CHRISTINE KEELER, FORMER MODEL AT HEART OF BRITAIN’S PROFUMO AFFAIR, DIES AT 75:

Keeler, then a teenage model and showgirl, became famous for her role in the 1963 scandal that rocked the establishment when she had an affair with the Tory cabinet minister John Profumo and a Russian diplomat at the same time at the height of the cold war. Profumo was eventually forced to resign after lying to parliament about the affair.

Keeler’s son, Seymour Platt, 46, told the Guardian she died on Monday at the Princess Royal university hospital in Farnborough: “My mother passed away last night at about 11.30pm.”

She had been ill for several months, and suffered from the lung disease COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

The past really is a foreign country, given John Profumo’s response to the scandal,  particularly in light of this fall’s endlessly recurring headlines. As Mark Steyn noted in his obit for Profumo (which also addresses Keeler’s sad later years), who died at age 91 in 2006:

There was no comeback, and no attempt at one. He accepted that his career was ruined and never sought public sympathy. As extraordinary as his downfall was, the aftermath was unique. On June 5th 1963 he resigned from the government, from Parliament and from the Queen’s Privy Council. Not long afterwards, he contacted Toynbee Hall, a charitable mission in the East End of London, and asked whether they needed any help. He started washing dishes and helping with the children’s playgroup, and he stayed for 40 years. He disappeared amid the grimy tenements of east London and did good works till he died. And, with the exception of one newspaper article to mark Toynbee Hall’s centenary, he never said another word in public again.

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In 1963, “Profumo” was shorthand for establishment hypocrisy. Across 40 years, he reclaimed the narrative, as a story of shame and redemption, of acting honorably, making the best of a sticky wicket and all the other allegedly obsolescent virtues of his class the sex and hookers had supposedly rendered risible. Had Stephen Ward not thrown a teenage girl’s bathing suit into the topiary, John Profumo would have been noted as the last surviving member of the House of Commons to vote in the confidence motion of May 8th 1940, after the fall of Norway. He was one of only 30 Conservative MPs to join the opposition in declining to support the continued leadership of Neville Chamberlain and thus to usher Churchill into Downing Street. That vote changed the course of the war. But instead his place in history is as the man who saw a call-girl naked in a swimming pool.

Profumo was a word that defined the British establishment for the pre-swinging London era, if not the entire 1960s. Today, the scandal would just be a blip in the news cycle, as the ’60s sexual revolution concludes by descending into a 21st century repeat of the French revolution.