Editorial: What a show of pretence and hypocrisy (1963)

Editorial from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yet another political scandal has hit the headlines. Mr. Profumo’s indiscretions are only the latest in a long line of such extra-curricular activities on the part of our elected representatives but, unlike most of the others, he failed to keep his indiscretions discreet.

His confession and resignation have left the Conservative Party in confusion and the Labour Party cock-a-hoop. The latter, of course, can hardly go wrong as long as they don’t overplay their hand and show their glee too openly. It is enough for them, whilst fervently protesting that they are not in the least concerned with Mr. Profumo’s sexual behaviour, to keep the pot quietly simmering with expressions of deep and distressed concern for the country’s security.

As for the Conservative Party, they are quite demoralised, in spite of all Mr. Macmillan’s efforts to pull them together. Following upon all the other distasteful events of recent months, the new bombshell has shattered forever the sacred relic they have so carefully carried in their political baggage for so long — the idea that they alone are the Party who should rule because they are gentlemen, the personifications of all the noble traditions of high principle, strict morality, implicit honesty, and overwhelming trustworthiness.

The sensation-mongering Press, after taking a bad beating over the Vassall case, are back in full cry. Miss Keeler got what is reported to be £15,000 from the News of the World for her confessions, and was also well paid by the Sunday Mirror for her letter from Mr. Profumo. No doubt more large sums are in the offing for her and others in the case. At the same time, it is disclosed that the actual facts were known to many sections of the Press even when Mr. Profumo was making his denials last March, but that they all chose to keep quiet about them. Not, be it added, because of scruples about Mr. Profumo, but because they were afraid of losing some money in libel damages. So much for the boasts they periodically give us about telling the truth at any price.

Large sections of the public, of course, put on their usual show of shocked protest whilst fervently perusing every hard-bought detail the newspapers provided for them. One of the choicer blooms of the British cultural scene, the weekly ration of spice, scandal, and snigger, flowered brighter than ever.

What a show of pretence and hypocrisy it all is. The capitalist political parties all play the game of setting up their leaders as men apart—as people of greater intelligence, higher principles, stricter morals, than the common herd. The working class accept all this, and even grow to believe it, in return for lots of nice, fat promises to have things done for them and the relief of not having to think for themselves.

All sorts of people are drawing all sorts of implications from the Profumo a case. But for Socialists, its chief importance lies in the way it reflects, yet again. the cynicism and hypocrisy of the capitalist parties and their system, and the political laziness and ignorance of the working class who support it all and refuse to take action to get rid of it.

News in Review: The Profumo affair (1963)

The News in Review column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Profumo affair

It was in the May Socialist Standard, at a time when Mr. Profumo’s strenuous protestations of the innocence of his relationships with Christine Keeler still held public water, that we pointed out how unimportant are the personal morals of the administrators of capitalism.

Now that Profumo has come clean, and now that we have been treated to the squalid detail of the Argyll divorce case, what we said in May still stands. With something to be added.

The rather nasty stories have lifted a corner of the curtain on a life which is completely foreign to most workers.

The life of rich houses, glamorous holidays, expensive women and powerful men. Of easy luxury and sophistication. The life, in fact, of people who can dedicate their lives to what they conceive as living.

Which is something very foreign to most members of the working class, who are only the people who make possible the lives of luxury and glamour.

Profumo was a member of a capitalist government and capitalism teaches us, when we are children in school and when we are grown up enough to read its journalism, that the basis of morality is monogamy.

Many workers absorb this teaching and, no matter what it costs them in terms of personal strain, conform to it. Others conform because they cannot afford to do anything else. Promiscuity can be a costly business.

It can also be a tragic business, for workers. Only recently The Observer ran a series on illegitimate children in this country, which showed up the sadness of many unmarried mothers who are forced by their circumstances to give up their babies when they desperately want to keep them.

This sort of tragedy need never happen to rich people who are also promiscuous. They have no trouble in taking care of any number of children, 'legitimate" or no.

In more ways than one, capitalism is a sordid, inhuman social system in which only the ruling class are free.

War in the air

The early railways fought each other tooth and nail for freight and passengers, often taking enormous physical and economic risks in the process. In the same way, the great airlines are currently coming to grips over the pickings to be had on the world’s busy airlanes.

For some time, the American transatlantic carriers have been fighting the rest —and particularly Britain—over fares and cargo rates. This provoked the recent crisis in which British airports were on the point of being closed to Pan American and Trans World aircraft; something which was averted only when the American Civil Aviation Board made a temporary climb down. The situation remains threatening.

And now the war is hotting up in the freight carriers.

BOAC has been happily operating piston engined freighters across the Atlantic and had no immediate intention of spending any more millions on jets to speed up this service.

This intention has been upset by Pan American’s opening of the first all jet freight service, over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fast and capacious, the Boeing freighters have started an air cargo sales war which may, as in the case of passenger traffic, develop into a rate war.

If this happens, we shall probably see every airline which aspires to a place in the sun on the transatlantic run being forced to buy aircraft which they cannot afford, do not want, and which they often have to send off only half full of cargo. We may see countless aircraft which have plenty of useful life in them being scrapped or sold off for a song. And perhaps we shall see the airlines taking the same sort of physical risks which the primitive, battling railways took.

Competition, we are often being told, is one of capitalism’s health-giving substances. In fact, just like the other features of the all-wasteful society, it is a ludicrous way of running human affairs.

Advertising for votes

Do you vote for capitalism? You do?

Well, how does it feel like to be in somebody’s sights? You should know —both the big parties are now drawing a bead on you.

You have probably seen the big spread ads. which the Tories have been taking in the papers. You have probably heard that the Labour Party is indignant about where the money comes from, and you may have reflected that this argument has lost a lot of its point since Labour started putting out its own big ads.

These are part of a very expensive 
campaign. And it is all aimed at you.

The Tory ads. are punchy, with facts and figures about the roads they will lay down, the hospitals they will put up, and so on. If only, that is, you will give them the chance. Has it struck you as strange that after twelve years of Conservative paradise there are still no new hospitals in this country and the roads are still in a mess?

The Labour ads. are perhaps rather more airy, with some distant ideals of justice and equality—and Mr. Wilson just caught in the act of almost giving the new Labour thumbs-up sign. Labour has to go easy on the facts and figures. Their own record is pretty awful and to say too emphatically that there is anything wrong with Britain today leaves them open to the countercharge of running down the old country, dammit. That wouldn’t go down with a patriotic voter like you, would it? So Labour puts in the plea that everything could be all right. If only you give them the chance.

And will you? The big parties are lashing out the thousands in an effort to persuade you to put them in charge of British capitalism. But whoever gets that job will make no difference; the black spots which capitalism makes will remain unerased.

