In the summer of ’61 John Profumo, Minister for War, enjoyed a brief affair with Christine Keeler…
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday 31 July 1963, Dr Stephen Ward was convicted at the Old Bailey on two counts alleging that he lived on the earnings of a prostitute. He was not in the dock but comatose in hospital. The previous night he had attempted suicide, because (as he said in a note) ‘after Marshall’s [the judge’s] summing up, I’ve given up all hope’. He died on Saturday 3 August, without regaining consciousness. Many observers of the proceedings thought the convictions did not reflect the evidence and that the trial was unfair, and this book will show that it breached basic standards of justice.
Geoffrey Robertson brings his forensic skills and a deeply felt sense of injustice to the case at the heart of the Profumo affair, the notorious scandal that brought down a government.
The funeral of Stephen Ward, at Mortlake Cemetery in August 1963, attracted only six mourners. This distinguished osteopath and skilled portrait artist, a favourite of London’s fashionable society throughout the 1950s, had died by his own hand. At the grave lay a wreath, made up of one hundred white carnations, and a card signed by Kenneth Tynan. It bore the simple inscription: To Stephen Ward, Victim of Hypocrisy
- Publisher's description
Read the review 'The Profumo Stitch-Up' in Socialism Today 176
