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From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. So, over the past few episodes, we've been following the twists and
And in terms of the Profumo affair, we've learnt how a teenage dancer, Christine Keeler, had an affair with the cabinet minister, Jack Profumo, and how a series of abusive boyfriends then brought more trouble. And that just all blew up into this huge tabloid feeding frenzy. And at the same time, we were following her on-again, off-again mate, Stephen Ward, to
The social climbing, sketching, slightly sketchy, don't book an appointment with him, osteopath. And how he ended up being involved with MI5 and just on the side as a kind of passion project, sorting out the odd orgy. So it's been a rollercoaster. Yeah, and so much of this...
I mean, there are lots of things to take from this story. One, that the 60s was no way near as progressive as it's made out to be, or as we like to think in retrospect, particularly those of us who weren't there at the time. And more importantly, never, ever call anyone progressive.
Oh, don't. I can't. I can't. Shake it off. Shake it off. But what about the person at the centre of the storm? What about Christine Keeler? We all know the famous photo of her, but what was she like in real life? To talk about her, we'll be joined next by her son, Seymour Platt. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.
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Seymour, we've grown to really love your mum recording this series and I have to confess before doing this series of British Scandal I never really fully appreciated the depths of some of the horrors that your mum had been through. What kind of woman was your mum? Well thanks guys, that's a really nice thing to say. I was fond of her as well actually. She was, look, I mean my mum was
I'm told that there were different mums for me. There was Christine Keeler, who I never met, and that was somebody from the 1960s.
But the mum that I knew was very funny. We used to laugh an awful lot. Sometimes she'd get very sad and sometimes she could feel that the whole world was on her shoulders. And she was also sometimes a little bit crazy, a little bit mad as a bag of badges. But she always filled me with love. I always knew that she loved me, no matter what happens, no matter what horrible things were ever said, any arguments,
anything. I always knew she loved me and that was a gift that she gave me. Can you tell us a little bit about her early life? You know, when did you become aware of the profile that she had? Oh, I think I always knew there was something a little bit unusual about my mum because every now and then there'd be journalists that would want to come over and interview her. And I also remember there was one really silly, well, funny story actually, but
We went through a stage where my mum was really poor and she really did land on her backside. And we moved into the world's end estate in Chelsea. And there was, and I would have been about five or six. And I think because she was quite desperate for money, she took on a job for a porn magazine and she was going to be an agony aunt.
And I remember about five or six finding this magazine, because I'd obviously sent her a sample of what she was going to be saying. Finding this magazine and walking into my mum saying, "Mum, why are there naked women? What is this magazine?" And it was years later that she told me, "Look, I was desperate for money and they were going to pay me to be an agony arm." So I always knew there was something unusual about my mum. The scandal was a defining event in her life, I imagine. How did your mum change afterwards?
Well, that's difficult for me to answer because I didn't know her. But what I can say is that there was an impact on that scandal, which was quite clear. When my mum went through what she went through and she went to prison and she came out of prison, she suddenly found herself very famous. She was going to all the right parties.
She was meeting everybody that she wanted to meet. She was having a great time. And then there was one guy that she did have really did fall for and thought she was going to have a relationship with maybe get married. And it was one day when he turned around and he said to her, look, I can never marry you because you're Christine Keeler. And I think that sort of dawned on her that she had this this name and this reputation that meant that going forward, things would never be right.
And people were really unforgiving. So my mum found it very difficult to move on and maybe find work. Because what would she do? I don't know that today when we think about or look back, we don't appreciate how horrible people were back in the 1970s and 80s.
and 90s about my mum. I mean, we talk about her differently now, but back then she really was somebody that was disliked in the public eye. And how would that manifest itself? Would people make comments in the street? It could happen. Yeah, people could put comments in the street. They could leave things on a doorstep. I remember somebody leaving...
really bizarre one actually she was given a box of chocolates by uh somebody in the street who just said oh you're christine killer gave her a box of chocolates she came home she seems to have just given me a box of chocolates that's fantastic and she opened them up and there was this terrible smell and what it was is as opposed to chocolates there were like lots of poos oh god
It's this really horrible thing. And she did, you know, she brushed it off and we thought it was funny. But I tell you, if she was ever given chocolates again, she never ate them. So she was a pariah, you know, there was intense scrutiny and intense criticism of her, perhaps in a way that other players in that story didn't experience. Yeah.
