Free Republic

I'm an over-the-road truck driver. That means I have lots of time to indulge myself in activities not given to ordinary mortals, such as listening gavel-to-gavel to the Senate's impeachment process (still in progress as of this writing). Most ordinary mortals do not enjoy (?) this luxury, because they have lives of their own: things like home, family, hobbies, jobs that don't permit radio or TV listening. But me, I'm a captive audience in my truck, so if I feel like listening, then listening is what I do. It makes the miles go by. In the course of my tuning...

The woman at the centre of the Profumo affair that helped define a decade, has died aged 75. Often presented her as a femme fatale behind the downfall of two powerful men, she spent much of her life trying to shake off that image. In 1963, she rocked the establishment when she had an affair with the Tory cabinet minister, John Profumo while also having a relationship with the Russian diplomat Yevgeny Ivanov at the height of the Cold War. Her life is the subject of a BBC series which will be filmed next year and outlines her upbringing in...

Fifty years ago, it was the Summer of Profumo in London, commencing with a ministerial resignation that brought down a Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and eventually his successor, Lord Home, too. Half-a-century on, it remains Britain's most famous sex scandal, and sufficiently potent that later this year Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton will unveil their West End musical on the subject. Here's what I had to say, with a personal reminiscence of the lady involved, in my obituary of John Profumo. This essay appears in my book Mark Steyn's Passing Parade:

...Fifty years after the Profumo affair erupted, Christine Keeler, now 71, has confessed she played a role in a high-placed spy ring... ...she says: 'However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it. The truth is that I betrayed my country. ...The scandal hit the headlines after seven shots were fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler in December 1962. It then emerged the then 19-year-old Keeler had been sleeping with former Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then 48, and a handsome Russian...