Kissing and Telling

The application for my mother’s pardon was sent in on 14th June 2021 and is available to read on on the campaign pages on this website.

It is very detailed and leaves no doubt that my mother was assaulted by Gordon on 18th April 1963 and, as the victim of crime, it was wrong that she was sent to prison. It’s filled with evidence that shines a new light on that part of history.

The Ministry of Justice has received the application and have said they are going through the review process. I believe lots of you have emailed or written to the Ministry to show support for Christine’s pardon, so thank you. If you haven’t yet, please go to the campaign page, where there are instructions about how to give your support.

Campaign page

In August 1963 John Hogan sold his story to The People, the article had the snappy heading of “Christine Keeler is a shameless slut”. John Hogan could now tell the world that he had been working as a butler for Christine. Some of his duties seemed to include bringing her up cups of tea in bed, sometimes an extra cup for a lover who might be there too, allegedly once John Profumo.

John Hogan also claimed that Christine did not wash, her feet were so dirty he had to tell her to get them clean, had disgusting nicotine stained fingers and that she left her clothes on the floor where they fell.

John Hogan told The People how how she had such a voracious sexual appetite that on Stephen Ward’s say-so she would pick up homeless men and drag them back to her flat for sex, and his story went on to lament the suicide of Stephen Ward who, he said, was an innocent man in all of this.

Mandy and Christine were the real monsters in his eyes.

Extract from the Denning report regarding Hogan

John Hogan was paid £600 for his story, according to Lord Denning, and he wasn't a butler, he was a carpet cleaner. The idea that Christine had a butler in 1962 is ludicrous. She was broke, in fact she was always broke and never had any money, that is until June 1963 when the News of the World newspaper gave her £23,000 for her story.

Maybe some of the men around her resented her sudden fortune, felt they should have their share, as her success was their property.

Robin Drury had an axe to grind with Christine. Robin was Christine’s manager and had been trying to get a book written, “Christine’s Story”. He had a good friend who would write the story for £15,000 (£100,000+ in today’s money). She was being conned and she knew it, so she pulled out of the book deal and fired him.

They had recorded a tape for the book while everyone was drunk and high, and Christine insisted that Robin destroy the tape. She watched him burn it in an ashtray - Robin did put a tape in the ashtray and burn it, it just wasn’t Christine’s tape.

According to Christine, Robin now turned to straight blackmail: he had the tape and wanted £10,000 or he was taking it to the police.

Robin was bankrupt and desperate for money so, after being turned down by Christine, he took the tape to the police and started selling his story to the press.

By the beginning of October 1963, Robin Drury, Christine’s ex-manager, was selling his story, talking about orgies and the lies Christine had told. He said Christine had said on the tape that she wasn't assaulted by Lucky Gordon and that on that night there were two other West Indian men who witnessed it all. He said that Christine had picked up another woman for an orgy and she had beaten her up - it was all nothing to do with Gordon. And the newspapers printed every word

The press had a new story, there was proof Christine was a liar and Gordon was an innocent man, or so it seemed. However, Robin Drury was lying.

Of course in court the tape recording was thrown out, rambling drunk and high people talking rubbish is not admissible but, asked in court, the police did assert, “The tapes confirm that Gordon assaulted her”.

John Hamilton-Marshall was a friend of both Stephen Ward and Lucky Gordon. He went to the police and said he had been in an altercation with Christine on the same night that Lucky assaulted her. All through August 1963, John was also selling his story for money in The People and the Daily Express, telling them he was responsible for all her wounds and injuries.

It was another lie. We show in our pardon documents that John Hamilton-Marshall’s allegations were not corroborated by anyone else. He had a criminal record and had recently lied under oath in the Stephen Ward trial.

Unusually, he was given immunity from prosecution for what he would say in court, and even the prosecution admitted he was a tainted witness whose testimony was not “evidence that one or more injuries to Keeler were caused by him and not by Gordon”

John was Paula Hamilton-Marshall’s brother and Paula was a witness who supported Christine's account of the assault that night. So John would have known his testimony could end up causing his sister’s conviction.

He said after her trial, "I did it for Stephen Ward. Paula was for Christine and I was for Stephen. But it all seems rather pointless now."

Of all the elements to this story, I have found John’s lies and exaggerations the hardest to grasp. Why would he step forward and do so much damage, for money, resentment or vengeance for the death of Stephen Ward or any of the three?

I recently asked Douglas Thompson, co -author of my mother’s autobiography, for his thoughts on what John did. Douglas told me a story of a serial killer in the US. A child had gone missing and the police had thrown up checkpoints and were screening all cars. A father and daughter pulled up. They talked to the police and were waved on, without the police searching their car. This was a father out for a drive with his daughter, so the police assumed that he could not be the man they were looking for, but in the boot of that car was his next victim. The Police didn’t appreciate that a murderer would take his child for a drive with his victim in the boot.

I’m not suggesting John was a serial killer or anything that awful but I think it illustrates people are beyond understanding.

Through June 1963, before Stephen’s trial, members of Parliament, protected by parliamentary privilege, destroyed Christine’s reputation, lining up to call her a prostitute.

Both John Hamilton-Marshall and Robin Drury were friends of Stephen Ward and both went to the police with their stories in the same weekend, the 6th and 7th of July 1963, days after Stephen Ward’s committal proceedings and only a few weeks before his trial.

I’ve been asked if I think there was a conspiracy to punish my mother, I still remember my mother saying.
“If you want to keep a secret, tell no one” and “keeping secrets is the hardest thing in the world”

Still I think people deliberately stepped up to destroy her, or just make money…Or maybe it was just the way women were treated in 1963.