Sex scandals ain’t wot they used to be

The death last week of Christine Keeler, a central player in the Profumo scandal which helped bring about the end to thirteen years of Tory rule in the early 1960s, can be seen as another salutary reminder of Britain’s decline. To put it simply: even sex scandals ain’t wot they used to be.

British decadence is usually measured by such dull yardsticks as GDP, the fall in value of the pound, withdrawal from the far flung outposts of Empire, and the decision – taken by the then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan just before the Profumo affair broke – to apply for membership of the Common Market, today’s European Union. But the drop off in quality of the sex scandals that regularly embarrass our ruling caste is an equally valid sign of  decline and fall.

Back in the day when Britain still ruled an Empire embracing one quarter of the globe, and national government was firmly in the tight grasp of a tiny circle of noblemen, sex scandals – when they could not be safely hushed up – were earth shattering events, causing the disgrace and even deaths of statesmen, the fall of governments, and tectonic shifts in social attitudes to sexuality and human frailty.