The tragedy is that the ballyhoo, the big splash, is what so often counts.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain cannot afford expensive publicity campaigns and indeed has to bleed itself merely to run one or two candidates in an election. Yet only Socialism can give us the sane world which most people, somehow, are looking for.

Remember that, when you read the next big ad. Remember it when you vote. They’ve got you in their sights but, in a way, you are the one who pulls the trigger.

The Pope is dead

Pope John died when, just before the Profumo scandal burst, news was in short supply. Especially the juicy "human interest” sort of news on which the popular press thrives. On thin rations, the papers made the most of the drawn out death agonies. Some of the headlines were almost ghoulish.

This gave us a peep at one of the nastiest sides of capitalism—the side which works for a profit out of human suffering, even when it is the suffering of one of the great upholders of property society.

Not only reporters rushed to say nice things about John XXIII. Bertrand Russell, a professed non-believer, echoed the popular estimation of the dead Pontiff as a man of peace:

The Pope used his office and his energy to bring peace and to oppose policies which lead to war and mass murder. His encyclical is a magnificent statement of the deepest wishes and hopes of all men of decency. . . I mourn his death.

There is, indeed, some rather tenuous evidence that the dead Pope was prepared to act as some sort of a go-between in a new world carve-up by the United States and Russia. This is the sort of diplomatic dabbling which often qualifies all sorts of people for the description of "peace loving.”

But this holds good only in peacetime. We know that, just like his predecessors, the Pope would have done nothing to oppose a future war and that in such a war there could well be Catholics on both sides, killing each other.

Thus does capitalism make warriors of them all.

In any case, modern war has nothing to do with a supposed lack of men of peace among the world’s leaders. Capitalism itself causes war and the leaders always go along on the tide of destruction.

And let all peace lovers remember that capitalism has always done well out of the servile ignorance of the religious, and especially of the Church of which John XXIII was so briefly the Vicar Supreme.

Postscript on housing

Of all the people to write a postscript to the special issue of the Socialist Standard on housing last May, it had to be the Minister of Housing himself, Sir Keith Joseph.

The last few days of that month gave birth to yet another White Paper which is supposed to be going to solve the housing problem. (“. . . promises,” commented The Observer, “borne on fairly insubstantial wings.”)

The new plan is to give housing subsidies only where the government thinks they are needed. Thus is quietly killed off the old policy (which was also going to solve the problem) of giving subsidies virtually indiscriminately. How long before the latest plan is pronounced to have failed?

There will be a bit more entertainment from the government’s financial jugglers; £100 million is intended to be available to encourage the building of houses for rent. From the merry shouts of welcome which greeted this announcement, nobody would have thought that these were the very policies which, in one form or another, have failed so blatantly in the past.

And, of course, the government will be speeding up slum clearance and will build more houses. The happy day when everyone will be living in what Housing Ministers think is a decent home has had to be postponed for a bit more, what with all this planning. Actually, it has been put off for another ten years. Said Sir Keith:

This programme will within 10 years transform the country's housing position, and will bring within reach of nearly every citizen in the land either a modern or a modernised house.

Presumably the Tories are hoping to win a few votes on this programme. Perhaps they will. It would not be the first time the working class have been hopelessly deceived about one of the ways in which capitalism blights their lives.

The Importance of Mr. Profumo (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

it was the Daily Express which pointed out, quickly, cruelly, that profumo is the Italian word meaning perfume. But the famous scandal sticks in a way undreamt of in the philosophies of big newspapers.

Now Profumo’s “sin,” for the Tories, was not just that he was running a mistress. That was bad enough, but there have been some famous precedents who have got away with the same thing. It was not even that the girl was being shared with a Russian intelligence agent and at least a couple of others, although that was enough to wilt the flowers on the starchiest of hats at a Conservative women’s fete. What really put Profumo beyond the pale was that he admitted to telling a lie. Not a lie to just anyone, but to the House of Commons, which is supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen and where it is the tradition not to question nor debate personal statements like Profumo’s original assertion of his innocence, this was what Robert McKenzie called a kick in the stomach for the Tories, who have always liked to think of themselves as the party of better people, of Christian gentlemen.

It was the lie which gave Lord Hailsham the excuse for his fireworks in his TV interview with McKenzie, when he blasted Profumo as a man who has “ lied and lied and lied ” and insisted that the whole affair was a moral issue. Hailsham is well known as a Tory moralist, a strict Christian who professes unshakeable principles. So is another central figure in the drama surrounding the government crisis—Enoch Powell. The hullabaloo over Profumo has served to make these men— and others like them—heroes of integrity. The inference we are invited to draw is that generally capitalism administered by the sort of men who would never tell a lie and that Profumo was just the inevitable bad apple.

Alright. Let us have a look at this business of lies. And if we do, the first thing to hit us is that political history is crammed with examples of men who, as a matter of course, have told enormous lies yet have never been accused of being liars. Some of them, in fact, have died as respected pillars of capitalist society. Stafford Cripps, for example, was the very caricature of an ascetic moralist. Strict vegetarian. Fervent Christian. Like Enoch Powell, he was supposed to be a man who stood for principle before everything. Did Cripps, then, never tell a lie? We need nudge our memories only a little to recall that in 1949 he protested for weeks that he had no intention of devaluing sterling, while all the time his plans for devaluation were cut and dried. There are plenty of other examples of Cripps’ flexible reverence for the truth.

The Tories are not, of course, untarred by this brush. Hailsham and Powell are only two of those who were unprotesting members of the Eden government which embarked on the Suez fiasco. They apparently held their consciences in check when their government broke its word to the United Nations and justified the invasion by what were quickly revealed as blatant lies. More recently the same, government has been what we can politely call less than frank over, the deportation of Doctor Soblen and of Chief Eriahoro. In fact, in a more subtle way, Christine Keeler is not the only matter on which Profumo has been dishonest, although on these issues his ex-colleagues in the government would never dream of calling him rude names. As Minister of War, Profumo bore the ultimate responsibility for the big publicity campaign to persuade people to join the Army. The advertisements used in this campaign showed such a one-sided view of Army life that even some newspapers felt moved to protest. Profumo’s ads. showed clean-living young men playing rugby, climbing mountains, patrolling romantic deserts. They did not hint that military discipline, in its dreary stupidities, is designed to degrade and brutalise men. They did not mention the unpleasant places a soldier may be sent to, nor the dirty jobs he may have to do there. They ignored the fact that soldiers often die especially horrible deaths, looking not at all like clean living Soldiers of the Queen as they do so. The advertisements told lies, but nobody in the government got upset with Profumo because of that.