I think so. And it's difficult to say why that was. Mandy, for example, came out of the story actually pretty well. And she was really good at spinning a quote as well. One of my favourite ones that she had was, my life has been a slow descent into respectability, which is a great quote. It's a great quote.
And she was really good. So after, she would go on and sit down and have married married people, do very well in business herself, became friends with Margaret Thatcher. You can imagine sort of Mandy Rice Davis sitting at a dinner party with Margaret Thatcher when she was much older. It wasn't this sort of this
incredible life that she led in comparison to my mum's life where she really was a pariah and it was very difficult for her I don't think she was equipped in the same way as Manly to deal with what she went through and in later years I mean obviously you described finding the magazine and obviously that was a moment for you and starting to realise who your mum was and perhaps what her history was did you ever ask her about the scandal in later years and was she happy to talk about it would she ever tell you stuff about it
Yes, absolutely. She'd be delighted to talk to me because all mums like to talk about their life to an extent. But I think that she'd tell me the story, but she wouldn't tell me in a linear way. So she never sat me down and said, well, this happened in 1961 and I met so-and-so and all of this happened. But what I get is anecdotal stories from and I have to piece the entire thing together myself.
And then in about 1989, there was a big movie that came out called Scandal. And you had John Hurt, who played Stephen Ward. And I remember, I guess, sitting that was the first time I sort of saw the story in a linear way. And I was about 17. So although I'd heard all the different stories, I'd heard about Lucky Gordon. Chris had told me relentlessly about how awful Lucky Gordon was and how afraid she was of Lucky Gordon.
in growing up. It wasn't until I sort of sat down and watched that scandal film that I began to think, oh my God, that is the whole story. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.
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I wonder if you realised when you were 17, 18, 19, the huge cultural and political impact of these events, or was that still something you were piecing together? No, I definitely didn't. And it was too big for me to understand until I think I got a little older. And I think that I only really started to think about it when it began to have an impact on my life.
And there'd be things that would happen, for example, like there'd be a girlfriend who would say, I don't want to date you anymore because I think what your mum did was weird. And I began to look back on this and think, well, actually, what my mum did was actually quite important. It was an important part of history. And for me, the most important thing was it sort of shone a light on
the hypocrisy of power. And it took us from a period of thinking that the ruling class could do no wrong to suddenly they were the same as us. Of course, we are still governed by everyone from Eton, but we're maybe more suspicious of them now.
Yes, the sense that our leaders are morally superior is no longer a view widely held by the British public. And your mum is central to that fundamental shift in our relationship between citizens and the executive. I mean, in a way, I mean, thinking about your mum, obviously you had a personal relationship with her, but when we think about it like this, I mean, it's almost like to think of the time in which she was living and
She's almost like a beetle or a member of the 66 World Cup winning squad. You know, she's something and someone who is so culturally important to how we live our lives now. Well, it's funny you say that because as I'm told by people who were there at the time, we went into 1963 at Victorian Britain and we came out of 1963 into the swinging 60s. And there's a lovely anecdotal story that I heard about Barbara Windsor.
Not Barbara Windsor. Sorry, Mary Whitehouse. I don't know how I got those two mixed up. Two very different characters. Yeah. Mary Whitehouse, famously from the Carry On films. No, but Mary Whitehouse was, she was a schoolteacher in 1963. And she found two girls behind a bike shed showing their tops off to all the boys. And she asked these two girls, what are you doing?
And they said, well, if it's good enough for Mandy Rice Davis and Christine Keeler, it's good enough for us. And Mary Whitehouse, after this, went on a campaign
And that campaign was really to protect children from the news and from pornography and all the things that Mary Whitehouse was famous for doing. And today we're still stuck. Well, we still have the nine o'clock cutoff on TV. The watershed, of course. The watershed, exactly. And that was something that Mary Whitehouse brought in. And she brought that in because of my mum. So those impacts, there's a nice anecdotal story about just another side impact that we live with today.
Absolutely. Do you view scandals that involve female protagonists, particularly in a sexual context, do you kind of view them through the lens of what your mum went through? And do you think there's been a progression? Do you feel like we treat women differently now when they're caught up in these kind of things? Or is it just the same, but maybe more insidious? No, I don't think so. I still think that we look at women, particularly young women and young beautiful women as property issues.
