The day after Mr Macmillan had read Lord Denning’s 50,000-word report on the Profumo affair and discussed it with his senior Cabinet colleagues, newspapers carried pictures of the Prime Minister with a broad smile on his face. The smile looked a little forced but it was a pleasant contrast with the frown on the Opposition leader, Mr Harold Wilson’s face when he emerged from the Admiralty House after a two-hour study of the report the same day. Mr Wilson even complained about the circumstances in which he had read the report. Within hours word went round that Lord Denning had laid to rest all the rumours about the alleged moral misbehaviour of the other ministers.
This was the atmosphere in which the report was finally released shortly after midnight on Thursday. The first hurriedly prepared summaries on both radio and television reflected this relaxed atmosphere. Among the leading newspapers only the eight column banner in the Daily Express – “It’s Dynamite!” – fully captured the spirit of the document. In the context of British standards of public life it is indeed an explosive document even though it is not sensational in that it dismisses rumours of moral corruption in high places.
Evasion
To me the most damning part of the report appears to be the one that confirms the Opposition charge that the Government had been guilty of evasion. Lord Denning has established that Mr Macmillan himself tried unjustly to blame the security service for not passing on to him the information that had come into its possession. Its relevance is obvious if it is recalled that this was the burden of his self-defence in the House of Commons on June 17 when the Opposition motion of censure was debated.
Mr Macmillan first came into the picture when a senior executive of the News of The World called on his principal private secretary on February 1 and gave him highly relevant information concerning Mr Profumo’s relationship with Miss Keeler and the existence of the now famous “darling” letter written by him to her. On June 17 Mr Macmillan explained away his failure to act on this information with the statement that “my principal private secretary at once transmitted this information to the deputy head of the security service with a view to my receiving a full report immediately on my return” from Rome, where he had gone on a state visit.
Lord Denning’s finding is that the private secretary’s object was “simply to tell the security service about the call of the newspaper executive and to get any information which might be useful for him (the private secretary)” to report to the Prime Minister. His object was not to ask the security service for a report as some might think from what the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons on June 17, 1963. The security service did not understand that it was to make a report.
The security officers were aware of the danger that they would attract criticism if Mr Profumo’s association with Miss Keeler resulted in a scandal and if it was found that they had failed to bring to light the information they possessed. One of them had stated that in writing in a minute to the chief. But the head and deputy head of the service decided that it was essentially a political matter and since the Admiralty House was already seized of it there was nothing for them to do. In terms of a specific directive quoted by Lord Denning that they were strictly to limit their task to the defence of the realm as a whole, these officials had no alternative but to be content with the receipt of information passed on to them. Lord Denning has not only not blamed them but expressed the view that the security service must not pry into the private lives of citizens to avoid the risk of a police state.
Wrong Question
It has been known all along that the five ministers who met Mr Profumo on the eve of his lying statement to the House of Commons did not try to see the “darling” letter which was in the possession of the Sunday Mirror. Lord Denning goes further in his criticism of their role. According to him they asked of themselves the wrong question whether Mr Profumo had in fact committed adultery whereas the question should have been whether his conduct justified suspicion. Even in considering the wrong question “they did not regard themselves as conducting an investigation but rather as concerned to protect a colleague from rumours.”
Regarding this meeting of five ministers, Mr Macmillan conveyed a somewhat different impression in his speech on June 17. He then said: “what I said in my speech I will repeat. I thought it better that the examination that led up finally to the statement should be made by the chief whip and the law officers.” This statement can certainly be interpreted to mean that Mr Macmillan was referring to the discussions between them and Mr Profumo prior to this meeting. But the impression that the speech created was that the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General cross-examined Mr Profumo at the meeting as well.
So far the Home Secretary, Mr Henry Brooke, who has otherwise attracted a good deal of criticism and even ridicule since his elevation to this office after the great massacre of ministers in July 1960, had been free from blame in the Profumo affair. For one thing, it was not known that in terms of a directive of 1952 he was the head of the security service and for another it was a secret that on March 27 he had summoned the head of the service as well as the commissioner of police and been posted with all the information. He also did not put the Prime Minister wise. While Mr Macmillan will have to explain why he kept the fact of the Home Secretary being responsible for the security service secret from Parliament, Mr Brooke will have to explain why he did not pass on to the Prime Minister the information that came into his possession on March 27.
Thus it is reasonable to infer that as a result of the publication of the report the pressure on Mr Macmillan from within the Conservative party to retire will not ease. It is quite likely that there would not be the kind of revolt by the backbenchers as we witnessed last June. The pressure will not be less compelling for being subtle. The revolt was largely the result of widespread panic in the Conservative party which again was not solely the product of the Profumo affair. The reverses that the party had had in a series of by-elections over a year had softened the morale of the backbenchers, many of whom had been returned from marginal seats. The collapse of the Common Market negotiations on the success of which the Government had staked a great deal had contributed to the demoralisation.
While the embarrassment of the Prime Minister and some of the senior ministers is obvious, it remains to be seen whether the report would do any good to the electoral prospects of the Labour party. If popular reactions were guided wholly by rational considerations the Labour party would have nothing to fear since at no stage did the leadership attempt to take advantage of the wild rumours about other ministers. But the impression exists that the Labour party contributed to the atmosphere in which the worst came to be believed about everyone. This can cause some difficulty for the party.
Academic
It has all along seemed as if too much was being made of Miss Keeler’s statement that Dr Ward had asked her to find out from Mr Profumo when America would deliver nuclear weapons to West Germany. Lord Denning has not attached any importance to it at all. Here again Mr Wilson kept a cool head in a heated atmosphere. He never alleged any security leak had taken place. His case was that Mr Profumo could have become a security risk. By the time the affair came into open even that possibility was at best of academic interest.
Intrinsically the Profumo affair was trivial. It got blown up into a major scandal because of the way it was handled and his lying statement. This otherwise thorough inquiry by Lord Denning offers no explanation why Mr Profumo thought he could get away with it particularly after he, Lord Astor and Dr Ward had tried and failed to persuade Miss Keeler from selling sex story to newspapers. She demanded £5,000 which they were unwilling to pay. The price of silence was not too high.
The Times of India, 28 September 1963