Neither have they been upset by the lies about, say, the effects of testing nuclear weapons. The government assure us that the danger from these exercises is negligible and that another little test will not do us any harm. Yet they know perfectly well that every test adds to the atmosphere’s load of radioactivity and that this means that a lot of people, especially children, will die who would otherwise have lived. Overseas, as well, lies are told on this matter. President Kennedy has recently announced that his government will suspend all tests, unless some other country starts them up again. This may well be followed, as it was in 1958, by a similar announcement from Moscow. Both sides will pose as the guardians of peace and human safety. Yet both sides know that a suspension of tests does not mean that the development of nuclear weapons has been suspended. They know that they are all working on -their bombs and that when they think it is to their advantage to do so they will think up some reason to start testing them again. Are Kennedy and Khruschev, then, champions of truth?

It would, indeed, be surprising if men in their position were, for they administer a social system which is full of lies, and not only those told by politicians. Were the makers of thalidomide telling the truth when they asserted that the drug could safely be taken by pregnant women? What sort of principle were they upholding, when they protested that the delay in the American Food and Drug Administration approving thalidomide was costing them their chance of exploiting a Christmas market? Do the mass-production tailors believe their own advertisements, which show aristocratic young men being admired by glamorous girls for the cheap off-the-peg outfit they are wearing? Are the estate agents who advertise a cramped, poky apology for a house as “ neat and compact ” and a garden with knee-high weeds as “mature” keen churchgoers who regularly say their prayers?

We know what grounds these lies are excused on. We know that capitalism claims that strategic and commercial reasons justify telling lies. As R. A. Butler said about the Cripps lie, “. . . I know that if you talked about devaluing the currency well ahead of time, you would do indefinite damage to your own currency. . . .” But they cannot have it both ways. Capitalism professes to work on a basis of morality; workers are taught from the very beginning that the road to Heaven is paved with honesty and high principles. Yet capitalism admits that its own interests force it to deny these principles. And since when have the sort of morals propounded so often by capitalism's leaders been relative, adaptable, matters of expediency? A lie, after all, is a lie under any circumstances. No, they cannot have it both ways, although over Profumo that is how they have tried to have it.

Imagine a politician who told the truth! A Minister of Housing who admitted that he could not solve the housing problem! A Foreign Secretary who blew the gaff on every double-crossing international carve up as soon as he had made it! A Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced his Budget with the admission that it was just a rehash of a lot of ideas which had flopped in the past! If that happened nobody would get involved in a scandal. There would be a dignified resignation, surrounded by sorrowful stories of tiredness, strain and mental breakdown.

Profumo told a rather foolish and, for him, a risky lie. But at least it was a lie about his personal life, a lie which involved only a very few people. In contrast, day after day capitalism goes on turning out lies which affect the welfare and in many cases the very lives of millions of people. What is more, those lies play their part in bolstering the social system which degrades and depresses the majority—the only socially useful people—the working class.

No minister gets worked up about that. There are no top level inquiries, no resignations, nothing on television. In cases like the Profumo scandal the working class are supposed to be content with a mixed diet of salacity and hypocritical moralising. The same newspapers which got indignant over Profumo's lie saw nothing wrong in paying thousands of pounds for Christine Keeler's story, nor in publishing photographs of her which we will describe—and not for want of a better word—as arresting.

It will be tragic if in among this smoke screen of hypocrisy and scandal the essential fact is lost sight of. Let us state it here, quickly and simply.

Lies are essential to capitalism and super moralists like Lord Hailsham know it. And capitalism itself is the biggest lie of all.

Ivan

The Passing Show: Social revolution in Japan (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social revolution in Japan

Under the above heading The Times told us recently of changes in Japan brought about by the war. But if the reader expects to learn that the wealth producers, the Japanese workers, have taken over, he will be disappointed though he should not be surprised. What in fact the article deals with primarily is the rise of new propertied group and families in place of the old.

The richest man in Japan has an income of 440m. yen (£440,000) a year. He is Mr. Konosuke Matsusha, chairman of the Matsusha Electric Industrial Company. His declared income is nearly twice as large as that of anyone else in the country. According to figures based on tax returns for 1962. the 20 richest men in Japan have incomes ranging from £121,000 to £440,000. All but one are industrialists. Some of the names in the list are almost unknown to the general public and the famous pre-war names—Iwasaki (founders of the Mitsubishi combine), Okura, Mitsui and Sumito Mo—do not appear anywhere.

Of course, there has been no social revolution for the other Japanese, those whose names are always unknown. The latest figures published by the International Labour Office show average earnings in Japanese manufacturing industries, ’’including family allowances and end-of-year bonuses,” as 22,834 Yen, or about £22 16s. 8d. a month.

Bigger and Fewer Breweries

Official figures published in the April issue of Economic Trends showed how far take-overs have gone in industry as a whole. In eight years, 1954-1961, £1,600 million was spent on take-over bids, but of this total nearly half came from the 98 companies each with assets of £25 million or more, though they represent only a tiny proportion of the 2,600 companies whose shares are quoted on the Stock Exchanges of this century. Altogether 3,400 companies were taken over (most of them not quoted on the stock exchange).

One industry in which amalgamation has gone far, but with more to come, is the brewing industry.

In place of a multiplicity of breweries many of them small and local, a writer in the Financial Times (May 25) writes of the industry now being dominated by six major groups.

What the boards aimed to achieve by take-overs was to consolidate brewing and distribution in large regions and thus achieve big economies and larger profits. Local breweries are being closed down and a considerable number of the local ”milds, bitters and light ales” are disappearing, ”no longer worth producing in small quantities.” Standardisation of a smaller number of nationally advertised brews is the order of the day for capitalism in brewing. It is ironic to recall the old argument against Socialism that it would deprive us of the variety of choice that capitalism gave us. Maybe the local varieties were no better (or worse) than the TV advertised popular brands, but that is not what drinkers were told before the change took place.

Common Market under a Cloud

When the drive for British entry into the Common Market was in full and hopeful flood the line taken by its advocates was to say that all was well inside the Six and British industry must be in to share in the benefits.

It was equally to be expected that immediately entry was blackballed by De Gaulle, they should nearly all have a change of heart and say that it really did not matter after all.

Now a few months have passed and some of the earlier arguments have begun to look rather thin. In place of the supposed absence of labour disputes we have seen massive strikes in France and Germany. French farming interests which were partly responsible for the objection to British entry have now brought the French and German governments into conflict, and both of them into conflict with American farmers over the entry of their exports into Europe.

The bloom has gone off the German industrial and stock exchange boom, because of falling profit margins and stronger pressure for wage increases.

At the same time, helped by some industrial recovery and rising profits, many British capitalists and politicians are thinking that they can do better out of Europe, and British exports into the Common Market have increased, as also exports to Russia.

