From Profumo to Hancock: A history of Britain’s political sex scandals

Sean O’Grady takes a look at where the health secretary’s ‘steamy clinch’ ranks in the long list of intimate improprieties

Matt Hancock with adviser Gina Coladangelo outside BBC (PA)

Matt Hancock’s been playing around – so what? As Thomas Macualay famously remarked long, long ago: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.”

Indeed so. There’s a great deal to be said for the modern attitude of tolerance towards the private lives of politicians.

However, the health secretary’s relationship with Gina Coladangelo has raised questions about possible conflicts of interest, breaches of the Covid rules and use of taxpayers’ money – giving the press due licence to chase the story, and Hancock, down.

In fact, though, this is nothing new, and neither are Hancock’s private activities particularly outrageous by past standards. Take the most celebrated sex scandal of the last century: the Profumo affair.

The disgrace and resignation of a Tory cabinet minister for cavorting with call-girls was the subject of so much attention not just because it was – in 1963 – an early example of the newspapers turning someone over (though the hard work was done by a well-connected Labour MP raising it under parliamentary privilege).

It also raised questions of national security – as Profumo’s lover Christine Keeler was also seeing the military attache at the Russian embassy at the same time. Pillow talk, blackmail, that sort of thing at the height of the Cold War, and Profumo had to go.

The fact that he lied to parliament meant he had to resign from the Commons, and spent the rest of his life in a sort of medieval penance quietly doing charity work in London’s East End.

You can’t see Hancock doing that, really. The threat of blackmail was a common factor in a series of spying scandals, especially where gay man were involved, and because homosexuality was illegal, any MP caught, or entrapped, cottaging faced the end of their career, whether the case made it to court of not.

Other justifications for invasions of privacy were more threadbare. When the minister of national heritage, David Mellor, a married man, was caught having an affair with an actress, the press had two ostensible “public interest” defences for ridiculing him (including the false claim that he made love in a Chelsea strip).

First, it was the era when the Conservatives were stressing “family values” and John Major made his misunderstood “back to basics” speech, which gave the green light to any number of Tory “sleaze” stories. Second, even more tenuously, it was claimed that Mellor’s exertions made him so tired he couldn’t discharge his (not very demanding) duties as a minister of the crown. Anyway, he was toast.

Other politicians get into trouble because their behaviour is so bizarre. Back in the mid-2000s, for example, married Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten claimed the pressure of work and “something of a mid-life crisis” prompted him to have had an affair with a male prostitute. The Lib Dem MP for Winchester and home affairs spokesman could only plead that he was bored, which didn’t entirely save his career.

Other strange episodes include Ron Davies (Welsh secretary in Tony Blair’s government) getting mugged on Clapham Common after a “moment of madness”; John Stonehouse, a former Labour minister, running off with his secretary and faking a “clothes on the beach” suicide (he’d also been a Soviet spy); and Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party, no less, who ended up at the Old Bailey on a charge of conspiracy to murder his former lover, Norman Scott (he was acquitted).

Jeremy Thorpe and his wife, Marion, in 1974 (PA)

Not long ago the SNP MP Angus MacNeil admitted being “wrong and stupid” to indulge in “three-in-a-bed” “foolishness” with two teenage girls, at a time when his wife was carrying their child. There are many more distasteful examples which make Hancock’s school disco-style grope look pretty tame stuff.

Of course, the really shocking sex scandals are the ones we never know about – at the time. These have occurred, indeed, right at the top of politics but tend not to be reported until decades later.

In the Victorian era, prime minister William Gladstone used to take in prostitutes and spank them at No 10 (not a euphemism). We found out about that almost a century later when a smart historian deciphered some mysterious squiggles in the grand old man’s diaries.

John Profumo resigned in 1963 after Christine Keeler affair (PA)

As prime minister, David Lloyd George, a notoriously randy old goat, was virtually a bigamist at No 10 because of his live-in relationship with his secretary; his wife stayed home in Wales. Fellow liberal PM Henry Herbert Asquith used to pass the time during dull meetings of his war cabinet by writing saucy letters to his lover.

Harold Wilson’s premiership was dominated by his political secretary Marcia Falkender, partly because he had a brief affair with her in the 1950s. Poor old Harold Macmillan had to put up with his wife Dorothy conducting an open affair with his rival, Bob Boothby MP, for about 20 years.

The rascally Boothby also happened to be a bisexual, friend of the Krays and is rumoured to have fathered a daughter by Dorothy who Macmillan brought up as his own (she died by suicide in 1970).

It was only many years later, too, that we learned of the passionate affair between Edwina Currie and John Major, which had ended before he became premier in 1990, but always had the potential to destroy him. She herself told the tale in her memoirs, sensationally, but not until 2002.

The fact that we know so much about Boris Johnson’s affairs is, if anything, an exercise in openness and transparency by the past standards of incumbents of No 10, and we may as well place Hancock’s misdemeanours in some sort of perspective.