The British establishment's Profumo conspiracy

[Peter Presland]

There is rollicking humour as well as cold rage in Robertson's account of the injustice. He shows that the judge in the case made repeated improper interventions in the trial, and misdirected the jury on both the evidence and the law most grievously in the definition of prostitution. The judge's summing up was so cruelly biased that it drove Ward to take a fatal overdose.

Although a recent report, posted on this forum, reveals that Ward was almost certainly murdered by a paid agent working for the security and intelligence services.

Yes. It's here. It's from a new book co-authored by Stephen Doril - former partner of Lobster's Robin Ramsey and always worthy of attention IMO. The book benefits from the authors having been 'given sight of' the trial transcripts [though still sealed from public view - hmm] + US and other documents.

A few snippets from the Prologue:

....Stephen Ward never heard the verdict. By the time it was handed down, he was in hospital on life support, following the barbiturate overdose that was to kill him. A distinguished observer wrote at the time that, There were many people in Britain who, on hearing the news, felt a little ashamed, a little diminished . . .'

The writer Henry Fairlie defined the British Establishment as A small group of men who use their contacts and influence to put a stop to the things they disapprove of, to promote the reliable, and to preserve the status quo.' Though it has been described as being time-hallowed, the Establishment had the odour as much of corruption as of sanctity as it still does all these years later. It provided the principal villains in the Profumo Affair.
Talking with a friend in his last conscious hours, Ward had said, Someone had to be sacrificed, and it was me. One or two people can still vindicate me, but when the Establishment want blood, they get it.'


....Our investigation suggests that the public never learned the true facts about the Profumo case, and remained woefully uninformed about the role of the British security and intelligence services.

We reached these conclusions by compiling our own dossier, based on many dozens of fresh interviews. Apart from the new American documents, we were permitted for the first time to see official transcripts of the Ward trial, a record that had always been denied to researchers. Finally, we obtained a typewritten outline for a memoir Ward himself assembled shortly before he died. Part of it was written by hand in Brixton Prison and taken out in sections by a visiting friend, part was apparently dictated into a tape recorder. Some of what he claimed may have been self-serving, less than the truth, but it is evident that he was used, then made a scapegoat while sordid truths about the great and the good' were covered up in both Britain and the United States. This book is an effort to open a window on an episode the Establishment preferred kept tightly shut.