Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson will attempt to convince the Privileges Committee that he didn’t lie to parliament. By a strange coincidence – the sort that politics throws up all the time – on this day sixty years ago (22 March 1963), John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, denied in a speech in the House of Commons that he had a sexual relationship with model Christine Keeler, saying: “There was no impropriety whatever in my acquaintance with Miss Keeler.”
He later admitted that was a lie. I write about the episode in my sixties spy and political thriller, Witchfinder. Profumo did great charitable work when he left parliament, and more than atoned for that slip. Who knows, there is just a hope Boris Johnson might follow his example.