Why does the death of John Profumo make headlines 40 years after the scandal that bears his name?
As dusk fell on a warm Saturday evening at the beginning of the 1960s, Viscount Astor and his weekend guest John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, took a walk in the grounds of Astor’s grandiose Cliveden estate in Buckinghamshire. Both wore dinner jackets. At the pool they found a beautiful 19-year-old woman swimming naked. Her male companion had hidden her swimsuit. Spotting a towel by the edge, she swam to it and wrapped it around herself in the water, then climbed from the pool to retrieve her costume. Playfully, Astor and Profumo intercepted her but the laughing teenager easily eluded them. As the other guests arrived from dinner the floodlights were switched on. The scene — two prominent middle-aged Tories caught frolicking with a girl in a sudden blinding light — could serve as a metaphor for the era. According to the poet Philip Larkin, 1963 was the year sexual intercourse began. It was the year in which Harold Macmillan’s government faced a welter of accusations involvin
