Sixty years on: How the Profumo affair ended the age of deference

These days our sex scandals seem like another symbol of Britain’s national decline. They are diminished, petty and tawdry, certainly compared to the grand affair that took its name from its main actor: John Profumo.

Sixty years ago today, on 5 June 1963, Profumo rose in the House of Commons to admit that he had lied to his wife, his cabinet colleagues, and the nation, about an affair with a 19-year-old model, and was therefore resigning and retreating into obscurity.

In the early 1960s Profumo was a rising star in the durable but tired Tory government of that eminent old Edwardian Harold Macmillan. He had enjoyed an exceptionally good war – serving in North Africa and landing in Normandy on D-Day, exactly 19 years before his spectacular fall.

His early political and social career had been as blessed by good fortune as his military one: educated at Harrow and Oxford, and elected as Tory MP for Kettering in a by-election, he was the ‘baby of the House’ – the youngest member – arriving in time to take part in the legendary Norway debate in 1940 that brought down Neville Chamberlain and elevated Winston Churchill to power.