AFTER mountains of column inches, books, a movie, even a musical, the early life and times of Christine Keeler can still draw a crowd. Audiences for a Sunday night BBC drama about her are now nearing population of Scotland levels.

Last week’s episode featured the famous photoshoot of Keeler apparently naked astride an Arne Jacobsen chair. As the drama showed, she was wearing knickers. Keeler had always maintained this was the case, saying: “Although the illusion was that I was totally naked, I wasn’t.”

The episode was a good enough hook for a Sunday paper to print shots from the original photoshoot and a screen grab from last Sunday, complete with underwear on show.

Some have hailed The Trial of Christine Keeler for its on the money looks at the politics and fashion of the time. All that striding down corridors meant to be the Commons, the fevered conversations between Keeler’s War Minister lover, John Profumo, and the chief whip, the shift dresses and kitten heels, the bouffant hair. Then there is the sex, oodles of it.

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The drama, written, produced and directed by women, is different from what has gone before in that it tells the story from Keeler’s point of view. As such, it has been lauded as the most feminist take on the Keeler story to date, prompting many to look afresh at the story of the minister and the showgirl, who died in 2017.

Separately, Keeler’s son wants the Home Secretary to review his mother’s conviction for perjury and grant a posthumous pardon. “At the time of her trial she was very young and very naive,” Seymour Platt told The Times. “By today’s measure the outcome of that would be very different. We don’t punish victims in the same way we did then.”

One of the stars of the series, James Norton, who plays osteopath Stephen Ward, said the Profumo affair had to be looked at in light of the current #MeToo movement against sexual exploitation and harassment.

Certainly, the most shocking aspect of the series is not the sex – there really is nothing to frighten the horses there – but how young the women are. Keeler was 19 when she met Profumo. Her on-off friend Mandy Rice-Davies, she of the “He would, wouldn’t he?” quotation, was two years younger. The men around them were middle-aged or older.

The men were vastly more privileged and powerful. Profumo, an old Harrovian and Oxford graduate, had been tipped as a future Prime Minister. He was wealthy, connected and firmly part of the Establishment. Keeler was none of these things. She grew up in poverty and went straight back there.

She had a tolerate-hate relationship with the scandal that made her infamous. She earned from it, managing to write no fewer than five books on the subject, while professing to be sick and tired of hearing about it. Her response on hearing of the new BBC production was “Oh God, not that again.”

READ MORE: The trial of Christine Keeler reviewed

It is tempting to imagine what might have happened had the scandal happened today rather than 1963. The story would have broken on some obscure website before finding its way into the mainstream media. Twitter armies, for and against the protagonists, would form; PR firms would be engaged. One would like to think the age and other differences would be noted, and that there would be more sympathy for the teenage Keeler, but how can we be sure?

Her son believes victims today are not “punished” in the same way they were then. Really? How about the recent case of a 19-year-old woman from the Midlands who alleged she had been raped by a group of men in Ayia Napa, only to be convicted of lying after she retracted the claim. She says police pressured her into withdrawing the statement.

Victim blaming is just changing form, not going away. Tomorrow sees the release of the film Bombshell, which tells the true story of how one of the most powerful men in the media, the late Roger Ailes, founder of Fox News, was forced out after claims of sexual harassment were made against him.

In one scene, a young woman (a fictional creation) takes the Megyn Kelly character to task for not speaking out sooner when it happened to her. “Did you know what your silence would mean for us, the rest of us?” Kelly is asked.

The real Kelly had her say later. Her first response was to call the Bombshell scene "b*******" and say it was written by a man, but on reflection she did not want it taken out. “I do wish I had done more,” she said. Yet the harassment of Kelly did not happen when she was in a position of power. That's the point. It was more than likely speaking out would have had no impact.

The lesson from Kelly’s experience, as with so many others, is that you do the best you can when you can. That goes for Christine Keeler, too. You could argue that she was a victim of circumstance, of the press, of the powerful men around her.

Yet if you read or hear interviews with Keeler, or just watch the BBC drama, she does not come across as a victim. She was not coerced into sleeping with any of her lovers. She pleaded guilty to perjury. Keeler might have been naive but she was never a fool.

To cement her now as a victim does her a disservice, if nothing else because it reduces her life to a scandal. Her life went on.

She continues to matter, as does the affair as a rare example of the Establishment failing to protect one of its own, Profumo. He ended his career when he told the Commons there was “no impropriety whatsoever” in his “acquaintanceship” with Keeler.

There could yet be more to say, though not perhaps on Keeler. An intriguing footnote to the case came in 2018 when it emerged that the evidence on which the 1963 Denning report into the Profumo affair was based could have been released under the 30-year rule. Instead, the period of secrecy was extended till 2063.

Some of us watching this Sunday may not be around for the next instalment in 43 years' time, but courtesy of this new drama, and Keeler’s refusal to go quietly, people will still know her name. That is a victory of sorts.