The fact is that both before and after, the arguments were based on wrong or too limited assumptions. The European Common Market carries no more guarantee of permanent rapid expansion than any other large or small region of capitalism, and no more able to escape wage disputes and fluctuating profit margins.

And what happens to one industry inside or outside the Market is not necessarily the experience of other industries. . While motor car exports to Europe have been rising, and the Ready Mix Concrete Company claims record sales on the Continent, one firm, Wilmot Breedon, producers of motors, aircraft engines and domestic appliances, reports that the profits made in Britain were overshadowed by the heavy losses of its French subsidiary.

So for the moment the Common Market is rather out of favour.

What Mr. Profumo did to the Stock Exchange.

One of the emptiest dreams of the capitalists is to imagine to themselves how happy they could all be if only they could go on making, profits without the constant interruption of “politics." One of a cloudless sky politics keeps blowing up. On Monday, June 10th according to the Evening Standard, the London Stock Exchange had its biggest slump since Cuba—not this time the work of one of the K’s, but of Mr. Profumo. “Dealers, nervous about the eventual outcome of the Profumo affair, marked share prices down all round."

The same issue of the Evening Standard had an article asking whether Mr. Profumo, out of politics, can hope to find an outlet for his talents in business. The argument raises diverting side issues:

A man in public office has to have a high moral character and appear totally incorruptible. . . In business, however, standards are not always that high . . . But the business world doesn’t think much of a liar, especially if he gets found out

The writer of the article, the City Editor of the Standard, asks: “If he came knocking at your door would you give him a job ? ” But there is no urgency about it:

The ex-Minister of War comes from a rich family. The Profumos have for many years controlled the £34,000,000 Provident Life Association of London.

Most of the shares are held by trusts in which Mr. Profumo has an important role. In 1961 the trusts sold some £1,000,000 worth of shares for cash in a public issue. But they still own around two-thirds of the company’s Ordinary share capital, Worth some £3,700,000 at current market prices.

Mr. Profumo, of course, is only one of the beneficiaries. But he must draw quite a useful income from the investment.

Last year Provident Life paid out £120,000 in Ordinary dividends, of which the trusts must have received a considerable share.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Passing Show: On The Bomb (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the September 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

On The Bomb

What sort of picture does that title paint for you? Probably one of unparalleled destruction and misery, of thousands of people wiped out in a matter of minutes; of a shadow of mixed gloom and terror which has darkened the world ever since those fateful days in early August, 1945, when the fruits of the hideous “Manhattan Project” were delivered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I well remember the giant newspaper headlines and the sloppy, hypocritical editorials, bleating about “international control” of this new super weapon, saying how it could be perhaps a “force for peace” if it were kept “in the right hands,” etc, and expressing thanks that it had at least been used to speed the end of the war against Japan and save many allied lives. This has since been nailed as a lie, and the fact made known that the war was kept going in face of Japanese attempts at surrender negotiations, so that the bomb could be dropped. Nevertheless, the lie is often repeated by capitalist politicians, plus the new one that the bomb is necessary as a deterrent to “the other side,” so that this uneasy lull they call peace can be maintained.

Socialists think it is a tragedy that workers in any part of the world should lose their lives in the defence of capitalism’s interests, and this has typified our attitude to all weapons of war. But to the patriotic British or American worker in 1945 it was a case of “Thank God we got there first!” Well, now the wheel has turned quite a few times and the nuclear club numbers five members, with others like India and West Germany wondering whether to join. In the past 20 years the bomb has become a diplomatic weapon of the first importance; one might almost call it a first-class admission ticket to any of the top international conference tables.

It is against such a background that you should consider movements of protest like CND, which have sprung up in this and other countries over the past few years. When we say that these movements must fail, this is not to underestimate the sincerity of many of their members. It is simply that they take no account of the social conditions which have fostered such horrors as the bomb. The roots of war, atomic or otherwise, are in the capitalist system and none of its conflicts yet have been fought with kid gloves.

Once born, man's atomic knowledge cannot be destroyed. It will be refined and developed, and under capitalism perverted for base ends. Within private property society there is no sensible meaning to the term "for peaceful purposes". Only in a Socialist world could we guarantee that atomic energy would be used solely for human welfare, and the monstrosities of nuclear bombs be but a ghastly memory.

The shock of going out to work

I never used to believe my parents when they told me that my schooldays were the happiest days of my life. I began to believe them in earnest on the first day I went out to work. Not that school life is that much of an uplifting experience, as we know; for most of us it is only a training for the workaday world we have to face at some stage in our adolescence. But when that world at last closes round us and the irrevocable step has been taken, we realise with a sudden jolt that the comparatively carefree days of short hours and long holidays are gone for good.

From now on we begin to covet those two or three weeks of holiday a year and the precious evening and weekend leisure hours. Suddenly we seem to be too short of spare time to do the things we’d like to do—neither do we have the necessary cash—and we begin to find the restrictions of factory and office routine irksome to say the least. Perhaps we haven’t yet grasped the full impact of what has happened, but sooner or later the awful truth begins to dawn on us that this is the beginning of our wage earning years, stretching away before us through a lifetime of care and struggle. 

There is the job, and a pay packet at the end of the week or month, and the terrifying prospect of doing something we don’t want to do for the next 40-odd years. Many people try to dodge the issue by changing jobs when the boredom gets too acute, and it’s nothing unusual for boys and girls nowadays to have had a whole series of employers within a year or two of leaving.school. But whichever way we turn, the black ogre of wage slavery confronts us, devouring the peak years of our lives in dull unfulfilling and often stultifying activity. No wonder we set such store by our spare time. It’s usually the only part of the day we can even think about doing something which really interests us.

For work under capitalism is not a means of expressing and developing ourselves to the full. It is merely a means of getting a living wage, and for the employer of course of getting his profits. And this state of affairs is doing a lot of harm to a lot of workers everywhere.

On Authority 

In Ludovic Kennedy’s book on the Stephen Ward Trial, there is an interesting paragraph or two on the functions and activities of “The Establishment” in a time of crisis. It was Kennedy’s contention that whatever Ward’s morality he had committed no legal offence, but had roused the wrath of those in authority by ratting on his former politician friend Profumo. The scandal rocked the government at the time, but says Kennedy, the Establishment closed its ranks and earmarked Ward for special treatment.

Socialists have long realised the ability of the ruling class to stand together when the occasion demands, and ruthlessly destroy anyone who threatens to bring its authority into public ridicule and contempt. For mass loyalty and “respect for their betters” by the working class is certainly essential to our masters if they are to get support for (or at least acquiescence in) the continuation of their system of privilege and exploitation.

