Profumo affair

Mandy Rice-Davies saw the Profumo affair as an adventure, not a scandal

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