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. These are the older Mandy’s hitherto unheard reflections on the seedy, glamorous world that circled the house of the society osteopath Stephen Ward and his high-profile connections. Its antics became public in 1963, with both Keeler and Rice-Davies – models and good-time girls – smeared as prostitutes by an indignant press that couldn’t get enough of them.
Listening, you begin to understand why, despite the fierce media heat, some inner Teflon prevented Rice-Davies from being badly burned. Arriving at court for Ward’s trial (he was charged with allegedly living off the girls’ immoral earnings), she saw some people throwing eggs at Keeler, and decided the same thing mustn’t happen to her: ‘So when I got out of the car I put on a big smile and waved and nobody threw any eggs.’
Unlike the more vulnerable Keeler, who drifted towards London’s cabaret scene from an impoverished and difficult childhood, Rice-Davies had precocious notions of adventure. Aged 14, she was a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘I’d read all these books, I was a bookworm… I really wanted to be part of something glamorous myself.’ By 16 she was forging a letter giving her father’s permission for her to work in Murray’s cabaret club in Soho, where she first met Keeler. Before long she was plunged into a surreal, sexualised milieu, in which older, powerful men conducted compartmentalised dalliances with teenage mistresses.
Wark provides the essential context of the Profumo affair, but wisely lets her late subject do most of the talking: Rice-Davies had a gift for skewering a character sharply but without malice. She describes Ward in the argot of the era as ‘a great gossip queen although he wasn’t a queen. His principles were a little wavery. A lot of his relationships were quite temporary’. Like a latter-day Lorelei Lee, the younger Mandy attracted older suitors bearing lavish gifts. She reflects on their awful lies and lapses with unusual indulgence: Lord Astor ‘leapt’ on her without warning, she said, but ‘the mitigating circumstances’ were that his wife was heavily pregnant ‘and I think maybe he was feeling a little frustrated’. A love interest arrived in the unlikely shape of the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, who gave her a white Jaguar and a forged Irish driving licence for her 17th birthday. Only after his sudden death did she realise that his ‘lodger’ Audrey was in fact his wife. The aftermath of Rachman’s death was the one time when her composure cracked: she attempted suicide.
In the end, however, she became the great survivor. Ward killed himself before his trial finished; Macmillan’s government fell; and Keeler was haunted by the scandal and dogged with depression. But Rice-Davies married, moved to Tel Aviv, had a varied career as a businesswoman, actress and author, and gave every appearance of being happy. The events of 1963 followed her around ‘like a poodle’, she said, without any real resentment – yappy, I suppose, but still much smaller than her.
Some 21 years later, at 2.54 a.m. on 12 October 1984, the British government was rocked by something much more shockingly literal: the bomb at Brighton’s Grand Hotel, in which the Provisional IRA attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet during the Conservative party conference. The architect of the explosion was an IRA member called Patrick Magee, who had concealed a time-delayed explosive in the bath panel of room 629 about three weeks earlier.
The Northern Irish novelist Glenn Patterson has expertly written and narrated a podcast on the story, demonstrating high alertness for tension and detail. The grim aftermath of the bomb was splashed across the news – five dead, more than 30 injured – with Thatcher emerging jarred but indefatigable from the devastation. Yet Patterson is also preoccupied with what took shape unseen in the long approach: the mindset behind the IRA’s meticulous planning or the twists of chance that drew conference-goers closer to or further from the waiting bomb.
Donald Maclean, the president of the Scottish Conservatives, checked in to room 629 with his wife Muriel. He was blasted into another floor of the hotel but survived, while she died from her injuries a few weeks later. Magee says that for him the operation ‘was never a personal matter’. Yet taking in the weight of lives his blast scarred or destroyed, it rings hollow: planting a bomb seems the most personal act imaginable.
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