A Moral Post-Mortem

All his life Stephen Ward had been surrounded by people, a few of them, perhaps, his friends. In death last week he attracted only curiosity seekers, several hundred strong. Nine days after swallowing a massive overdose of Nembutal, Stephen Ward--liar, drug user, pornographer, libertine and convicted pimp--was cremated in the London suburb of Mortlake. Though his solicitor had asked that no flowers be sent, there was a wreath of two hundred roses from, among others, Playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, Critic Kenneth Tynan, Novelists Angus Wilson and Alan Sillitoe, Jazzman Acker Bilk (who later withdrew his name). With the flowers came a note: "To Stephen Ward, victim of British hypocrisy." Explained Tynan: "British society created him, used him, and ruthlessly destroyed him. The Establishment has closed its ranks around its body."

This preposterous attempt to make a hero of Stephen Ward fitted in with the scatterbrained, left-wing politics of most of the signers, Britain's Angry Middle-aged Men, who used him to demonstrate that the Establishment and British society in general are rotten. Amid all this sudden sympathy for Ward it almost became necessary to recall what he had really been like. A top London crime reporter, who knew him long before the case broke, summed it up. He said Ward had corrupted the innocent, worsened the already bad, toyed with people's lives for the fun of it, dallied with whores so grubby that even Christine Keeler "could not bear to look at them." To many he was "a central figure of evil." Ward, added the Guardian, was not a victim of hypocrisy, but a "victim of his own impulses, which led him into many squalid crimes, not all of them mentioned in the official charge sheet. There ought to be compassion for a doomed criminal, but no support for any myth about his being a 'martyr,' and nothing but contempt for those who try to encourage such a myth."

Highest Duty. Yet the uneasy feeling persisted that somehow Ward had been made a scapegoat, and that his case and the public's reaction to it carry a disturbing message about British law and morals. Nothing could be more revered, solemn and self-righteous than the British judiciary, but there is now a growing consensus that the Ward case has put in question its vaunted independence from politics.

Ward's hasty arrest and trial raised the troubling implication that he was prosecuted mainly because he threatened the existence of the government. Under oath, Call Girl Ronna Ricardo said that the police had put her up to making damaging false statements about Ward. To a newspaper reporter last week, Prostitute Vickie Barrett admitted that she had perjured herself when she claimed on the stand that she had whipped men for money in Ward's flat; later she denied her denial.

Though Cabinet, film and noble personalities were mentioned in court as having been involved with Ward or his girls, none of the gentlemen in question were called to testify. The widespread suspicion in Britain is that the defense did not call them because by telling the truth about Ward they would only have damaged his case, and that the prosecution did not call them because it did not wish to embarrass the Establishment. In general, serious observers fear that British courts are assuming, or are being forced to assume, too much authority as an arm of government, and recall the dictum of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, during the trial of scandal-mongering journalists after the Vassall spy case, that "the citizen's highest duty is to the state."

Never the Same Again. The doubts raised by the Ward case go beyond such specific matters as the function of the judiciary. The wide-ranging inquiry being conducted by Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls,* keeps feeding new rumors into the stream of London gossip, including the suspicion that two more Cabinet members besides War Minister Jack Profumo were involved in the case or its fringes. Says Denning: "It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between crime and sin."

The press continued to play both crime and sin for all they were worth, and it was easy to blame it for exaggerating, if not creating the scandal by buying up "confessions" right and left at fabulous prices. The People, which had lost Christine Keeler's story in the bidding with its rival, News of the World, last week attacked Christine under the banner SHAMELESS SLUT.

Not only was Christine a marijuana smoker who engaged in nightly orgies, said the paper, but it added the oddly prim observation that she only bathed every other day and never washed her underwear; when it got too dirty, she sent her butler out to buy some more. Christine immediately filed suit against The People.

The Guardian splenetically accused fellow journalists of being little better than prostitutes and purveyors of pornography (though in fact, it carried more words on the case than the tabloid Daily Mirror). But for all its excesses, it was the press that was largely responsible for bringing the Profumo affair to light. And it was the normally pro-government London Times which insisted from the first that the case posed a moral issue.

"Morals have been discounted too long," wrote Times Editor Sir William Haley last June. "A judge may be justified in reminding a jury 'this is not a court of morals.' The same exception cannot be allowed public opinion without rot setting in and all standards suffering . . . For the Conservative Party --and it is to be hoped, for the nation --things can never be quite the same again."

Goats & Monkeys. Harold Macmillan, for one, has not forgiven Haley for what he considered a stab in the back from within the Establishment. "The Profumo case," said Macmillan fatuously last week, "revealed the very high standard we try to maintain in British public life," because otherwise the affair would not have "caused so great a shock." The judge in the Ward case himself echoed the widespread view that Ward was an exception, and that "the even tenor of the British family goes on quietly." And the Bishop of Exeter maintained that the "Profumo scandal does not prove that the private morals of public men are worse in this generation than they have been in the past. In the 17th and 18th centuries, they were far worse."

But the whole tone of morality then was different. In Restoration England, debauchery was public and unabashed. King Charles II acknowledged 14 bastards, openly went to church with them, even gave them titles (the present Duke of Richmond springs from the Stuart bar sinister). But there was just as much vigor among the Puritan opposition, which lustily preached fire and brimstone. In Ward's Britain, vice tends to be half-hidden by respectability--and only half-condemned. There is a relative lack of moral indignation in many quarters, including Profumo's own constituency (see following story). The Labor Opposition, though it has muttered about the corrupt aristocracy and the twilight of a class--and exploded the Profumo scandal in the first place--has put far more stress on the practical issue of the British security system.

Yet a sense of outrage does remain. Profumo, for example, would not dare to enter one of the St. James clubs, or to appear at the Goodwood races (he fled to Scotland and his sister's place during the recent bank holiday). Lord Astor continues to entertain, but, says one Establishmentarian, "people resent him for mixing his family and his circle with his peccadilloes."

More significant than its social repercussions, however, is that the whole question is provoking serious, bitter, partisan and angry argument. A besetting sin of British society for a decade has been self-satisfaction and complacency. These have been badly shaken. Britons have been forced to begin a long and painful examination of conscience. "Let us be frank," says Novelist Rebecca West. "The problem is, as it always has been, to get the goats and monkeys under control. The Ward case is a problem in animal training, and we ourselves are the animals."

*A prestigious title, always given to one of Britain's senior justices, it carries an annual salary of $25,200.

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