The Profumo Affair was one of the first widely publicised political scandals of the new Britain that had emerged from World War Two. Undoubtedly one of the most influential and significant political scandals in British history, the Profumo Affair ended in jail sentences and suicide. During the peak of the Cold War, the war minister John Profumo was caught secretly engaging in an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old model, Christine Keeler. The scandal caused an explosion at the heart of the establishment, and the affair was exposed by newspapers nation-wide.
The gravity of the scandal was compounded by the fact that Keeler was concurrently engaging in a sexual relationship with a Soviet military attaché, which raised allegations that she may have been a spy for the soviets. Resigning in disgrace, Profumo’s political career would never recover, and the aftermath was an embarrassing charade in which a number of trials, one resulting in the suicide of the accused, were conducted by the government in order to save face.
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