Steve Pound bought the drugs Stephen Ward used to kill himself

The former veteran MP for Ealing North - Steve Pound has revealed that as a 15-year old in 1963 he acted as a 'gopher' to Stephen Ward - one of the main characters involved in the so called 'Profumo affair', and handed him drugs that eventually led to his death.

Stephen Ward was an artist and osteopath and sixties socialite who introduced Profumo to the then 19-year-old Christine Keeler, causing the scandal ( recently serialised on the BBC) which led to his resignation.

Ward was charged with immorality offences and convicted, but before verdict was announced he took an overdose and died three days later.

Mr Pound (Ealing's Labour MP from 1997 to 2019) talked about the Profumo affair to Mark D'Arcy for Today in Parliament.

In the Summer of 1963 he had been on holiday from school. His father had been features editor of the News of the World and knew Ward. He had posted bail for him and left his job to become his literary agent.

Stephen Ward had been arrested at the Pound’s home and one of his suicide notes was addressed to his father

‘I was there this 15-year-old school boy suddenly in the middle of this extraordinary world, meeting this amazing man, this clipped ex-army officer, frightfully proper and very well-spoken, with a sort of roguish style”, says Stephen Pound.

He describes Ward as having a film star quality and says he had never seen anyone wearing sunglasses before he met him. He also met at the time Mandy Rice-Davies and even now he can ‘hardly breathe’ when he thinks of her and he describes how Christine Keeler would glide into a room. He describes her as ‘heart-stoppingly beautiful’.

He told the BBC how he would visit Ward in his cell at the Old Bailey to get him to sign chalk sketches he had made for sale. The money raised went towards his defence and Mr Pound says that one of the pictures featuring Prince Philip was bought by a member of the Royal Household for cash ‘no questions asked’.

After the trial and a damning summing up from the judge, Ward was travelling back with the teenage Pound in a taxi and wrote himself a prescription for barbiturates which he asked the future MP to collect for him. In those days there was not a problem with a minor collecting such medicine and Mr Pound got out of the taxi near Harrods to collect it. He returned to the cab and gave the pills to Ward who later used them to take his own life.

Ward did not die straightaway and Mr Pound says that he felt terrible about his role and prayed for Ward to recover.

He said, “ For a 15-year-old, it really was as if we were moving from the black and white, post-war austerity, rationing, all that business into a completely new world. It was going to be the swinging sixties.”

He quoted Larkin’s Annus Mirabilus, “Sexual intercourse began, In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) -Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."

Mr Pound says that in retrospect he felt the ‘crucifixion’ of Stephen Ward was an attempt by the post-war establishment to turn back the tide of history. He says when he eventually became an MP he entered parliament with a burning sense of injustice due to his experiences of these events and that he refused to give unearned deference to those that would want to wind the clock back to the summer of 1963.

5 February 2020