“He would, wouldn’t he?” In four exasperated words uttered from a witness stand in the Marylebone magistrates’ court, Mandy Rice-Davies, who has died from cancer at 70, earned a place in the modern dictionaries of quotations. She also summed up succinctly the changing social attitudes of the 1960s, when deference to the Establishment began to crumble.
Rice-Davies, a former model and nightclub dancer, was one of the key figures in the Profumo affair that ended the career of the secretary of state for war and played a part in bringing down Harold Macmillan’s government.
Although she never met John Profumo herself, she shared a flat with Christine Keeler, who was accused of having a scandalous affair with both the Conservative politician and Yevgeny Ivanov, a