The Tory Anarchist

John Profumo, former British secretary of war and center of a sex-and-spies scandal in the early ’60s, has died. He was cut from a cloth very different from that of today’s politicians, as the New York Times obit remarks:

…after his fall, he withdrew permanently from public office, refused to discuss the scandal that ruined him as a politician and, instead, turned to charitable work among the poor in the hardscrabble East End of London. He achieved a degree of rehabilitation in 1975 when he was honored as a Commander, Order of the British Empire.

Unlike more modern politicians, he refrained from publishing memoirs or even rebutting allegations about his association with Christine Keeler, a prostitute he met at an upscale party.

I haven’t seen “Scandal,” the 1989 film based on the Profumo affair, but I do know Dusty Springfield’s “Nothing Has Been Proved,” from its soundtrack, which summarizes the story in about 4 minutes and 40 seconds. But if you’re going to dabble in ’80s Dusty (beyond “What Have I Done to Deserve This,” that is), the melancholically exuberant “In Private” is the tune I’d recommend, and that’ll serve as the song of the day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 8:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized, the dead. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.