Our press and politicians will try to tell us that this is “our” country and that we have a vested interest in being proud of it. In support, they will point to the various institutions, such as the Church and Royal Family, which we can look up to because they are supposed to be above “sectional interests” and therefore bind us all together in common interest. And although risqué jokes may be tossed about at times, this version dished out by authority is generally accepted by workers.

Now both the Church and the Royal Family are exceedingly rich and are symbolic of private property society, and for this reason alone would earn the Socialist Party’s hostility; but it would not really be true to say that they are above politics. True, they make no political pronouncements but they are part of the constitutional set-up in Great Britain and are expected to co-operate with the government in its day-to-day administration of capitalism. The Queen, for example, signs Parliamentary Bills, calls Privy Council meetings and generally does what she’s told. Neither the Monarch nor the Church has any power to resist the will of the capitalist class. That matter was settled a long time ago.

Which in itself is an answer to those who advocate a republic. Whether or not the Monarchy has any power makes precious little difference to the essential division of wealth and the subject position of the working class. France, U.S.A. and Russia, for example, all operate without a monarchy. And they are just as much capitalist states as Britain or Sweden.

Gaspers

“A Labour Government will not be a soft option.” (Jim Northcott, in Why Labour. Penguin Books, 1963).

“My politics were confused. 1 was a Liberal-Radical, a Tory-Democrat and a Fabian Socialist.” (Harold Macmillan—The Winds of Change).

“He (Mr. Wilson) has put aside promises now. He is giving us threats instead. Why? The fact is that he simply has no choice. Britain (like it or not) is a capitalist country, living in a predominantly capitalist world.” (Charles Curran, Evening News, 15.7.66).

“This journal will do anything in its power, short of betraying its principles, to support a Labour government.” (New Statesman. 15.7.66).

“Labour members must realise how wrong they are to describe stop-go as Tory policy. It has been the policy of all governments since the war.” (Selwyn Lloyd, Commons debate. 27.7.66).

Eddie Critchfield

News in Review: Aftermath of Profumo (1963)

The News in Review column from the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Aftermath of Profumo

If Mr. Macmillan is forced out and if, as now seems likely, the Tories lose the next election, we may be sure that the unhappy Mr. Profumo will get a lot of the blame for it.

This, of course, will be hardly fair or accurate, The government have been in trouble for a long time and so has the Prime Minister. Profumo's indiscretion was only the last, if the most News of the Worldish, of the events which have exploded under the Tories’ confident conviction that they could do no wrong and that there was no reason why they should not stay in power for ever.

There were good grounds for this confidence. As each political crisis was ridden, as each potentially dangerous policy was ruthlessly pushed through, as Macmillan airily brushed all criticism under the nearest carpet, the working class faithfully piled up the Tory majorities. Mac and whoever he chose for his men seemed to be unbeatable.

Now, it seems all that is to be changed and, unless after hanging on, the Conservatives can recover the ground they have lost, we shall have a Labour government next time.

If that does happen the reasons for it will be no less foolish than in the past. The working class voters will think that the Labour Party is more efficient, cleverer, perhaps morally sounder, than the Tories. They may decide that the secrets of British capitalism will be better guarded under, say, Mr. George Wigg than they have been under Mr. Macmillan. Or perhaps they will virtually give up thinking about it and simply decide, as if politics were like a game of Ludo, that it is time Labour had a turn.

Whatever the detailed reasons, if the electorate return a Labour government it will be because they are hoping for better things from them. In this hope they will be as mistaken as they were in 1945 and again twelve years ago when they changed back to the Tories. Neither of these parties—nor indeed any capitalist party—can provide the sort of world which human beings should live in.

It is a safe bet that some future journalist-cum-historian will write up a romantic, exaggerated account of the Profumo affair in which the ex-Minister of War will be given an importance out of his due. In fact, the most that he has done is to contribute a little more to the probability that the British working class, sometime in the next year or so, will change from supporting one capitalist party to another.

BTC dies

The British Transport Commission is now dead. Would there be any of its stockholders grateful enough to contribute towards a suitable memorial?

Consider the facts. Doctor Beeching has proved, says the government, that a lot of the railway system cannot make a profit. Under the Beeching regime lines have been shut down wholesale and, of course, there is the Big Chop yet to come.

Now if this sort of thing happened in a privately controlled industry the people who held stock in it would suffer. Their dividends at the least would be cut and in all probability would disappear altogether.

Not so on the railways, nor in the other nationalised concerns. The Transport Commission’s final accounts showed a total deficit for its term of life of £143.6 million, almost entirely due to the unprofitable operation of the railways. Yet concealed in this deficit was the sum of £74.4 million arising from payments of interest on stock and other central charges.

Which means that tens of millions of pounds have been paid out to stockholders, of one kind or another, from railway lines many of which were not making a profit and some of which have indeed been closed.

The story is the same in the coal industry, where the recent small surplus represented an actual operating profit of £25.4 million, when we take into account the interest which the NCB is liable to pay. And this interest, again, bore no relation to the fact that there have been widespread closures of coal mines.

Even for capitalism, this is something of an Alice-in-Wonderland story. The whole point, which is quite obscured in the regular hullabaloo over the finances of State industries, is that nationalisation basically changes nothing. The workers in State industries continue to turn out surplus value, a fair chunk of which goes out in the form of profit. For them, it is exploitation as usual.

For the capitalist class it is profits as usual. Even if the profits are unusual—and unusually generous.

The Kennedy tour

It was not, of course, just to visit the Ould Homestead that Mr. Kennedy came to Europe, although one of the uses of his tour was to make plain, by his refusal to open the Giant's Causeway and his other references to Anglo-Irish relations, his support for the cause of Irish republicanism.

The Irish part of the journey was, predictably, a pressman’s junket, with a faked up cottage, pigs dragged into the kitchen and the President taking a dish of tea with kind, puddeny Irish ma's.

Beneath this ballyhoo, Kennedy was in deadly earnest. He came to rally support for his governments European policy, which has been under some heavy fire of late. He came to put the de Gaulle concept of an independently united Europe in what Washington thinks is its place. He came to win Germany away from the temptations of the stubborn old man in Paris and to make sure that Adenauer’s successor will be receptive to American influence.

It was also noticeable that, for the usual diplomatic reasons, Kennedy did not see Harold Wilson. This gave some support to the rumours that one of the results of Wilson’s recent trip to Washington is that the American government does not look favourably upon the prospect of a Labour win at the next election. Did Wilson really give Kennedy cause to adopt this attitude? Perhaps, if Labour is returned next time, we shall find out.

