FROM LONDON:

BERNARD LEVIN draws the moral

(if that's the word)

from the Profumo case

SOME OF THE PEOPLE,

ALL OF THE TIME..

mattachine REVIEW

Shortly before Mr John Profumo decided to make, if I may so express myself, a clean, breast of it, it was possible to isolate and observe a perfect example of the way in which Rumour operates. I was assured by three separate people in the course of a single afternoon that that week's Paris-Match was arriving in Britain with twenty-four pages of the original printing torn out, and that the missing supplement contained a detailed account of the whole affair, lavishly illustrated with pictures of the two protagonists in flagrante delicto and alfresco to boot. The pictures were described to me in detail, as was the article, and a list of other names mentioned in the course of it was thrown in gratis.

Next day I was lunching at a house where their Paris-Match is sent direct from Paris, not ordered from an English newsagent, and it was possible to see exactly what it contained on the affair. It was a single two-column picture (head and shoulders) of Miss Keeler, with a 200-word caption beneath it, which caption did nothing more than vaguely link Miss Keeler's name with Mr Profumo's, and hint that some people in Britain were saying that he had something to do with her disappearance. 'Shelved? No!' it concluded. Well, it was right there. Thus, in the space of not more than twenty-four hours (for Paris-Match, with its one mutilated page, was almost immediately in the London newsagents), a single perfectly ordinary photograph with a largely meaningless caption had become a twenty-four page, fully illustrated guide to la dolce vita anglice beside Lord Astor's swimming pool. This, however, is only half the story of Rumour's activities this spring. At about the same time, I was hearing equally detailed accounts of the evidence (which could not, by law, be published) being given at the hearing of the Argyll divorce case; these included synopses of the afternoon in which the ownership of the pubic hair (not to mention the male member) in the now celebrated though

still unseen photographs was earnestly disputed, and the judge's reply to the Duchess's request to be excused answering when she was asked what she was actually doing in the photograph. And all this was perfectly true. I begin like this because it is important to bear in mind throughout any discussion of these matters that any story one hears about anything or anybody involved may be entirely true, entirely untrue, or anything in between. One can hear, for instance, a story that the man whose head was missing from the relevant photograph in the Argyll case is a certain Minister. It may be right; or wrong. (Or conceivably both; it might be another Minister.)

Anyway, with that said it is possible to cast a discreet glance at the manners and morals of those whom Mr E. M. Forster called 'them persons what governs us them dukes and duchesses and archbishops and generals and captains of industry', and perhaps draw a conclusion or two.

We can clear one or two obstructions from the runway immediately. The Profumo case, of course, raised questions of security; one may easily conclude, without overstressing things, that it is undesirable, from a national point of view, for the Minister of War to be sharing the services of a prostitute with a Soviet diplomat. To take this a point or two further, we might even assume that the latest achievement of our security services, in not bothering to tell the Prime Minister that his Secretary of State for War was a-mollicking when the sukebird was out, surely brings within reach at last the happy moment when the whole fatuous, perishing lot of them, bowler-hats and all, will be cleared out into some trade where their incompetence does not go quite so close to treachery as it does at the moment, and one or two of them hanged into the bar. gain, pour encourager les autres. (I am of course assuming here that the Prime Minister was telling the truth in Monday's debate. But if you can't trust the 5