John Profumo, the 5th Baron Profumo of Italy, who has died aged 91, lived many lives, in reality and in fiction.
In the reality of the early 1960s, he was the wealthy playboy-dilettante secretary of state for war who almost destroyed Harold Macmillan's Conservative government by the discovery of his dalliance with the dancer and call-girl Christine Keeler, who was also said to be sleeping with the Soviet naval attaché Evegeny Ivanov. The reality that followed included four decades of work at Toynbee Hall in the east end of London.
But in 1963, having lied about his dalliance with Keeler, and having been whitewashed by his Conservative colleagues, under pressure from his wife, the film star Valerie Hobson (obituary November 16 1998), he confessed the truth. In June 1963 he resigned as secretary of state, from the privy council and as MP for Stratford-upon-Avon.
Then came the work at Toynbee Hall, receiving a CBE for this from Harold Wilson in 1975 and becoming its chairman from 1982-85 and then its president. From 1975 he was also a director of his family's firm, Provident Life.
But the overt sign of his full public redemption in the eyes of the establishment came in 1995 when he was seated on the Queen's right at the top table of the dinner celebrating the 70th birthday of Margaret Thatcher.
"No one judges Jack Profumo more harshly than he does himself," his friend, the late Jim Thomson, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, once said. "He says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt real shame".
Unfortunately for Profumo, in his quiet pursuit of personal redemption, he could not escape the public purgatory imposed by his 1963 image as an errant playboy-politician.
This was featured in TV documentaries, a half-fictional film, Scandal (1989), and the ghosted autobiographies of Christine Keeler, the lissom young woman whose naked form he chased around the pool at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire stately home, with its then owner Lord ("Bill") Astor.
Keeler was to constantly relive her ever-changing four months in 1962 with Profumo. In a 2001 version, based on 1,000 pages of released CIA fantasies, Stephen Ward, the tragic osteopath-artist-voyeur who introduced Keeler to Profumo, became a "Soviet" spy along with Sir Roger Hollis, the head of MI6.
After 37 years, Keeler also alleged that she had become pregnant by Profumo and procured an abortion. The book and an accompanying TV programme would not have made it easier for an 85-year old to sleep three years after the death of his supportive wife.
It was easier to fictionalise the events because Lord Denning's official 1963 inquiry into what became known as the Profumo Affair had been largely a whitewash.
And when the last British documents were supposed to be released in January 1994, a number of aspects were left obscure, including MI5's attempt to "turn" Evegeny Ivanov with the help of Dr Ward. Profumo always refused to talk because, in the words of his solicitor, Lord Goodman, "it caused him terrible pain".
Seldom can anyone have paid more for longer for the sins of having been a playboy. As such, he had aroused the ire of my friend the late Captain Henry (Bob) Kerby, the very rightwing Tory MP for Arundel and Shoreham.
A former MI6 man who had risked his life behind Nazi lines in wartime Europe, Kerby considered himself an outsider in the Conservative party and resented the privileges provided to the insiders in what he called the "kissing ring" - the rich and privileged Tories who attended the same schools and universities. Profumo very much fitted Kerby's picture of a member of that ring.
Profumo was the eldest son of Baron Albert Profumo and was born into a family that then controlled Provident Life. He was educated at Harrow school and Brasenose College, Oxford. From 1939 he served in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, was mentioned in dispatches and awarded a military OBE in 1944. By the war's end in 1945 he was a brigadier and chief of staff to the British mission in Tokyo.
But Profumo was the focus of antipathy for old sweats such as Kerby and the Labour MP Lieutenant-Colonel George Wigg.
They resented the fact that, as a 25-year-old in 1940, he had become MP for Kettering (he lost in the seat in the 1945 Labour landslide) and having been MP for Stratford-upon-Avon from 1950, that such a "playboy" should become secretary of state for war in 1960.
This was after junior posts in transport (1952-57), the colonial department ((1957-58) and the foreign office (1958-60).
Although MI5 had known about Profumo's dalliance with Keeler for many months, the first politician to learn about it was John Lewis, the former Labour MP for Bolton, who mistakenly thought Stephen Ward had seduced his wife.
In January 1963, he informed George Wigg, Harold Wilson's intelligence chief, that Ward's protégé Christine Keeler, previously the girlfriend of property speculator Peter Rachman, had had a four-month affair with Profumo after a brief fling with the Soviet naval attache Evegeny Ivanov. In February 1963, Macmillan's private secretary, John Wyndham, later Lord Egremont, was told about the Profumo-Keeler relationship.
