Her Majesty's Stationery Office announced jubilantly last week that the celebrated blue-bound volume entitled Lord Denning's Report (price: $1.05) had sold nearly 100,000 copies in 24 hours, an alltime record for an official document. Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition had somewhat less reason to rejoice. The report, based on a three-month investigation of the Profumo affair by Britain's second-ranking judge, dismissed most major charges and every squalid rumor of government culpability in the case. In 60,000 lucid words, Denning rejected persistent reports that other Tory ministers had been involved in bizarre sexual exploits, left no grounds for belief that John Pro-fumo's affair with Christine Keeler had resulted in any leakage of Allied secrets, and quashed partisan speculation that Harold Macmillan's Cabinet had sought to protect the former War Secretary in order to avoid another scandal.
But Britain, though relieved at the A-plus report on its rulers' morals, was chagrined by the detailed picture of muddle inside the government. Denning concluded that the Prime Minister and his advisers were naive and even careless in accepting a philanderer's denials of philandering. "The conduct of Mr. Profumo," as Denning put it, "was such as to create, among an influential section of the people, a reasonable belief that he had committed adultery. It was the responsibility of the Prime Minister and his colleagues, and of them only, to deal with this situation, and they did not succeed in doing so."
Provider of Popsies. Britain's serious press was more critical of the Prime Minister. The Tory Daily Telegraph headlined its Page One account of the report: PREMIER "FAILED" IN PROFUMO AFFAIR. The Times demanded to know why Macmillan had not himself questioned Profumo or checked into other evidence in the case, pointing out that the "Prime Minister selects his ministerial colleagues; responsibility for their fitness for office is his, and serious imputations on their character must concern him personally."
Nevertheless, the report bore little resemblance to the sizzling exposé for which Macmillan's critics had hoped. In a post-Denning TV attack on the government, Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson rehashed the weary charge that the Tories have debased public morality. As for the public, most Britons were so happily absorbed in Denning's brisk, chatty account of upper-crust sinning that many TV sets stayed dark.
The late Stephen Ward, as pictured in the report, was not only "the provider of popsies for rich people" but caterer as well "to their perverted tastes," and an avowed Communist sympathizer who yearned to paint Khrushchev's portrait. His close friend, Soviet Naval Attaché Evgeny Ivanov, was a spy who made no secret of his activities. Poor Christine was "enmeshed in a network of wickedness" from the time she arrived in London at the age of 16 and took a job as a showgirl—"which involved, as she put it, just walking around with no clothes on."