Her name is synonymous with sleaze and scandal but Christine Keeler – whose affair with a Cabinet minister helped bring down a government – once told a journalist she didn’t much enjoy sex.
Her son Seymour Platt gives a wry smile. ‘She’s quoted as saying that. Now while it’s an awful thing for me, as her son, to have to think about, I have had to come to terms with the fact that my mum did have sex – and more than once!
‘She did give that quote, but hand on heart, and given everything I know and have read about my mum, I’d say ‘rubbish’. She really enjoyed sex.
‘She would have said that because that was the mood she was in that day. Anybody that knew her would tell you that she could be difficult. There were times when she was difficult with me.’
Seymour, a business analyst who now lives in Ireland with his wife Lorraine and daughter Daisy, laughs as he recalls his last ever conversation with his mum, just a few days before she died in 2017, aged 75. She could barely breathe by then – ‘smoking absolutely killed her’ – but the woman at the centre of the Profumo Scandal was as contrary and unpredictable as ever.
First, she told him that he’d put on a bit of weight, and that he needed to shave. ‘I had a bit of stubble and she said, ‘I don’t like that. It looks very messy’.’ Then she came out with a line that few would expect from their mother, on her deathbed. ‘She said, ‘I still think about having a boyfriend, you know. I mean, if Brad Pitt turned up, I would…’ I said, ‘Oh shut up, Mum, please’, but that was my mum.’
Eight years on, it is noteworthy that Seymour, 53, flips between talking about ‘Mum’ and ‘Christine’. He says: ‘I’ve thought about that and I can’t tell you why that is. Maybe it’s because I’m always reading about ‘Christine’.’ Are the two women separate, in his head? That unforgettable image of Christine Keeler, astride an imitation Arne Jacobsen chair – a chair that is now in the V&A Museum, no less – clearly pops into it.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he says. ‘The woman on the chair is an icon, but she isn’t my mum. That woman is Christine Keeler. I never met Christine Keeler. I wasn’t alive for Christine Keeler.’
The Profumo Scandal that engulfed Keeler, and so many others, is still breathtaking – but so is the fact that the dust has not settled on that saga, more than 60 years later.
Since her death, Seymour has been on something of a mission to clear his mum’s name, by seeking to have her 1963 conviction for perjury overturned. She admitted having lied during the trial of a man called Lucky Gordon, who admitted assaulting her in court. Christine subsequently served six months in prison.
Her son and others have long argued that Keeler’s conviction – over something that was nothing to do with the Profumo affair – was a national scandal; the charges convenient to an establishment determined to, as Seymour puts it, ‘deflect and damn’.
‘If someone was jailed today in the circumstances my mother was, there would be uproar. This is a case of a victim being the one who goes to prison. But at the time it suited the establishment for her reputation to be trashed.’
Yet Seymour’s campaign has suffered a setback. The Criminal Case Review Commission has refused to refer his mother’s case to the Court of Appeal. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ he says. ‘One of the most upsetting things is that they said my mother had ample opportunity to set the record straight herself, in her lifetime. That’s awful. My mother never spoke much about her time in prison because it was the worst chapter of her life and she didn’t want to relive it.
‘And one of the reasons she didn’t appeal herself was because she felt – and had always felt – that the system was geared not to give Christine Keeler justice. She wasn’t wrong there either.
‘We hoped the CCRC would have taken the opportunity not just to correct a historic injustice, but to draw a line under the whole Profumo Scandal, and confirm my mother’s role in it – as a victim.’
He’s not giving up, however. The next step is a formal approach to the King, requesting a royal pardon. ‘Queen Camilla has done a lot of work with women who suffer violence, so we are hopeful.’
There is a moment in our interview when we discuss what his mum would make of his continued fight to restore her name. He chuckles. ‘I can see my mother standing here now, shouting, ‘Ooh Seymour, that’s my life. Why are you talking about my life?’ There’s no way she would let me do this if she were here. But she’s not here, and that’s why I’m doing it. My mum deserves justice.’
