Stephen Ward: Scapegoat

The tragic story of the persecution, trial, and death of Stephen Ward is both torturous and infamous. Now, author Douglas Thompson has traced confidants of Ward, speaking for the first time in more than half a century; along with newly-discovered government documents, he has gathered their eyewitness accounts of Downing Street intrigue, sex orgies, and dangerous liaisons. Few truly knew the rakish charmer who was the catalytic character of The Profumo Affair. A talented osteopath and artist, Stephen Ward treated, sketched, and seduced the great and often not-so-good of the post-war years. He healed Churchill and Gandhi, Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor; he drew Princess Margaret, the Duke of Edinburgh, Harold Macmillan, dukes, duchesses, maharajahs, and Christine Keeler, whose striking likeness by him hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Everyone loved the superbly well-connected Stephen Ward. But when Christine Keeler slept with two of his friends—British War Minister John Profumo and Soviet superspy Eugene Ivanov—and President Kennedy's White House went haywire, suspicion and scandal cast a shroud over Ward and his world. In the middle of a nuclear poker game, he soon had MI5 and MI6 snapping at his heels, along with the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI at his shoulder. The spooks all feared what he might know, or do. The British Establishment, keen to see Ward gone, brushed him off. Posterity is ferociously capricious, but there are still those alive who know the secrets and the true story of Stephen Ward—brilliantly told here.