Christine Keeler on the 'Swinging Sixties'

Christine Keeler, the former model whose involvment with a British government minister rocked the Conservative government in the 60s has spoken out against the (im)morality of that period.

Christine Keeler

Christine Keeler (born 1942) is an English former model and showgirl whose affair in 1961 with John Profumo, the then British Secretary of State for War, led to his resignation.

At the height of the Cold War between the East and the West, Profumo entered into the relationship with Keeler not realising that whe was also sleeping with a drug dealer and – perhaps even more significantly – with a naval attaché at the embassy of the then Soviet Union.

Though Profumo terminated the liaison the affair became public knowledge when the drug dealer, Johnny Edgecombe was arrested for shooting a gun at the door of Keeler's home. The ensuing scandal forced the resignation of Profumo in 1963.

Though relatively minor by the (much-declined) standards of today, the sorry story undermined Harold MacMillan's Conservative government of that day. Christine Keeler's name is as synonymous with the sexual revolution as the pill. The whole episode shot Keeler and a friend, Mandy-Rice Davis to notoriety. The latter has since described her life as "one slow descent into respectability".