Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK by Geoffrey Robertson – review
Stephen Ward was the fashionable osteopath who, as punishment for introducing the minister for war, Jack Profumo, to his young nemesis Christine Keeler, was framed by the police on "vice" charges and hounded to death in 1963. Ward was an avid attention seeker, an incorrigibly indiscreet chatterbox with a mischievous streak, who would revel in the attention that he is receiving 50 years after his Old Bailey trial. Andrew Lloyd Webber is bringing out a musical honouring him. Written by no less than Christopher Hampton and Don Black, and directed by Richard Eyre, the play is an apotheosis for a scapegoat who was denounced in court as "a thoroughly filthy fellow" and was ostracised by his friends.
Geoffrey Robertson, the human rights barrister, has written a coruscating account of the miscarriage of justice centred on Ward. He shows how the Conservative home secretary Henry Brooke summoned the head of MI5 and the police commissioner of Scotland Yard to the Home Office and instructed them to "get Ward", as Robertson says, "for any offence that he could possibly have committed". Ward's crimes, so far as the devoutly Christian home secretary was concerned, were fornication, Godlessness and blabbing information to Labour politicians about Profumo. Ward's telephone was bugged, his patients were placed under surveillance and 140 witnesses were interviewed so that the police could frame Ward as a pimp.
Only recently, after the deaths of the last policemen involved, has it been possible to give the full story of police threats to witnesses, their concoction of evidence and barefaced lies. Little has changed in the Metropolitan police's handling of some high profile cases, it may be thought, and it is timely to be reminded of police misconduct in cases with political ramifications.
The prosecution of Ward was launched for political expediency. Laws and legal procedures were manipulated to produce an unjust verdict. After a string of witnesses had traipsed into the witness box to lie about Ward, he was convicted on two counts of living on the earnings of prostitutes, namely Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. This is a continuing injustice to these two women who, as the law stood in 1963, and by any reasonable judgment now, were never prostitutes. They were perfectly capable of making their own choices about men, and far from indiscriminate in their boyfriends. It is hateful misogyny to call them "tarts" or "whores", as people did, and journalists still do.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/04/stephen-ward-innocent-geoffrey-robertson-review