I think that we do that culturally. And I think that my mum really did suffer from that. And would your mum talk to you about things like that when you were growing up? She would. Yeah, I think my mum was always at pains to make sure that she wanted to educate me so that I wouldn't be the guy who would treat women badly. And that's because she'd been treated so badly by so many men.
And she used to tell me stories I didn't really understand, I think because I was too young. And so she would say things like, and this is going to sound very confused, but Seymour, when, what is prostitution? If a wife, uh,
gets a nice present from her husband and they have sex that night. And she's not really in the mood, but she does anyway. Is that prostitution? And these were questions that I grew up with. And I didn't really understand them because I was too young. It was only when I got older that I realized actually that what my mom was trying to teach me was that her sexuality was hers to give as she wanted. But as long as she was in control, that's all that mattered.
That's a very contemporary perspective. She was a very contemporary woman. You know, she did help kick off the 1960s swing in the 60s. You talk about some of the men who were abused at Seymour. Lucky Gordon is an individual who features in this story and was particularly brutal towards your mum. How scared of him was she? All her life, she was afraid of Lucky Gordon. Yeah.
So every house that we'd moved to, the first thing that she'd make sure is that she had security on that house. And the security she had on the house was, as she'd say, was to make sure that Lucky Gordon couldn't get in. She was always afraid of him. And I think that, I know that in the end he died before she died. And I'm not sure that, because she was quite sick even in those last months,
I'm not sure how much satisfaction that gave her or maybe respite from the fear that that gave her.
That's just such a heartbreaking thought that that just hung over her for her whole life. He was an awful man. You know, before, in 1969, he stabbed a woman in Denmark and got a corona record and was extradited from Denmark. He had a record of violence against women. Did you ever encounter him? We did once, actually. So in about 1977...
My mum had really fallen from, you know, financially fallen on her backside, found herself in the West End estate on benefits, was very, very poor. And she felt very vulnerable. You know, suddenly she thought, you know, this guy can get me any time because I don't have anything to protect me.
And so we actually organized, well she organized, because I was only about six at the time, she organized a meeting with a guy called Frank, I forgot his surname now, but he used to run, he used to own the Flamingo nightclub. And she got him to organize a meeting and he was also very influential in Nonning Hill Carnival as well. A really great man, funny enough, and I just can't remember his surname.
And she asked him to organise a meeting between Lucky Gordon and herself so that she could establish that he wasn't going to come near her. And also to, and so Frank did this, it was at the Flamingo in Notting Hill,
And we went there and I kind of remember walking into a room where this guy Frank was. There were lots of other West Indian guys there. I mean, lots of West Indian guys there. And Chris had this meeting. Lucky Gordon was there. And it was only until years after that she told me that that was about trying to make sure that Lucky Gordon was never going to come after her again. The other two men in this story are John Profumo and Stephen Ward. What's your impression of those two?
John Fimo, I've heard anecdotal stories that he was one, extremely litigious, but also a terrible lech and would pinch girls' bums as they walked past.
But I never met him and I've got no animosity whatsoever towards John Perfumo. He's just a guy who had a libido and had an affair and these things happen. I'm not going to judge somebody for that. Stephen Ward, I judge him harsher. I think that he was Epsteinian. I'm not sure if that's a verb or a participle, but he was somebody.
who did want to use women, I think, as kind of a property. It felt as if your mum was, I mean, certainly our reading of it, is that your mum, sympathetic might be the wrong word, but that she quite liked Stephen. Would she ever talk about him? She often would. What was interesting about Stephen was the effect that Stephen had, I think, on who she became, who she was as a person. So my mum's politics was always really sort of borderline communist. She believed in sharing wealth,
She was really socialist in a lot of her views and yet she'd always vote conservative all of her life, which never made any sense and it wasn't until later when I'd speak to her that I think that Stephen influenced her, moulded her as the person when she was very young. I did some more reading and certainly Metropolitan Police files that I read where Stephen Ward was interviewed. He's very, very pro or sympathetic to communism.
And I think that that came across in my mum as well. And so I think that he had a massive impact in shaping her personality and her knowledge. Because that goes far beyond just being manipulated to do things. I would never have had Ward down necessarily as a communist, particularly as he was fraternising with Conservative cabinet ministers. It's remarkable that he was able to have that level of an effect on her. Oh, yes. You might use the word groomed.
