asked the man himself, 'John F. Kennedy's sexual appetite was so prodi- gious and so indiscriminate that he would not have been able to remember', the authors affirm. It is a pretty thought anyway.

Summers and Dorril do their best on the other side of the Atlantic. Kennedy visited England in 1961. He had a bad back. Ward was an osteopath. Bingo. He would have been the 'natural choice' to treat the President. You have to admire this, in a way.

The Sunday Times book, which contains about enough material for a feature article, has been patiently padded out by synthesis- ing and paraphrasing the immense amount of material already in print on the affair.

Ludovic Kennedy arcanely described the entrance of the judge at Ward's trial like this: 'He came billowing in like a small Dutch schuyt under a full spread of canvas, grey and black and scarlet'. Kennedy and Knightley meld their vocabularies to turn out this: 'He seemed almost lost in his billowing grey, scarlet and black robes of office'. Ludovic Kennedy's description of Ward as 'dressed in a sober heather- mixture suit' is collaboratively reworked to `soberly dressed in a heather mixture suit'.

Some of this rehashing is not even accurately done. Keeler wrote of one of her last meetings with Ward, when the investigation was already under way: `Throughout the evening I was aware things were different between Stephen and myself now . . . there was a lack of trust between us that could not be restored.' This erroneously emerges as Ward's perception. 'Throughout the evening he sensed that their relationship had changed and that there was now a lack of trust that could not be restored.' Of the making of books there is no end, if they are made like this.

One reason for the mistake is that Knightley and Kennedy are concerned to give Ward's version always. He is por- trayed as a martyred saint, a super chap, fit for the Lifestyle section. Those Cliveden parties?

We can picture him on a typical Saturday at his cottage, deeply engrossed in his garden- ing . . suddenly realising the time and making a desperate dash to clean up and change into his dinner-jacket in time to go to a formal dinner with the Astors. We can see him the following day, again in his old clothes, greeting the assortment of guests arriving from London, this one bringing a few bottles of wine, that one a leg of lamb, another a pound of cheese, or some fruit, chocolates, or tins of soup. And then Sunday lunch, outdoors if it was fine, with everyone sitting around with plates on their laps, talk flowing freely.. . .

We can? Thanks, I suppose.

Summers and Dorril have produced a much more intriguing book by not roman- ticising Ward but still protesting his inno- cence of the charges on which he was tried. They have also thrown in every morsel of scandal they can get their mitts on. What else are books like this for?

Many fine paragraphs begin 'True or not . . .' and, after a bit of hair-raising, conclude 'There is nothing especially implausible about this.' They have got hold of two sources, derided by the opposition, in the form of Mr Hod Dibden, 82, and a manuscript by his late wife, Mariella Novotny, and have relayed some wonder- ful scandal from them. The Man. in the Mask? The Honourable Anthony Asquith. Mr Dibden 'smiled secretively' when this was suggested, so it must have been.

Some repulsive people are described. Abortionist Teddy Sugden kept snakes in his surgery and liked his female compan- ions to simulate sex with them. Totally new characters are introduced, including another Ward girl called Suzy Chang — 'a figure to make any man take a deep breath', pant the authors. Fetishes are eagerly guessed at. One Conservative Secretary of State 'favoured a "babies and nursemaid" scene in which he played the nursemaid. . .

This all inspires prose which, after Hind- sight, reads like poetry: 'London after dark was a postwar melting pot'; 'Stephen Ward was a loose cannon on the deck of history'; `The sordid secrets of this teenage Nefertiti came as a gift from the gods'; 'The skeleton in Profumo's cupboard had started to rattle in public'; 'Within hours, she lit a hydra- headed fuse'; 'One man's folly in the bed of a teenage girl opened up a can of American worms.'

Amongst all this glory, Summers and Don-il nonetheless draw a convincing pic- ture of how the Establishment closed ranks against the interloper Ward. On some questions they correct Knightley and Ken- nedy. The latter say that Ward was intro- duced to the Russian Ivanov by Sir Colin Coote, editor of the Telegraph, to facilitate a sketching trip to the Soviet Union after a successful expedition to the Eichmann trial. The former point out that the intro- duction took place before then, and that, anyway, Coote had an Intelligence back- ground himself.

At other points they support each other. The grotesque police investigation of Ward was led by Chief Inspector Samuel Her- bert. Knightley and Kennedy reveal that When he died three years later there was an inexplicable £30,000 in his bank account. Summers and Dorril add that Herbert was himself a longstanding punter of one of the tarts pressured to give evidence against Ward, Ronna Ricardo. (The former, by the way, reckon Miss Ricardo has ALL COPPERS ARE BASTARDS tattooed on her stomach; the latter settle for ACAB on her fingers.)

Taken together, the books effectively rubbish both the trial and the Denning Report on the Profumo Affair (`there was no security interest in the matter', he said). But then did anyone ever credit them? What the books do not do is create sympathy for Ward the person, rather than Ward the victim. He emerges as a creep. He sucked up to what he called 'top People'. He spoke of himself as 'one of the most successful men in London with girls since the war.' As an osteopath he kneaded his way into favour, Aged 50, he would address an 18-year-old girl as 'little baby'. An MI6 man says 'he liked to watch girls being screwed, especially adult women dressed as underage girls.' Hod Dibden remarks that 'one thing he liked was to have a high-heeled shoe tied around his nose.' True or not, I expect there is nothing especially implausible about this. Such details are part of what the Profumo Affair was all about. Nowadays we have videos.