It does rather make you shudder to realise that Christine Keeler was just 17 – a year older than Seymour’s daughter Daisy – and working as a showgirl in a Soho cabaret club when she met osteopath and socialite Stephen Ward.
It was 1961, the height of the Cold War, when Ward introduced Keeler, a working-class girl with a troubled background to married war minister John Profumo and Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov. She went on to have flings with both, but when Profumo lied to Parliament about his association with her in 1963, it provoked the political scandal of the century. Harold Macmillan’s government collapsed within the year.
Born in Middlesex, Christine Keeler moved to London as a teenager and began working at Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho.
It was there she met Dr Stephen Ward, a high-flying London osteopath and fixer who ‘procured women’ for leading members of the Establishment.
He introduced her to Conservative War Minister John Profumo while at a party thrown by Lord and Lady Astor in 1961.
The pair hit the headlines after seven shots were fired at Ward’s house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler’s a year later in December 1962.
It emerged the then 19-year-old Keeler had been sleeping with Profumo, then 48, and at the same time handsome Russian spy Evgeny Ivanov.
But when the news broke, Profumo lied to the House of Commons about his affair.
He was soon found out and Keeler sold her story to the News of The World for £23,000.
In June 1963, he quit in disgrace, amid allegations Keeler had been asked by Ivanov to discover from the War Minister when the West Germans might receive U.S. nuclear missiles to be stationed on their soil.
Profumo had been a rising star of the Tory Party, close to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a favoured visitor at Buckingham Palace, a war hero and the dashing husband of actress Valerie Hobson, one of the great beauties of her day.
Ms Keeler’s other lovers included A-Team actor George Peppard, legendary womaniser Warren Beatty and Prisoner of Zenda star Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
She died aged 75 in December 2017.
There were many victims in the fallout. Stephen Ward – whom many believe to have been the first establishment scapegoat – took his own life in the final stages of the trial which found him guilty of living off the allegedly immoral earnings of Keeler and her then friend Mandy Rice-Davies. But Keeler was never a prostitute; a fairer assessment would be that she was a good-time girl, no more a ‘hooker’ than a WAG today.
Yet, at the highest levels, she was hung out to dry. Macmillan decried Christine as a ‘tart’. ‘She was vilified,’ Seymour agrees. ‘One front-page headline, in The People, called her a ‘worthless slut’. That is a strong front page.
‘Later, she was compared to Myra Hindley, a child killer. Today, we’d call it slut-shaming, and the fact that it’s recorded in Hansard [the official record of Parliament] is hard to get your head around.’
Hard for a loving son to live with, too, and Seymour is the first to admit that he leapt at the chance to move to his wife’s native Ireland two decades ago ‘in part because of the stigma of my mum’. He’s pleased that Daisy ‘can go to school and if she says her grandmother is Christine Keeler, everyone will say, ‘Who?’ It doesn’t have the same significance here.’
But the fact that Keeler had a criminal record – handed down the same year as the Profumo scandal – has always muddied the waters about how much she was responsible for her own fate.
Seymour had known that his mother had been imprisoned for lying under oath, but hadn’t been aware of some of the details until after she died.
The facts are these: Christine was in court giving evidence against a Jamaican jazz singer called Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon, who admitted he had assaulted her. Lucky Gordon has often been described as Christine’s ex-boyfriend. She always denied that this was the case, and if there were sexual relations she insisted it was because she was raped.
Having pored over his mum’s statements, Seymour says ‘stalker’ and ‘abuser’ would be a better description than ‘ex-boyfriend’.
It was established during the trial that Christine was terrified of Lucky. She was also under duress from two other men – who didn’t want the police to be looking into their lives – to conceal the fact that they were present during the attack.
‘So, yes, she lied, but the background is that she was a victim of abuse, who’d had pressure put on her. And crucially, we believe her lie wasn’t a material one – in that it didn’t affect the outcome of the trial, because the attack had already been proved.