The real reason for visits like Kennedy’s is all too often hidden in a cloud of newspaper nonsense. The men who meet in high conference are there to stand up for the interests of their country’s ruling class. They talk about the carve up of the capitalist world and the economic and military steps they can take to keep the carve up as they want it. They discuss the disputes which capitalism is so constantly heir to.

These men appear to hold the fate of the world in their hands. But the reality lies deeper. The working class must see this essential fact and resolve to do away with the social system which produces these leaders, their cynicism, and the perpetual threat of war.

Struggle for power in the Tory Party (1963)

From the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the facts to come to the surface of the murky waters of the Profumo affair is that there is now a serious split in the Conservative party, at any rate in Parliament, over who should lead them at the next election..

For some time Tory M.P.s have been harbouring considerable dissatisfaction with Mr. Macmillan's leadership. Men like Nigel Birch, Lord Lambton and Sir Harry Legge-Bourke have made no secret of the fact that in their opinion they stand a better chance of coining back to Westminster next time under a new, younger leader. It seems safe to assume that this feeling is more widely held than the number of abstentions in the Profumo debate would indicate. There is some fairly sound evidence that many Conservative M.P.s agreed to go into the government lobby thad night only after their doubts had been stilled by a promise that Mr. Macmillan would resign as soon as it was possible for him to do so without losing too much political dignity. If this is true, then Mr. Macmillan's television announcement that he still hopes to be the Tory leader in the next election was a very fast one to be pulled. It was a typically shrewd move by a master at the game of staying in power. But more of that later.

For the moment, let us observe that another of the blows which Mr. Profumo dealt his party was that he deprived them of their cherished image of unity. It has long been a useful electoral move for the Tories to publicise the searing splits in the Labour Party and indeed Labour has had their share of them. These splits have also provided the Tories with some useful bogy men—particularly, of course, the late Aneurin Bevan. In contrast, the Conservative Party has usually seemed like a haven of peace. Nobody asking awkward questions. Nobody getting at the leader. No splits, at any rate on the surface. But now all that is gone. And to heighten the Tories' discomfort, the Labour Party now seems to be calmly united. Mr. Wilson has trod craftily since he became leader of the Opposition; his admonition to the 1922 Committee to call off their attacks on Mr. Macmillan, was typical, of his aptitude for political warfare. At this distance, Mr. Wilson seems to be one of the cleverest of Labour's post-war leaders. He seems to have pacified his Party, although he has undoubtedly been helped in this by the fact that Labour's electoral hopes are so high. Nothing concentrates the mind of a capitalist political party so much as the realisation that power is almost within their grasp. It is anybody’s guess how long this will last. If, after all their lip-smacking over the gallup polls and the by-elections, Labour lose the next election, Wilson may well get the blame and find his grip on his office considerably weaker. For the moment, it seems to he getting stronger as the days go by.

Despite the Tory split, it was always on the cards that Macmillan would not in fact go over Profumo. Clever indeed was the question, put in another context by The Economist, ". . . may the Government, or rather the Prime Minister, of Britain be about to be overthrown by a 21-year- old trollop? " How many M.P.s would answer yes to that question?

Perhaps not many Tory M.P,s would realise that in any case it was beside the point. Apart from the distressing—for the Tories—thought of Miss Keeler giving Mr. Macmillan the sack, there was the urgent question of who to replace Mr. Macmillan with. The Prime Minister has cleverly pushed all of his likely rivals out of the running. Men like Butler, Hailsham and Macleod, all of whom were once well fancied for the succession, have been sidetracked and in some ways discredited. If Britain had succeeded in the application to join the Common Market, Edward Heath may have been in line for the job. As it is, however . . . Selwyn Lloyd has been banished and into the bargain he has been held in check, his energy diverted into work like his recent instigation into Conservative Party organisation. The strongest challenger now seems to be Mr. Maudling but apart from anything else, he would operate under the handicap of leading a government full of aspirants for his job.

The fact is that Mr. Macmillan has never allowed a Crown Prince to rise from the Tory ranks. When Churchill was Prime Minister there was no serious doubt that when he went he would be succeeded by Anthony Eden. Churchill was firmly enough in the saddle to be able to tolerate this situation. In contrast, Macmillan's rule has seen a number of potential challengers rise only to fall again into comparative obscurity. This may yet be the fate of the genial Mr. Maudling. Macmillan has played this card—a strong one—for all he is worth, together with the other trumps he holds— his unprecedented election successes and the threat to dissolve Parliament, with the implied follow-up that this would mean throwing a lot of potentially rebellious Tory M.P.s to the electoral wolves. We may be sure that nothing is more calculated to dampen the fires of revolt in the well-cared-for bellies of Conservative members.

If Macmillan pulled out all his aces in the Profumo battle, it can only be because he was literally fighting for his political life. The last few years have seen his government facing a series of crises, many of which he has been able to dismiss with an audaciously airy phrase. Thorneycroft's resignation was “ alittle local difficulty." Selwyn Lloyd went because, perhaps, he was "tired." He has even tried the same trick in his latest crisis. “ I see," he said, a couple of weeks after the Profumo debate, "the Gallup Poll is going up again. These things come and go." Yet this was surely his gravest hour, with a lot of the Tory press after him and no end of whispers of even worse to come, when we knew the identity of the naked butler and of one or two other curious figures.

Perhaps the crucial point in the Profumo crisis was when the news got out that Mr. Enoch Powell and Sir Edward Boyle were considering resigning over the way the affair had been handled. This was dangerous news, because these two men could have been the gathering points for other rebellious Tories. In The Spectator of June 21st Henry Fairlie, who wrote up the story of the threatened resignations for the Daily Express, contributed a dramatic article which claimed that the story was given to him by a Conservative Member of Parliament, " . . . a source which not only was reliable but made the story credible. . .” Fairlie also gave his opinion that the impending resignations were leaked as part of a deliberate political move by his informant, a move to get Mr. Macmillan out.

This story, if true, is an indication of how deep is the split in the Tory party and how tricky was the situation which Macmillan faced. This is in no way diminished by the fact that Mr. Fairlie's informant, plotting against Macmillan on one hand, supported him in the voting on that fateful night. Mr. Fairlie, indeed, is as impressed by this as we would expect an experienced political journalist to be. “(It) only shows,” he commented, " that politicians are politicians.”

Should we, then, leave the matter there, so casually and with such a worldly cynicism? The row which is going on now in the Conservative Party, and which has been going on for so long in the Labour Party, is about one thing: power. They are all of them fighting over which policies and which leaders may give them the best chance of persuading enough people to vote for them to return them to power at a future election. It does not matter if they have no Intention of carrying out their policies. It does not matter if the leader they choose is dishonest or callous as many, in the past, we know have been. Provided they deliver the goods the policies and the leader get the support they need.

