Dirty tricks campaigns

There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English Affair, which is set to become the standard work.

He has found new material — the police files on Perec Rachman and Charles Clore, for example — and, as his subtitle suggests, he is big on historical context. His book is elegantly arranged in two parts, the first and longer of which is devoted to setting the scene and introducing the cast (‘Good-Time Girls’, ‘Hacks’, ‘Spies’ and so on), before the curtain goes up on the drama itself, which he calls a ‘corrupt, contemptible sequence of events’, involving prurience and snobbery, ‘insolence, envy and the politics of revenge’.