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The British establishment's Profumo conspiracy
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Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK by Geoffrey Robertson review

This coruscating account of the miscarriage of justice at the heart of the Profumo affair is written with gusto and gallows humour

By Richard Davenport-Hines

The Guardian, Wednesday 4 December 2013 09.30 GMT

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/de...son-review

Quote:Stephen Ward was the fashionable osteopath who, as punishment for introducing the minister for war, Jack Profumo, to his young nemesis Christine Keeler, was framed by the police on "vice" charges and hounded to death in 1963. Ward was an avid attention seeker, an incorrigibly indiscreet chatterbox with a mischievous streak, who would revel in the attention that he is receiving 50 years after his Old Bailey trial. Andrew Lloyd Webber is bringing out a musical honouring him. Written by no less than Christopher Hampton and Don Black, and directed by Richard Eyre, the play is an apotheosis for a scapegoat who was denounced in court as "a thoroughly filthy fellow" and was ostracised by his friends.

Geoffrey Robertson, the human rights barrister, has written a coruscating account of the miscarriage of justice centred on Ward. He shows how the Conservative home secretary Henry Brooke summoned the head of MI5 and the police commissioner of Scotland Yard to the Home Office and instructed them to "get Ward", as Robertson says, "for any offence that he could possibly have committed". Ward's crimes, so far as the devoutly Christian home secretary was concerned, were fornication, Godlessness and blabbing information to Labour politicians about Profumo. Ward's telephone was bugged, his patients were placed under surveillance and 140 witnesses were interviewed so that the police could frame Ward as a pimp.
Only recently, after the deaths of the last policemen involved, has it been possible to give the full story of police threats to witnesses, their concoction of evidence and barefaced lies. Little has changed in the Metropolitan police's handling of some high profile cases, it may be thought, and it is timely to be reminded of police misconduct in cases with political ramifications.

The prosecution of Ward was launched for political expediency. Laws and legal procedures were manipulated to produce an unjust verdict. After a string of witnesses had traipsed into the witness box to lie about Ward, he was convicted on two counts of living on the earnings of prostitutes, namely Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. This is a continuing injustice to these two women who, as the law stood in 1963, and by any reasonable judgment now, were never prostitutes. They were perfectly capable of making their own choices about men, and far from indiscriminate in their boyfriends. It is hateful misogyny to call them "tarts" or "whores", as people did, and journalists still do.

Ward's prosecutor and judge could not imagine women enjoying sex, or understand why women might "perform sexual acts", in the prim phrase of 1963, unless they were grateful wives or paid sex-workers. In comparable class discrimination, the prosecution did not seek testimony from the government minister, the film star, the aristocrats and tycoons who had been boyfriends of Keeler and Rice-Davies. They did dredge up and humiliate a witness who resembled Harry Enfield's character Mr Cholmondley-Warner and was deemed too suburban to need crown protection.

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.

Robertson's chief villain is the then lord chief justice, Lord Parker of Waddington. He initiated the policy, which continues to this day, of refusing to allow transcripts of the trial to be made available. It is, Robertson says, "the only public trial in British history which is subject to this enforced secrecy, and there can only be one reason, namely to stop researchers from appreciating its unfairness". The splendidly redoubtable Rice-Davies used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the transcript of her own testimony. It arrived with all the names that she mentioned in open court even Keeler's redacted in thick black ink by some time-wasting jobsworth. Such is the obsessive commitment to suppressing the truth about Ward's trial.

Parker's other machinations against Ward are crucial to Robertson's book. In devious manoeuvres which Robertson summarises with glorious lucidity Parker acted to prevent the Ward jury from knowing that Keeler had perjured herself in another criminal trial and that her testimony against Ward was worthless. Parker wanted to protect the policeman in charge of the case from the revelation that they had coerced her into perjury in both cases. More than that, on grounds of supposed public morality, he wanted to oblige the government by ensuring Ward's conviction. Parker's ruthless deceptions at this time almost beggar belief.

The cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, and reforms instituted by recent lord chief justices, mean that the judiciary could not behave now as it did 50 years ago. Police misconduct, by contrast, is as untrammelled as ever. And the political influences and newspaper brouhaha that can contaminate trial by jury have not been eliminated.

This polemic comes with endorsements from two former directors of public prosecutions. "A must-read for all those concerned to understand how miscarriages of justice can arise," says Keir Starmer. "A wonderfully clear discussion of a very grim period in British criminal justice a thriller with a dark ending," adds Starmer's predecessor Ken Macdonald. It is to be hoped that the Criminal Case Review Commission refers Ward's conviction to the court of appeal.

For those who have a prior interest in the framing and show trial of Stephen Ward this is a tremendous and thrilling book. I could not sleep for excitement after reading it at one sitting. Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK is written with punchiness, gusto, incisive forensic analysis, and deadly gallows humour befitting its subject. Anyone who wants a thumping, indignant read as an antidote to Yuletide complacence should be given this polemic in their Christmas stocking

So much for the claim, a stock-in-trade of left-gatekeepers in particular, that large establishment conspiracies, contemporaneous with the Dallas coup, are conspicuous only by their absence. Here is a massive one, within one half of the core Anglosphere, which continues, like the Dallas one, to this day.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"

Joseph Fouche
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The British establishment's Profumo conspiracy - by Paul Rigby - 16-12-2013, 07:37 AM

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