And the goods—the votes—come from the very people who have nothing to gain either way in the struggle for power. The majority of voters in this and every other capitalist country are members of the working class. They are the people who have to spend their entire lives working to build the wealth of capitalism and who make possible the very luxuries and privileges which power struggles are about. They organise and administer capitalism in all its aspects and at every level. Without their work, capitalism could not carry on. Yet although they hold this powerful position, the working class never exert it to the full. They could get rid of capitalism; yet they accept it as part of the natural order of things. Although they may not like some of the effects of capitalism, the working class generally think that there is little or nothing that can be done about them. If they lose confidence in one capitalist party they are content to put another to govern in its place. They accept the notion that capitalism’s leaders are as effective as the leaders themselves like to think. They pine for strong leaders, or clever leaders, or peaceful and humane leaders. They never reflect upon the fact that, no matter who is at the head of capitalism, it ticks over as unpleasantly as ever.

This is the human material with which Macmillan and the other politicians work. These are the people who fall for the smooth slogans and the big ads., the people who are convinced that they have never had it so good. These are the people who are fed with the newspaper revelations of the latest sordid sexual adventures of public figures. Is it any wonder that capitalism's leaders are hard and ruthless men?

One day the full story of the Profumo affair will be written and it will not make pleasant reading. It will be a story, familiar enough to us now, of lies (not just Profumo's) and double dealing. And by the time it is on the bookstalls there will have been many more scandals, many more political deals, much more ruthless struggling for power. It will probably be a best seller.

Ivan.

Wood for the Trees: The stable doors of instability (2019)

The Wood for the Trees Column from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Very occasionally an outrage occurs within the capitalist system that even the ruling class cannot ignore. In the wake of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry perhaps it’s time to look at the history of British Public Inquiries and assess their place within the body politic of this country. Let’s look at the origin, motivation, reality and effectiveness of this very British institution.

Having its origins in the 1920s the PI was initially set up to deal with public unease concerning natural or technical disasters such as train crashes and floods etc. but in 1957 there was a great scandal involving corrupt dealers making fortunes out of ‘inside information’ concerning bank rates. A public tribunal was set up and successfully managed to assure the public that it would not happen again – which, of course, it has and continues to do so. This probably gave the elite the confidence that this was a way of seeming to do something about political scandals while also covering up any major implications for themselves and the capitalist system as a whole.

However when the next great scandal exploded (the Profumo Affair) they chose the wrong ‘pair of safe hands’ in the form of Lord Denning. Although not initially a public inquiry the wide-ranging nature of his investigation shone a light on the meaningless and decadent lifestyles of the parasite class that fed the increasingly prurient 1960s media. The establishment, in its haste to cover the thing up, had chosen a moral crusader who lifted the veil on the reality of class society that helped accelerate the ‘end of deference’.

In 1972 on ‘Bloody Sunday’ 28 people were shot (14 fatally) by the British army during a peaceful demonstration against internment in Northern Ireland. Such was the level of outrage at the murders that the establishment was forced to hold an enquiry but this time, in the safe hands of Lord Widgery, it produced the expected whitewash and the army was exonerated. The story did not end there however as the bitterness lingered for decades leading to another inquiry headed by Lord Saville which began in 1998. This overturned almost all of the conclusions of Lord Widgery and led to an apology from David Cameron in the House of Commons – however only one ‘scapegoat’ was ever prosecuted for murder.

In the wake of the race riots in 1981 Lord Scarman was called to head an investigation into their cause. He made several recommendations emphasising ‘community’ policing which were subsequently ignored and it took another report by Sir William Macpherson (as a result of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence) to finally force an admission that a major cause of both racist violence and the subsequent cover-up was the institutional racism within the police. Investigations can drag on for years and even, as with the Hillsborough Disaster, for decades because of the tension between ‘getting to the truth’ and the desire to protect the integrity of institutions like the political establishment, army and police. . Let us now turn to a very different type of institution – the NHS.

Two scandals were to shake the always beleaguered NHS in the early 2000s. Dr. Harold Shipman became Britain’s worst serial killer whose victims numbered into the hundreds over many years. Dame Janet Smith was given the task of finding out why his crimes had gone undiscovered for so long. She was to recommend many changes to the protocols of death certification and drug prescription but as a result of dealing with endless bureaucratic ‘red-tape’ she was later to say, with exasperation that trying to implement change within such an establishment was like ‘attempting to herd cats’. In 2007 the terrible events at Stafford General Hospital resulted in a PI under Robert Francis but only after he had complained about the limited and restrictive nature of his former investigations. It is estimated that up to 1,200 patients died due to neglect between 2005 and 2008 at the hospital. Only two nurses were subsequently ‘struck off’ the medical register.

Of all the disasters that have brought forth public enquiries none have been more shocking than that of the Iraq war of 2003. Sir John Chilcot chaired this investigation which centred on the fantasy that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Although widely condemned as a ‘whitewash’ the report did show many deficiencies in the quality of ‘intelligence’ and how it was used to support a war that had already been politically decided upon by Bush and Blair. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis represent one of the greatest crimes in British history and the failure of a Public Inquiry to bring anyone to justice for this underlines the true nature of such investigations.

Although used primarily as a safety valve for public catharsis these inquiries always have a limited government remit and many are no longer content for members of the establishment to ‘self regulate’. The Grenfell Tower investigation is already showing signs of being another establishment whitewash. Perhaps with its failure this ‘Public Inquiry’ might be the last of its kind. Any investigation into major disasters within capitalism will usually fail to find the ultimate cause unless they become investigations of capitalism itself. From the perspective of our rulers the PI has been very successful in diverting attention from the capitalist system and finding scapegoats to blame. We are not suggesting that there will be no disasters within a socialist society but we can say with certainty that there will be no vested interests to protect, no corners cut to endanger safety and no protection of the guilty from being held responsible.

Wez.

Britain fifty years ago (2013)

Book Review from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines. Harper Press, 2013. £20

It is 50 years since what was termed the ‘Profumo Affair’ rocked the Establishment and the ruling class in Britain, but particularly in England and London. Davenport-Hines asserts that it was ‘a nation on the brink of a social revolution.’ It was not that, but there was considerable change in the mores and life-styles of many workers compared to the pre-war period and for many years after that war.

Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, was very much an old-fashioned Tory, dedicated to tradition, hierarchy, so-called Christian morality and, of course, a capitalist society not unlike before the war; although he realised that the sun was setting on the British Empire and Commonwealth. The working class, he felt, ‘had never had it so good.’ Many other Tories pretended to be much the same as Macmillan but, in fact, spent their time in nightclubs and at parties on estates such as Lord Astor’s Cliveden, where the osteopath, Stephen Ward, would bring young and attractive (mainly working-class) girls, such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, mostly for their sexual pleasure.

