Prince Philip revelation: MI5's bid to protect Duke from Profumo affair connection exposed

Prince Philip is currently back in Sandringham after recuperating from a health scare in the days leading up to Christmas. The 98-year-old prince has seen renewed interest in his early life

recently, most notably with The Crown delving into his family history. However in the Sixties, the Duke of Edinburgh was acquainted with some of the figures involved in the scandal that

rocked the establishment to its core – the Profumo affair.

Dramatised currently in the BBC six-parter  “The Trial of Christine Keeler”, the affair saw the downfall of the then-War Secretary John Profumo, and eventually Prime Minister Harold

Macmillan, over his false denial of a relationship with sex worker Ms Keeler.

Writing for The Daily Beast, veteran journalist Clive Irving explained how he was involved in investigating the affair – and how MI5 became interested in his work.

Mr Irving writes: “When the scandal broke I led a team from the Insight investigative unit at the London Sunday Times.

“For many weeks we had been trying to make sense of the labyrinth of interests trapped in the affair, reaching from picaresque Soho to the upper reaches of the security services.”

Mr Irving soon began looking at the Thursday Club, a supper club set up by Prince Philip and his private secretary and that counted Christine Keeler’s friend Steven Ward among its members.

He continues: “One of our reporters discovered that members of the Thursday Club had a favourite place for carousing, the studios of a professional portrait artist named Felix Topolski.

“Topolski was gregarious and famous for ripe gossip and, he told our reporter, he was happy to talk – in fact, he wanted to brag about knowing many of the people in Steven Ward’s orbit. With

one exception: 'I can’t discuss Prince Philip.'

“Naturally, we got interested in Philip.

READ MORE: Revealed: How Prince Philip could have been known as King 

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“But nobody else was talking about him, either, and since our focus was mainly political, pursuing a widespread cover-up to establish what Macmillan knew and when he knew it, we dropped that

titillating strand of the story.

Mr Irving explains: “I had a phone call from a ‘Mr Shaw’. He explained that he worked for MI5 and said he would be obliged if, together with two colleagues, I could meet him the following

day at a hotel near the St. James’s Park Tube station. Nothing to be alarmed about, just a matter of courtesy."

Mr Irving writes how he and his two colleagues met Mr Shaw, flanked by two assistants, who seemed to know about every interview the journalists had conducted in their investigation.

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He writes: “But they were really curious about only one of them, with Topolski and, specifically, what he had told us about Prince Philip.”

Mr Irving says he told the men: “We have no interest in Philip. He is irrelevant.”

He adds: “‘Irrelevant?’ spluttered one of the sidekicks, clearly not convinced.”

He continues: “I explained that on the following day we were due to have an interview at 10 Downing Street with a close aide of the Prime Minister and that whatever part Philip had in Ward’s

circle, if any, it was of no consequence to the very serious political issues involved.

“They seemed relieved. The location of the hotel was a lot closer to Buckingham Palace than it was to the offices of MI5. They were clearly more concerned about the occupants of the palace

than of Downing Street.

“We suspected, but were never able to prove, that Shaw and his colleagues were a special detail from MI5 assigned to make sure that the Royal Family’s interests overrode everything else in

the cover-up.”

However, in the author’s opinion, there were no deep royal secrets to uncover in the controversy.

He writes: “I believe that Philip’s connection to the scandal was peripheral, even though the affair was so toxic that the periphery was a dangerous place to be found for a man of his

position.

“That was because he was a friend of the only participant who ended up dead, by his own hand: an osteopath named Stephen Ward.”

Ward was put on trial during the scandal for immoral earnings, from Keeler and other women, but he committed suicide before the verdict was handed down in August 1963.

Stephen Ward and Prince Philip’s friendship is alluded to in “The Crown”,  and the men were both part of the supper club that Prince Philip set up.

The show even suggests that the Duke of Edinburgh went to a party of Ward’s that Christine Keeler also attended – although there is no evidence for this in real life.

Mr Irving writes: “It is true that Philip and (his private secretary) Parker set up a private dive for kindred spirits called the Thursday Club."

However he adds: “But there was never any proof that Philip used the Thursday Club to brag about sexual conquests in the way that Parker and others are seen doing in The Crown.”

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