You could do. She was very young. And that's one of the things that I found also upsetting when I really did look into this story. You know, when he met my mum, she was 17 years old. Shortly after he met her, he took her to a sex party. Well, you know, you're a man in your late 40s and you meet a 17-year-old girl and you take them to a sex party. I mean, you know, today it would be like, that's just disgraceful.
And I sense that these men weren't particularly supportive or there for your mum emotionally. I mean, particularly Stephen initially when your mum went to him with details of the attack. Yes. So when she was attacked by Lucky Gordon the first time, she went back to...
when Paul Mewes and Stephen was there and she told him everything that happened and Stephen turned to her and according to my mum's account he said he said well aren't you lucky it could have been much worse uh hell they could have given there could have been a massive gang bang uh and and then where would you be then shortly afterwards lucky gordon turned up at started turning up at the house and Stephen let him in on one occasion
and told him to leave Christine alone and to be on his way. There was an altercation and the police were called and it was at that stage that Stephen then apparently told the police everything that had happened to Chris about the rape that's in Stephen's garden. And the police were then, and he said, could you speak to Christine? And so the police then sat Christine down and said, listen, Chris, I hope you've learned your lesson. You'll be more careful in the future and stop being such a stupid little girl.
And that was how they dealt with the allegation of rape in 1963, or 1961 in this case. Your mum's fear of Lucky Gordon, absolutely justified and logical, leads to your mum being prosecuted and convicted of perjury. Why do you think your mum pleaded guilty? So the year that she'd been through had started in March or in December 1962 with the shooting at the house.
and then there was a court case and then there was the Edgecombe court case and then there was the Lucky Gordon court case and followed immediately by the Stephen Ward court case. All of this was at the Old Bailey and then there was her being arrested and her court case and she was a pariah in the press, she was a pariah in the House of Commons. What they said stood up in the House of Commons and said about my mum was disgraceful. She'd be called a prostitute on the floor of the House of Commons
There were terrible headlines that were coming out at the time saying that Kristin Keeler is a shameless slut, was a front page of the People. I mean, it's awful stuff. And I think that she didn't think that if it went to full trial, she was also told as well that if it went to full trial, they'd throw away the key. So she took a deal.
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No, I never have. I must admit now, it's not something I've ever really thought about because I think that it was in its place and in its time and it was a long time ago. But what I am looking for is I'm looking for a pardon because I think that the one thing that really stuck with my mum was that she went to prison.
And she really didn't think she should have done. All her life she'd say to me, see, I should never have gone to prison. Out of everything that happened, I should never have gone to prison. Because she went to prison for perjury, it also meant that she could never sue anybody for libel because she was a perjurer, a convicted perjurer.
And it really took away her voice and it meant that people could say anything they wanted about her in the press, and they often did. And I think it was her greatest regret was going to prison. It was the thing that had the most lasting impact on her out of this entire story. What you've described is a deluge of trauma that somebody...
with more years to their name, would find incredibly difficult to live through. But she was so young. What effect do you think going to jail had on her? And how old was she when she went to prison? So she was 21 when she went to prison. And I think that psychologically, the effect was very traumatic. I think that they tried to get into her head is the way that she described it.
So they put her in a cell, for example, facing a door. And it was the door that the last woman who was hanged walked through. And the governor told her, you keep an eye on that door. That's what happens to women, that they can get hanged. And so it was really trying to get on...
I guess, into her head. And she found it very upsetting. She had her liberty taken away. But she also then had her name taken away from her when she left because her reputation was in tatters. And your campaign to have her posthumously pardoned Seymour, is there any process for that? Is there any hope of that happening? Absolutely. So we've got a lawyer, we have a barrister, we've pulled together a really complex and detailed document with all the proof
to show that my mum shouldn't have gone to prison. She was both morally and legally innocent of perjury. We've put that forward to the Minister of Justice. That's now gone on to the desk of Lord Buckley, who is the Minister of Justice.
And he then will preside over that and I guess make the decisions that they need to make and fingers crossed we'll get the Queen's signature. I do actually have quite a lot of hope and faith that that will happen because it's a really strong argument that we've got. She shouldn't have gone to prison. The one thing I was going to say is that it wasn't all sort of sad and miserable. There was also good times and fun times. And my mum could be really funny, you know.
