London: Christine Keeler, who was involved in a political scandal known as Profumo affair in early 1960s, which played a role in the downfall of the Conservative government, died in Farnborough, England. She was 75. Her son Seymour Platt who announced announced her death said she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“My mother, Christine Keeler, fought many fights in her eventful life,” Platt wrote, “some fights she lost but some she won.” Keeler was the “party girl” who had an affair with John Profumo, a star in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The secretary of state for war at the time, Profumo had met Keeler at a party in 1961, when she was still a teenager and he was in his mid-40s.
A startling series of events eventually brought Profumo’s involvement with her to light, but not before he had tried to save his career. In March 1963, he went before the House of Commons to try to quell rumours about a sexual relationship. “There was no impropriety in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler,” he said. Keeler had had multiple lovers, among them Cmdr. Eugene Ivanov, an attaché in the Soviet Embassy in London, and when that relationship came to light, government figures and MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, feared that her affair with Profumo might have created a grave security breach.
Profumo died in 2006, having rarely spoken about the matter again. Keeler, though, had a lot to say about the scandal over the years, including in “Secrets and Lies,” a memoir written with Douglas Thompson and published in 2012. “I enjoyed sex and I indulged in it when I fancied the men,” she wrote.
Keeler was born on Feb. 22, 1942, outside London in Uxbridge. She left home at 16 and was dancing in a topless club in London when she met Stephen Ward, an osteopath who moved in fashionable circles. “In reality,” she wrote in the book, “Stephen Ward was a spymaster who befriended hosts of prominent and powerful people in the British government, aristocracy and even members of the royal family.” He introduced Keeler to Profumo in July 1961. She had been swimming nude, “with Profumo watching approvingly,” Keeler’s book said. As part of the fallout from the events, Keeler served six months in prison for perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from false statements she had made about another lover, Aloysius Gordon. Ms. Keeler was briefly married to James Levermore in the 1960s and to Anthony Platt in the 1970s. In addition to her son Seymour, her survivors include a granddaughter.
