(2 of 3)
Bed & Bawd. In his own defense, Macmillan maintains that he was first informed of Profumo's liaison last February. He denies reports that MI-5—British intelligence—had warned the government at that time that its War Minister had shared bed and bawd with Soviet Assistant Naval Attaché Evgeny Ivanov. Macmillan insisted that he had no reason to doubt a man of Profumo's background (Harrow, Oxford, Infantry). Moreover, five of his ministers who "sat up half the night" of March 21 interrogating Profumo were also persuaded that he was telling the truth; the clincher was the War Minister's readiness to deny misconduct with Christine Keeler in a sacrosanct "personal statement" on the House floor next day. Macmillan's strongest argument was that a security check, which he ordered a week before his former colleague's confession, had turned up no evidence that the Russian had succeeded in using the Profumo-Keeler-Ivanov triangle to pry out secret information.
Something of a Cabinet mutiny seemed to be led by Health Minister Enoch Powell, 51, whose distaste for political compromise led him to resign from the government in 1958 in protest against an inflationary, vote-catching budget. Powell's feeling that the government had once more shown itself unbelievably lax was shared to a lesser degree by two more of Macmillan's ablest appointees, Education Minister Sir Edward Boyle (who quit the government over Suez) and Housing Minister Sir Keith Joseph, as well as a disgruntled minority of Tory backbenchers, who could themselves overthrow the government if 20 or 30 chose to abstain this week. But Macmillan's assurances quelled the mutiny, and the Tories marched into Commons outwardly united to face their greatest political threat since Suez.
Top Popsies. Meanwhile, in her newspaper "confessions," for which the News of the World paid her more (an estimated $85,000) than a girl might earn in years of casual strumpetry, Christine's artless saga of debauchery among the rich and the powerful titillated the nation, but also profoundly shocked it.
For publication, Christine flitted mainly from Evgeny ("a wonderful huggy bear of a man") back to Jack ("I liked it," said she, "I don't mind admitting") and back. Scotland Yard's dossiers on the call-girl racket may contain the names of many prominent Britons and reportedly a member of the royal family. Nobody would say, in advance of Ward's trial, just what the quid pro quo had been; Christine's confessions suggested that she enjoyed her work and was apparently somewhat offhand in business as well as affection.
If the Top Popsies seemed almost too good to be true, one peril of Profumoism was pointed up by Christine's friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, 18, and a lawyer who had been consulted by Christine. Both avowed that Ivanov had in fact tried to use Christine to worm secrets out of Profumo—even though his first try, an attempt to find out the date on which the U.S. was supposed to "give the H-bomb to West Germany," sounded more like a propaganda ploy than serious espionage.