Well, she's obviously very charismatic and at times almost eccentric individual. So it was we obviously assume outside of this story, there's so much more to her. In this series, we've covered the scandal and we hope we've brought more elements of your character into your mum into the story. But what are some of those happier memories?
Well, it's not even happy memories. It was my mum, for example, was just could be really funny. She my mum, I think, had if I'm going to point a failure that she had as as
just in her character, is that she would believe people absolutely until she didn't believe them at all. So you could say anything to her and she'd believe you. But if you proved yourself to lie on anything, then she wouldn't believe anything you said. And this actually meant that sometimes there could be really funny anecdotal stories that she could tell you. There was one, for example, and I was thinking about it the other day.
When my mum was very sick, she was telling me towards the end of her life, she said, Seymour, when I look back on our life together, me and you, I remember we used to laugh a lot. And I was trying to think about some of the ones, some of the stories that she told that really made me laugh. And there was one that came to mind where she was telling me about we were watching in the 1980s that TV show V. And she said, you know, there are aliens. And I said, really? And she said, I would have been about 13 at the time.
yeah, no, I met a guy who was in the CIA and he said that he went to area 51 and he interviewed an alien. I said, really, is there anything was, you know, interesting about meeting this alien? And she turned to me dead faced, dead straight and said, apparently he was clean shaven. Yeah.
And I started laughing just like that. And it was the funniest thing. And then she started laughing because I think she realized this car just fibbed. And there was a lot of that where you suddenly realize that, you know, people were doing things to show off to her or she just believed people and for no reason. But there was an awful lot of that.
And there was an awful lot of laughter growing up. Looking back on it now, a lot of the laughter was at my mum doing silly things like that. And obviously the public version of this narrative is only a small part of her life and we don't necessarily hear those things. So yeah, it must appear sometimes to be a kind of 2D portrayal of somebody. I wondered how you thought her young life and her upbringing influenced what happened to her later in the way that she dealt with that.
I think that her upbringing was difficult. I think that I know that her dad left when she was very young and there was a stepdad who came into it. He was quite cruel, actually, I think. And as she grew older, he became interested in her in a way that he shouldn't have done.
She used to tell me a horrible story about, you know, she reached an age where he would insist on bathing her and washing her chest. And, you know, she just had to stop bathing and she had to get out and she had to run away. And that's quite upsetting. And I think that her mum was quite a cold woman as well. My memory of her mum was that I don't think she ever spoke to me. And all the times that we met her,
And I don't know that she got a lot of love at home. I think that she was always trying to help her mum because she was trying to get love from her mum. And the father figures, she didn't have a father figure. She was always looking for a father figure. Do you feel like your mum ever found a protective, compassionate figure in her life?
No, she never did. The only, I guess the closest she ever got to that was the relationship with me. And maybe a little bit with a friend when she was a little older, when she was a lot older. But no, not really. Certainly not in a relationship sense. She was very bad at choosing men. The elements of your mum's life that we've covered in this series are horrendous, really. And it's a very sad story. But
Knowing your mum as a far more complex character, do you think she'd be comfortable with people all these years later feeling sorry for her? No. Do you know, it's funny. It's really odd because she would tell people, anybody who'd listen, I was never a victim. I'm not a victim. And the sad thing is the more sort of research I did into this, the more I realised that she was. She was the victim of all of this. And she always was a victim. And...
I know my mum was very possessive about this story. She didn't want other people telling this story. It was her story. It was her life. She wouldn't want me telling her story because it was her story. It was her life. And so she'd probably hate me even talking to you guys now about these private things.
But it's her legacy. I think that it's important that we say that she was a human being. I think it's important that we look at our history maybe a little bit differently to say that her agency, the reason she did a lot of things was actually because she was afraid of another man. And I think it's important that we understand our history. Seymour, thank you so much. No worries, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Incredible to have Seymour to talk to you there. And we've never had somebody that close to the story. So absolutely fascinating. Next week, we're going to be doing a very different scandal. One of the most famous and bizarre insurance scams ever. The story of John Darwin, the canoe con. Can't wait for that.
This is the sixth episode of our series, The Profumo Affair. If you like our show, please give us a five-star rating and a review and be sure to tell your friends. You can listen to new episodes one week early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, the Wondery app or wherever you're listening right now.
Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen for free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. Please support them by supporting them. You help us offer this show for free. Another way to support us is to answer a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Russell Finch. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery.
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