'It's all because of our fucking surname,' exclaimed the exasperated Valerie Hobson, the wife of Jack Profumo, when 'the Profumo scandal' was resurrected many years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself - a difficult undertaking - why such an essentially trivial matter should for so long have presented an almost hypnotic attraction to so many people and to the media. The Profumo affair was 'a potent mix', he believes, partly 'because it had so many tasty ingredients: sex, lies, drugs, espionage, violence, race, hypocrisy and a complicated class element' which involved 'the Doctor, the Lord, the Spy' and Profumo himself. The leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, dubbed them 'this dingy quadrilateral', though, as will soon appear, a much dingier quadrilateral was composed of four very different people.

LRB 19 October 2006 | PDF Download