THE PROFUMO CASE
71
repression of personal, along with cultural, dissidence. The recogni–
tion that the Soviet state is of a kind which denies all expressions of
personal and cultural radicalism has put the Soviet sympathizer in
the democracies in a position in which he exercises his freedom of
political choice in defense of a system which robs the individual
of his freedom of moral choice. The sympathizer handles this in–
consistency by developing one set of standards in the international
situation, another in the domestic; it is only in very recent years,
when cultural dissidence, of a sort that is likely to include a personal
and sexual protest too, has found a voice in the younger generation
of Soviet writers, that the contradiction gives any sign of lessening.
In making a scandal of Profumo's personal conduct, British socialism
pursued a moral course more appropriate to the authoritarianism of
the Soviet Union than to the libertarianism of its own constituents,
or certainly of its supporters among cultural radicals whose effort it
is,
at least in their own country, to bring into the closest possible
conjunction their personal and cultural and their political values.
It fell to Mr. Harold Wilson, as leader of the Labour party, to
speak from the side of enlightenment and, apparently in some aware–
ness of the awkwardness his party had contrived for itself, he was
at pains to separate Profumo's political from his sexual indiscretions
-he assured the House of Commons that it was only the security
issue involved in Profumo's sharing a mistress with Ivanov that
concerned his party. But there was a note of piety in his protestation
alongside of which the position taken by the London
Times,
that the
scandal was wholly sexual, wholly moral, had a reassuring ring of
honesty.
And, as it turned out, the
Times
was not only more accurate
about the source of the scandal, it was also more correct in objective
fact: there was, actually, no security issue in the case that didn't,
expectably enough, evaporate under investigation, although by the
time this had happened the Labour party had accomplished some
major part of its undertaking: Macmillan's government had suffered
an irreparable loss of prestige. For here was another paradox of the
affair: the fact that it was the party in which political enlightenment
and tolerance put their confidence and which is therefore supposed
not to be excessively suspicious of Communism that employed a
political tactic usually thought to be that of reaction. It
is
true that
