Photo of Wimpole Mews W1 – Home of the Profumo scandal

I walked by this famous road yesterday and took this photograph.

In the 1960s, this little lane was the heart of treachery and espionage: the Profumo scandal.

Mr John Profumo resigned over his “affair” with Christine Keeler and his subsequent lies over it all. It seems she was probably a KGB spy. As per Jonathan Haslam, statement by Keeler was “to the effect that only a few weeks previously, she had been asked by Mr Ward to try to obtain secret information from Mr Profumo”. Dr Ward was a pro-Soviet osteopath. Days later, a double-agent reported to American handlers that “the Russians had in fact received a lot of useful - information from Profumo from Christine Keeler, with whom Ivanov had established contact, and in whose apartment Ivanov had even been able to lay on eavesdropping operations at appropriate times”.