Thank you for the link Gaynor, and also to Ceri for the Daily Mail Review - got me remembering 1963
in my blog here on Americymru

And original in From the Barkeep's Blog

Couldnt find review online unfortunately I did find this though...Christine Keeler talking to the Daily Mail about the Profumo Affair earlier this year:- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2102814/Christine-Keeler-I-enjoyed-sex.html

Today, in the News Review section of the Sunday Times here in Britain, there was an extract from Richard Davenport-Hines's book "An English Affair, Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo".

I'm sure that many of you know already about the recent demise of The News of the World and the subsequent Leveson Inquiry. The actions of The NotW seem almost benign next to the descriptions Davenport-Hines gives of the press's actions in the 60s, particularly in respect to the so-called Profumo Affair.

The Sunday Pictorial (the precursor of The Sunday Mirror) had, as Editorial Director, a man called Cecil King and an editor called Hugh Cudlipp (of Cardiff). I quote from the article when I describe King's office at the Mirror Group in Holborn Circus, London. "King and Cudlipp taunted privilege and decried luxury; but their egalitarianism was undetectable in Mirror Group's brash, self-conscious offices, built on the site of a bombed drapery at Holborn Circus at a cost of 9.5m in 1961. There had seldom been an office so status-conscious in its interior arrangement. King had a private lift to his ninth-floor office suite, which, as a symbol of his paramountcy, contained an open-grate fireplace - the first to be installed in a centrally, air-conditioned office in a smokeless zone. King also had his own dining room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and luxurious carpeting.

Cudlipp had only a refrigerator, bedroom, private lavatory and shower; but his bedroom was designed as his "studio" to show that he was the creative ace rather than financial brains of the business."

The author describes Cudlipp thus:

"Cudlipp, the son of a commercial traveller in eggs and bacon, had left school at 14, trained on a Cardiff weekly newspaper and got his first Fleet Street job at 19. He never read a book if he could avoid it."

Apparently, despite marrying a high-powered journalist, he "exercised droit de seigneur by having sex with the wives of the men who worked for him.He liked to tarnish what he could not permanently possess."

They were not alone in bringing down both Profumo and the Tory government of the time but they played a large part in the story.

I hope I'm not alone in being utterly disgusted by their behaviour. I'm all for the press having freedom to expose what should be exposed but this article really shocked me.

updated by @gaynor-madoc-leonard: 11/11/15 10:38:32PM