One such visitor to Cliveden was the Minister for War, John Profumo, the grandson of an Italian baron. Ward introduced Profumo to Keeler, who had been swimming naked in the pool. Also joining the party, which included the President of Pakistan and Lord Mountbatten and other establishment figures, was the Soviet assistant naval attaché Yevgeni Ivanov (actually a Russian spy known to MI5) brought to Cliveden by Ward. Following his return to London, Profumo phoned Keeler and arranged to meet her the next weekend, as his wife would be away. Subsequently, Profumo and Keeler had an affair which was furtive but known to many people including MI5. Christine Keeler also knew Ivanov, claiming to have had sex with him. The Cold War had been ‘hotting up’; and Ward became an unofficial go-between for the Soviets and some British politicians.

When challenged by government ministers, MI5 and others, including Parliament, John Profumo denied having sexual relations with Christine Keeler. But it was too late. It was common knowledge. Profumo resigned as Minister for War, and Stephen Ward was arrested on trumped-up charges of keeping and living off the earnings of prostitutes, and various abortion offences. During his trial, however, Ward committed suicide. The so-called popular press had a field-day, publishing lie after lie about Ward, Keeler and Profumo. Davenport-Hines has an interesting chapter (‘Hacks’, no.7), demonstrating that the ‘popular’ papers and their writers were just as bad as, if not worse than, the red-top papers of today.

The author of An English Affair is not a socialist, and his analysis has its faults, but it is a useful reminder of British society 50 years ago. It’s worth a read.

Peter E. Newell

Greasy Pole: Mandy and Christine (2015)

The Greasy Pole Column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

There can't be many ex-pupils of Sharmans Cross Secondary Modern School in Shirley, Solihull responsible for coining a phrase which, for its terse penetration of a barricade of hypocrisy, has endured for fifty years and merited its originator a place in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Or whose later judgement of one of her 'affairs' when she was fifteen was 'I was an enthusiastic participant in what struck me as a perfectly pleasant way to spend an afternoon...the worst I could be accused of is bad judgement and a healthy libido...' We are discussing here Marilyn (more profitably known as 'Mandy') Rice-Davies who in the early days of Harold Macmillan's Nineteen Sixties never had it so good in numerous contacts with older, richer, more famous men. And who, when she was informed by a barrister in court that the Third Viscount Astor from Cliveden in Buckinghamshire denied that he had been one of those men retorted 'Well he would, wouldn't he'. She died last December, after a life she recalled as 'one slow descent into respectability'.

Astor

Rice-Davies' family moved to Solihull for her father to take a job at the Dunlop factory. She seemed older than her years and moved to London, became a dancer at Murray's Club in Soho, met Christine Keeler to replace her in the home of the notorious persecuting slum landlord Rachman. 'It was dislike at first sight' was how she described her original contact with Keeler; 'I enjoyed her company and learned never to rely on her for anything'. Which did not deter her from being one of a threesome sexual service for any client who was rich and energetic enough. During this time she was introduced by Keeler to, among others, Lord Astor and Stephen Ward – a highly successful osteopath. For some people Ward was cynically plausible and indiscreet, always ready to work a deal to promote the situation in which he was a favoured therapist for, among others, Paul Getty, Colin Coote and Frank Sinatra and a clutch of politicians including Churchill, Eden and Gaitskell. Meanwhile among Keeler's attendant men was Yevgeny Ivanov who was the Naval attaché at the Russian Embassy.

Profumo

In July 1961 the Astors threw one of their lavish parties at Cliveden, attended by the customary slew of notables including John Profumo, the Tory MP. The assembled guests made their way down to the house swimming pool which was close to a cottage rented by Ward. Taking a refreshing dip – made more so by having her swimming costume mischievously removed by Ward – was Christine Keeler. Before she left that evening with Ivanov, Profumo had made a note of her telephone number, which he used to facilitate an affair. At that time Profumo was very much a man with a future. He had been to Harrow School and then Oxford where while 'studying law' he found time to be a member of the vandalising Bullingdon Club. He was elected as an MP and in May 1940 he joined 30 other Tory MPs in a vote which effectively led to the resignation of Neville Chamberlain. The Tory disciplinarians in the House were not pleased; one Whip spat on Profumo's shoes and the Chief Whip snarled at him that he was '...an utterly contemptible little shit'. Notwithstanding this he remained in favour with the leadership; although he lost his seat in Kettering in the 1945 Labour landslide he was later elected for Stratford-on-Avon. It did not take long for him to squirm his way up the Greasy Pole to the extent that he was tipped as a future Foreign Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was Secretary of State for War when he was sexually linked with Keeler and the fact that she was also involved with Ivanov accentuated concerns about security. Meanwhile in Westminster Profumo developed a reputation as a persistent womaniser, accustomed to excuse his absences from home as due to late night sittings in the Commons. His wife, the film star Valerie Hobson, complained about him instructing his tailor to fashion his trousers so as to hint at his unusually large penis.

Trollop

The Westminster rumour mill ground hungrily into the Profumo/Keeler scandal with the Labour MP George Wigg particularly active. In March 1963 the Whips decided that enough was enough and one night in the small hours they hauled Profumo out of bed to insist that he came clean. But the most they could manage was a denial which Profumo was to read later that day to the Commons, part of which said: 'Miss Keeler and I were on friendly terms. There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintance with Miss Keeler.' But when this was read to the House it only aggravated the problem. Typically, Wigg '...left the House that morning with black rage in my heart because I knew what the facts were'. In addition when the police interviewed Keeler in their investigation into Ward on charges of ‘living off immoral earnings’ she confirmed having a sexual relationship with Profumo. It did not then take long for him to give in; during what might have been a conciliatory trip to Venice he confessed all to his wife and then to Macmillan. On 5 June he resigned. Among a flood of similar comment The Economist asked '...may the government, or rather the Prime Minister of Britain be about to be overthrown by a 21-year old trollop?' The police had also been active and Ward appeared at the Old Bailey on what was very doubtful evidence. Just before the day of it all being summed up he committed suicide at his home. Tory MP Alan Clark, whose own adventures made it difficult for him to overflow with any delicate sympathy, later blurted that the whole affair had '...exposed their (Tory politicians') essential rottenness'.

And so we return to Mandy Rice Davies and her enduringly perceptive phrase. That all happened fifty years ago but it is no better now. We have David Cameron claiming the ability to control the vagaries of capitalism. And Ed Miliband desperate to convince us that his party is even more capable. And Nick Clegg striving to make us forget the Lib Dem's record of deception. About each and all of them we must declare:

He would, wouldn't he?

Ivan