In the decades since the Profumo scandal gripped a nation, Mandy Rice-Davies has been fixed in the public imagination largely in the form of one verbal comeback and a photo. The comeback – ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ – came after being told by a barrister in court that Lord Astor had denied sleeping with her. The photo was of an 18-year-old Rice-Davies, sleekly cat-eyed and beehive-haired, in the back seat of a car with her friend Christine Keeler, who had triggered a public frenzy by sleeping with the war minister John Profumo at the same time as a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov.
Rice-Davies said the events of 1963 followed her around ‘like a poodle’ – yappy, but much smaller than her
She died in 2014, so it’s something of a revelation to hear her voice arising so confidently from the radio, in a programme hosted by Kirsty Wark and based on Dictaphone tapes discovered by Rice-Davies’s daughter.
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