“But I slowly learned, taught by experience, that over time it is the lies of silence that corrupt the truth in minor as well as major ways.”

the Profumo affair! A Tory MP has been caught screwing a minor again. For a change, this one is female, & clocking in at seventeen, late by their standards (Peter Jaconelli, Ted Heath, Leon Brittan, Harvey Proctor, Harry Wild et-al & the penchant for boy buggery, & worse). Although never prosecuted, John Profumo (then Minister of War) was forced to resign on the affair’s exposure, & it is generally accepted that this scandal precipitated the Conservative’s election loss to Labour that then ensued.

“it was never a question of if he would be set up, only a question of when. He was a man who knew too much. And not just spying secrets. Through his web of vice he knew the sexual perversions of many of the people who ran the world, including unelected ‘kitchen cabinet’ confidants. He had photographs, drawings of people engaging in all sorts of sex games. It didn’t turn him on – it was just part of the manipulation game. Many were destroyed but I believe some are still locked in Whitehall. Open government? Don’t make me laugh.”

the people and the bodies, all shapes and sizes, would change but the protocol stayed much the same. Drinks, usually lots of them, food and whine and sex in every which way. It was always a posh crowd who would arrive in chauffeur driven Bentleys or Rolls Royces. It seemed to me then that having money dictated that you had group sex as often as you possibly could.”

The entire “affair” was trivialized as a licentious cavort with a decent luster of sass (the pretty girl about town) to keep the punters grinning “well you would too wouldn’t you”. As Keeler relays, much’ much worse things were going on behind the manor walls of the powerful & influential & their Conservative compatriots. Characters such as Mariella Novotny (the Government’s “Chief Whip” & the infamous Stephen Ward were literally lashing masked frotters in mansions, sexually humiliating willing Tory MP’s in front of groups of engrossed onlookers along with other weird, sordid & insalubrious exploits, including the ‘Man in the Mask’, a Tory grandee or minister that was alleged to be an aristocrat (I have yet to discover the identity from Keeler’s account) & other freaks.

“and their was the well known actress and entertainer, something of a show-stopper, who always went around with a group of theatre boys. She liked to bugger them, and other than that, I will have to leave it to your imagination. But that was what she enjoyed.”

“and their was the well known actress and entertainer, something of a show-stopper, who always went around with a group of theatre boys. She liked to bugger them, and other than that, I will have to leave it to your imagination. But that was what she enjoyed.”

Novotony died young in a suspicious incident (the ol’ vomit choke, face down, on her bed whilst ostensibly eating jelly, which is a test for credulity) & Stephen Ward took his own life according to the official narrative. Stephen was a master of sexual blackmail & human compromise operations, a procurer & pimp as well as being a Soviet spy. Novotny’s “little black book” was alleged to be rotund with alarming contacts that were domestic as well as international… the Epstein similitude is inevitable at this stage. & yes, the analogy is striking if not identical.

“Stephen could always sense peoples sexual tastes – and egg them on, make them go further than they might of otherwise. It gave him control because people would sometimes be shocked at just how far they would go. Others simply enjoyed it, loved rough sex and all the bondage and whips. Stephen knew all the Masonic handshakes and he said that at some of the parties, the girls would just wear leather Masonic aprons. ‘They would be flicked up and down like a sporran,’ he laughed.”

“some of the women Stephen was involved with were heavily into sadistic sex and there were ‘black magic parties,”

Keeler is on the outskirts of this nastier stuff, just a pretty girl kicking-off her heels in the “swinging sixties” getting ensnared in far dodgier shit than she can decipher before its too late. But her vantage into the insidious craft of kompromat & scampering, louche Westminster gimps is very valuable & insightful material indeed.

The manipulation she suffers from the awful Stephen Ward, as well as her disconcerting Stockholm Syndrome-like relationship with this intensely unpleasant character is also a worthy study into Ghislaine Maxwell captivation & enthrallment.

The establishments utilization of an unwitting Keeler in the cover-up & her carefully inculcated role in the diversion from far greater salacity & perversion that was rutting rampant, easily oiled & orchestrated with the readily exploitable eye-candy, glamour & fantasy, – did the job in creating the ultimate sensationalized distraction.

Away from the disease platter, Christine expounds a vivid account of London in the sixties & some of the shit endured as an attractive woman in the era, tribulations that she weathers with considerable resilience.

A lot to learn here.

Until about the time I arrived in London, public life in Britain was run by a cabal of men who had known one another since Eton or Oxford, married into one another’s families and spent their weekends in one another’s country houses. Just think of Bill Astor’s Cliveden and his weekly guest list. They thought they could behave as badly as they wanted, confident that well-connected friends would shield them from exposure. When MP Tom Driberg was tried at the Old Bailey for sexually molesting two Scottish coalminers, no mention of the case appeared in the newspapers: Lord Beaverbrook, Dribergs mentor, persuaded the other newspaper owners to stay quiet. It was not a matter of not scaring the horses – it was a matter of not scaring the voters”.

Christine Keeler/Douglas Thompson, 2012, John Blake, 297 pages