Nothing has been proved
Prince Philip’s name appeared in top-secret FBI documents about one of the greatest British sex scandals of all time: the so-called Profumo affair, according to the Mail on Sunday.
The documents relay that the FBI had heard a rumor that Philip—Queen Elizabeth II’s husband—was “involved” with two women at the center of the early 1960s scandal which eventually led to the downfall of a government.
The scandal concerned Britain’s married Secretary of State for War John Profumo’s five-month affair with model Christine Keeler, at the same time as she was seeing Russian naval attaché Eugene Ivanov. The Profumo scandal is base camp for the modern sex scandal, sensationally entwining a presiding government and spying and sex in early-swinging 60s London.
At the later trial of osteopath Stephen Ward, who had introduced Keeler to the two men, Keeler’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies famously replied—when asked why Lord Astor had denied having an affair with her—“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” (If you haven’t seen the brilliant 1989 movie, Scandal, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, do so right away; and listen to Dusty Springfield’s Reputation album made in collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys featuring songs like the movie’s theme song, “Nothing Has Been Proved,” and “In Private.”)
What Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ Leaves Out: British Spies Protected Prince Philip’s Secret Life
The FBI heard that Philip had links to both Keeler and Rice-Davies, according to the report. Thomas Corbally, a U.S. businessman involved in industrial espionage, made the claim about Philip, the Mail reports, citing a memo written by J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI: “Corbally also stated there was a rumor Prince Philip may have been involved with these two girls.”
What else if anything the FBI files say about Philip is unknown, but an episode of The Crown ponders if a man photographed with his back to the camera in a party photograph was the Duke of Edinburgh. In The Crown the queen is seen being told that Ward had drawn Philip, and that Philip had been a frequent guest at Ward’s gatherings. As Clive Irving wrote for The Daily Beast in 2018, the reality of this portrait is far less spicy as implied by The Crown, and Philip’s place in this intriguing demi-monde remains hard to decipher—even if MI5 was keen to keep his name out of the story.
Ward was also a member of the notorious Thursday Club, which Philip cofounded with Lieutenant Commander Michael Parker, described by Miles Kington in a 1996 Independent article “as the gang of cronies that the Duke of Edinburgh used to gather round him in the 1950s to have a bit of fun away from his serious life at Buckingham Palace.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-named-prince-philip-profumo-122133959.html
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