Folklaw | The Profumo scandal scapegoat

There is a subtle common theme that emerges in this article '“ 1956. Parliament enacted the Sexual Offences Act in 1956, the year that Red Army tanks rolled into Hungary, Teddy Boys rocked around the clock and Eden orchestrated the last charge of the British Empire to liberate the Suez Canal.

Viscount Kilmuir introduced the Sexual Offences Bill to the House of Lords on 24 January 1956 to correct, consolidate and thereby improve the 'law of England and Wales relating to sexual crimes, to the ab-duction, procuration and prostitution of women...'. This new statute replaced much of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 and made significant changes to the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and Vagrancy Act 1898.

Life in high society reached a pinnacle in 1956 for the West End osteopath, Dr Stephen Ward. He had exchanged provincial practice in his hometown of Torquay for the glitter of the newsworthy jet set and purported to be the best osteopath in London. Among those he had treated were Sir Winston Churchill, Ava Gardner, Miss Elizabeth Taylor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Lord Astor. Ward also had a reputation as a talented portrait artist, who was commissioned to paint many members of the royal family, including the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Princess Alexandra, the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Snowdon.

Wild parties and love affairs played an integral part of Ward's artistic lifestyle in the new morality of the swinging sixties when the boundaries of what were considered appropriate were expanded. Good time girl Christine Keeler was living at Ward's Wimpole Mews flat from June 1961 until September or October. Mandy Rice-Davies, another young woman of easy virtue, had also lived with him. This sex charged bohemian existence continued until 1962 when news of Keeler's infamous love triangle with Captain Yevgeni Ivanov (Soviet naval attaché based at the Russian Embassy) and Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, shocked the world.

The establishment desperately needed a scapegoat. To his detriment, Ward, of his own volition, had assisted the secret service with information about Ivanov, which placed the society doctor at the centre of the sex scandal. When news of his infidelity first broke, Profumo denied all impropriety but later admitted that he had lied to the House, his colleagues, his constituents, and then he did the honourable thing and resigned. In the political fallout, the authorities concentrated their investigations on Ward to deflect attention '“ but to this day nobody knows who ordered this. He was charged under section 30 of the Act. The charge sheet read: 'He, being a man, on diverse dates between January 1st 1961, and June 8th 1963, knowingly lived wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution at 17, Wimpole Mews, W.1.'

Section 30 states:

(1) it is an offence for a man knowingly to live wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution.

(2) For the purpose of this section a man who lives with or is habitually in the company of a prostitute, or who exercises control, direction, or influence over a prostitute's movements in a way which shows he is aiding, abetting, or compelling her prostitution with others, shall be presumed to be knowingly living on the earnings of prostitution unless he proves to the contrary.

Living off the immoral earning of prostitution has traditionally been regarded a seedy offence associated with the criminal classes (See 'Don't spare the rod', Solicitors Journal 156/32, 14 August 2012). Ward was later charged with further offences (procuring women for prostitution) and committed for trial at the Old Bailey, beginning on 22 July 1963. At his trial, the accused made no secret of his low standard of moral conduct. His defence counsel, James Burge, asked Ward: 'You are not disguising the fact that you are a thoroughly immoral man? '“ Yes.' But he emphatically denied introducing women for intercourse and living off immoral earnings.

There was no concrete proof that Keeler and Rice-Davies were prostitutes but, even if they were, the negligible sums they paid to Ward by way of rent were insignificant compared to the sums he spent on them. Moreover, Ward earned substantial sums of money as a skilled and successful osteopath, not to mention royalties from his paintings '“ so why would he need an income stream from prostitution?

Ward took a fatal overdose after the judge's summing up and was found guilty on two counts of living off immoral earnings (those of Keeler and Rice-Davies) in his absence. There were findings of not guilty on one similar charge, and of not guilty on one of inciting to procure and another of attempting to procure. After his death on 3 August 1963, the trial was formally closed with no sentence pronounced.

2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the Profumo Scandal but as far as sex scandals go, the Profumo affair was no more disgusting than those of recent years. However, ask most people to consider the events of 1963 and they will instinctively think of it '“ the espionage element perhaps being the accentuating factor. The British establishment went in daily fear of Soviet infiltration, heightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis a year or so earlier, but the arrest of Stephen Ward was not an extreme security measure to meet the apparent security threat, rather a way of vilifying an innocent man from Torquay to deflect a sordid government sex scandal.