Among these was Lord Astor, at whose country house, Cliveden, in the summer of 1961, Ward introduced Profumo to a 19-year-old showgirl and night-club model, Christine Keeler.

Amid a range of rumours of widespread sex scandals in government and high society, the police began to investigate Ward.

Ward moved to London, where he worked for a few months as a carpet salesman in Houndsditch before an uncle found him a job in Hamburg as a translator in the German branch of Shell Oil.

In 1934, he was persuaded by his mother to seek qualification as an osteopath, by studying at the Kirksville College of Osteopathy and Surgery in the United States.

When war broke out in September 1939, he volunteered for service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) but was rejected because his American qualifications were not recognised.

The army still found it difficult to accommodate him, and he spent much time canvassing for the proper recognition of osteopathy while being officially assigned to non-medical duties.

However, he found opportunities to practise his skills; among those whom he treated was Mahatma Gandhi, who impressed Ward: "Although much of his policy was opposed to that of my own country.

[12] Following a nervous collapse that led to a period in a psychiatric hospital, Ward returned to England in October 1945 and was discharged from the army "on grounds of disability".

He befriended the cartoonist and socialite Arthur Ferrier, whose parties Ward attended regularly and where he mixed with, among others, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, later the Duke of Edinburgh but then a junior officer in the Royal Navy.

[17] Ward's own parties were noted for their social mix: "a barrister, a barrow-boy, a writer, a motor salesman, a peer, and always, for some reason, a steady stream of pretty girls".

[19] He generally enjoyed discussing and watching sexual activity rather than participating,[18] a factor which may have contributed to the failure of his marriage, on 27 July 1949, to an actress, Patricia Mary Baines, who came from a prosperous middle-class background.

[21] In his spare time, Ward had attended art classes at the Slade school,[6] and subsequently developed a profitable sideline in portrait sketches.

[26][9] Ward was later used by the British Foreign Office as a backchannel, through Ivanov, to the Soviet Union,[27] and was involved in unofficial diplomacy at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

[30] At the main house, among a large gathering from the worlds of politics and the arts, was John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, and his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson.

[39][40] The press and public remained largely ignorant of the Keeler-Profumo liaison until early in 1963, when Keeler became a focus of newspaper attention as the "missing witness" in a case involving one of her former lovers, Johnny Edgecombe.

A few days after the trial, on 21 March, the satirical magazine Private Eye printed the most detailed summary so far of the rumours, with the main characters lightly disguised: "Mr James Montesi", "Miss Gaye Funloving", "Dr Spook", and "Vladimir Bolokhov".

[45] Two days after the resignation, amid growing rumours of widespread sex scandals in government and high society, Ward was arrested and charged with several counts of living off the earnings of prostitution and of procuring.

[46] Ward's committal proceedings began on 28 June, at Marylebone magistrates' court, where the Crown's evidence was fully reported in the press.

[48] In his account of the trial, which began on 22 July, Richard Davenport-Hines describes it as an act of political revenge: "The exorcism of scandal in high places required the façade of [Ward's] conviction on vice charges".

The thrust of the prosecution's case, in which Keeler and Rice-Davies were their principal witnesses, was that these payments indicated that Ward was living off their earnings from prostitution (and was thus a pimp).

[49] However, one of the police officers involved in the investigation, Sergeant Arthur Eustace, stated that "Ward had no money in his British bank account"[50] at the time, and that they could find nothing to indicate that he had been living off "immoral earnings".

[53] The prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who adopted a tone of moral outrage, "pronounced words like 'prostitute', 'pimp', and even 'sexual intercourse' with obvious distaste",[54] portrayed Ward as a man who represented "the very depths of lechery and depravity",[55] and described him as "a thoroughly filthy fellow",[56] while the judge, Sir Archie Marshall, adopted a similarly hostile attitude.

The next day, Marshall completed his summary and the jury found Ward guilty in absentia on the charges of living off the earnings of prostitution, while acquitting him of several other counts.

[61] On the day of the inquest, after a private memorial service at the chapel in St Stephen's Hospital, Ward's remains were cremated at Mortlake Crematorium.

[62] "Though his solicitor had asked that no flowers be sent, there was a wreath of two hundred roses from, among others",[63] English playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, writers Angus Wilson and Alan Sillitoe, and musician Acker Bilk, "who later withdrew his name".

"[63] In their accounts of the security aspects of the Profumo affair, Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril provide extra information concerning Ward's last hours, his movements and his visitors.

Denning's report, published on 26 September 1963, concluded that there had been no security leaks nor evidence to link members of the government with associated scandals.

[70] In the October 1964 general election, the Conservative government was narrowly defeated by the Labour Party and Harold Wilson became prime minister.

[72] Keeler, in one of several accounts of her life, denounced Ward as a Soviet spy, and a traitor ranking alongside Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, but without providing any evidence.

During a late 1963 episode of That Was the Week That Was, Ward's name was included on a list of those who had died during the outgoing year, among Édith Piaf, Jean Cocteau and John F. Kennedy.