About then, Bob Kerby passed on to me a copy of an affectionate note Profumo had sent Keeler that she was unsuccessfully trying to sell in Fleet Street, where its content was widely known.
Editors, two of whose journalists had been jailed at the time of the scandal concerning the Soviet spy John Vassall, were reluctant to cross the Macmillan government again.
I started checking the background of the Profumo-Keeler letter. A press gallery colleague working for Tass, the Soviet news agency, confirmed that Ivanov had formed connections in Tory circles.
Then suddenly, I had to use the material in my newsletter Westminster Confidential because my other potential lead - the plan of then chancellor of the exchequer, Reginald Maudling, to float the pound - had been aborted. So, in March 1963, I printed the Profumo letter in Westminster Confidential.
All hell broke lose and my mail stopped coming. After Bob Kerby showed my newsletter to the Conservative chief whip, Sir Martin Redmayne, his face becoming even redder than usual and he rushed it to Harold Macmillan, demanding I be deprived of my lobby privileges.
Sitting in the press gallery I heard a rattled Macmillan attack me. Then I heard Profumo, flanked by Macmillan and the leader of the commons Iain Macleod, threaten the likes of me with a libel action after reading out a whitewash concocted overnight by Redmayne, the solicitor general, the attorney general, and information minister William Deedes - a meeting from which the stiff necked home secretary Henry Brooke was excluded.
Profumo insisted: "There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler." It was after this that the outspoken Tory MP Nigel Birch voiced all cynics' suspicions by saying: "What are whores about?"
Stephen Ward, fearing police prosecution as a pimp, informed Macmillan, through his principal private secretary Tim Bligh, about a series of love letters Profumo had sent Keeler. But the PM preferred to believe Profumo's word "as a gentleman".
Under the threat of an investigation by the lord chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, Profumo blurted out the truth to his wife Valerie over lunch in Venice. "Oh darling," she said, "we must go home as soon as we can and face up to it".
In Macmillan's absence in Scotland, Profumo confessed his four months of lies to Tim Bligh and, in a letter to Macmillan, resigned from all his offices.
From then on, the long-restrained press had a field day, speculating that Keeler had been programmed to ask Profumo about the rearmament of West Germany, although nobody believed she had the intelligence to ask the question, or understand the answers.
Subsequent preparations for the trial of Stephen Ward caused a panic in the establishment. Many of its members, whom he had treated for bad backs, sketched for the Daily Telegraph and Illustrated London News or matched with his young women of the demi-monde, were quaking in their hand-turned shoes.
They phoned Ward, telling him to keep quiet about them, leave the country or cut his throat. When he knew he would be found guilty he asked Stephen Pound to buy him enough sedatives to commit suicide, as desired by his establishment "friends".
The blow to the Macmillan government was enormous. Profumo's confession and the Ward trial broke open the shell of the old establishment, exposing its immorality and incompetence.
Macmillan wanted to eject Profumo from the privy council to show how forcefully, if belatedly, he could deal with lying sexual transgressors.
Documents released 40 years later disclosed that Profumo's friend, the Queen, intervened to allow the disgraced politician to resign. Macmillan was transformed overnight from "Supermac" into a doddering old Edwardian twit.
He confessed the sense of "personal strain" had been unprecedented. In September, having learned he had prostate cancer, Macmillan resigned his office.
Within a year, Profumo began reconstructing his life. Introduced to Toynbee Hall by Stella, the Marchioness of Reading, he began washing dishes in its kitchen, moving on to the meths drinkers' club.
He then tackled fund-raising to keep the settlement afloat. As his wife said: "it isn't what happens to a man, it's what he does with it that matters".
An epitaph of a different sort was provided in May 2003 by Labour MP Frank Field about the first vote Profumo cast as the newly elected MP for Kettering. This was the vote that helped bring down the Chamberlain government and install Winston Chuchill as war leader.
As "the last surviving Tory MP to have voted against the Government in that fateful division on May 8 1940, we publicly salute the gallant and honourable gentleman to whom this country owes a huge debt of gratitude".
He leaves a son, David.
John Dennis Profumo, Baron Albert Profumo, politician and social worker, born January 30 1915; died March 9 2006.