LIKE the Beatles, the Chatterley trial and Carnaby Street, the Profumo scandal was a landmark that helped define 1960s Britain.
It was one of the key political scandals of the age. And it caught the public imagination to such an extent that even the report of the subsequent judicial inquiry became a bestseller.
The passing yesterday of one of its key figures, Mandy Rice-Davies, brought it all irresistibly back to mind.
John Profumo was Harold Macmillan's war minister when he embarked on an affair with 19-year-old Christine Keeler, who herself was intimately acquainted with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet attaché. Profumo lied to the Commons about any impropriety; when he finally came clean, and resigned, in June 1963, the Herald wrote that this was "the most embarrassing and perhaps damaging thing" that had happened to Supermac's government.
Rice-Davies was Keeler's close friend; when it was put to her, at the trial of the tragic Stephen Ward, that Lord (Bill) Astor had denied having an affair with her, she retorted crisply, "He would, wouldn't he?" - a phrase that would forever ensure her inclusion in anthologies of quotations.
In the verdict of the Oxford Companion to 20th Century British Politics, the Profumo scandal marked a sea-change in attitudes towards secrecy about the private lives of public figures. Mandy Rice-Davies played her part in this, and she cleverly used her celebrity to lasting effect.
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