‘My mother was told it was the first time in legal history that a victim had gone to prison for not saying who or what was at the scene of a crime when a crime took place. On that basis alone, she should never have been tried for perjury, but when you look at the fact that she was a victim of violence and stalking, it’s astonishing: the victim, who went to the police, ended up being the one jailed!’
Although Lucky Gordon was initially found guilty of attacking Christine, his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal.
‘But this was nothing to do with Christine,’ says Seymour. ‘It was because the prosecution – the police – didn’t turn up to present the case against him.’
If there was no outcry, Seymour argues, it was because Christine Keeler had already been painted as a liar and a slut and was already guilty, of everything, in the court of public opinion.
‘I do believe there was a conspiracy, but it was a societal one. Nobody cared that Christine Keeler went to prison, which I find the saddest part. Society said ‘Poor innocent man’ about Lucky. No. This guy had a long history of violence against women.’
Seymour says that his mother remained terrified of Lucky for her whole life. ‘I once moved into a flat with her. I remember coming home to find her putting lengths of carpet tacks over the window, so you couldn’t get in from outside. She said she’d had a sudden thought that Lucky Gordon might find her. This was around 1999.’
It’s rather sad to hear Seymour talk of how his mother was let down by pretty much every man she ever met – except him – starting with the father who abandoned her when she was three, and the stepfather who not only sexually abused her himself but allowed his friends to.
She was twice married and mental health issues were clearly a factor, ‘although not ones that stopped her being a loving and doting mother to me’.
She had a child, Jimmy, from her first marriage, but he was raised by his grandmother. Seymour’s account is sympathetic to his mother. ‘I think she suffered from post-natal depression. She gave Jim to her mum to look after, which she regretted.’
Seymour was born to her second husband, wealthy businessman Anthony Platt, in 1971. He grew up knowing that he had a half-brother. ‘But it was a distant relationship, and I think he completely disowned Mum. That would be my mum’s biggest regret – that they didn’t have a relationship.’
By the time Seymour was five his parents’ marriage was over, and his mother – who also had a troubled relationship with the taxman – was penniless. ‘Everything went to pieces,’ he explains. ‘Before, we’d had this lovely flat but suddenly we were in squats and then a council flat.’
He details how money was so tight they’d have to take a light bulb from room to room; ditto plugs. There was once an explosion as he tried to wire the solitary plug to another device.
What sort of mother was Christine? ‘She was funny, great company, great with my friends, mad as a box of badgers sometimes and a terrible cook – you’d break your teeth on her rice pudding – but she was a doting mother. I never once doubted that she loved me.
‘She could also be difficult – paranoid, sometimes. Maybe a little blue, as in depressed, but that’s not surprising given her life.’ He does point out that ‘my relationship with my mother changed when I became a man… I think she felt that at any time I was going to betray her too. But I never did, and I never will.’
It wasn’t just men who betrayed Christine Keeler. ‘Ironically, I think that the one person who did look out for my mum in 1963 – and my mum wouldn’t see it that way – was Mandy Rice-Davies,’ Seymour explains.
‘I know why Mum didn’t like Mandy. She always felt that there were elements that Mandy hadn’t told the truth about, but when you boiled them down, they were always small details – ones that she could have easily got wrong.
‘But what really did annoy Mum was when Mandy said, in her book, that Lucky was her boyfriend.’
Christine Keeler died as Christine Sloane – the surname she ‘borrowed’ from a street sign in her old stomping ground, London’s Sloane Square. Brad Pitt never did turn up, alas.
While Seymour regrets that he did not make it back from Ireland to be with her – ‘it was quite sudden’ – there is comfort in the fact that he and his family had visited just a few days before.
‘I don’t actually think Mum would have wanted me there, at the end,’ he says. He reckons she knew it was the last time they would be together. ‘I remember her saying to my wife, ‘Loz, look after my boy, will you? Look after my boy’.’
Like any dutiful son, he has
been ‘sorting out her affairs’ ever since. Only one remains: to clear her name.