John Profumo didn’t do any of that. There was no comeback, and no attempt at one. He accepted that his career was ruined and never sought public sympathy. As extraordinary as his downfall was, the aftermath was unique. On June 5th 1963 he resigned from the government, from Parliament and from the Queen’s Privy Council. Not long afterwards, he contacted Toynbee Hall, a charitable mission in the East End of London, and asked whether they needed any help. He started washing dishes and helping with the children’s playgroup, and he stayed for 40 years. He disappeared amid the grimy tenements of east London and did good works till he died. And, with the exception of one newspaper article to mark Toynbee Hall’s centenary, he never said another word in public again.

He was, technically, the fifth Baron Profumo of the late Kingdom of Sardinia, but his family had settled in England in 1880, made their money in insurance and by the time Jack was born were comfortably ensconced as Warwickshire landowners. As a rising politician, he had a sheen and a charm about him that Ian McKellen, in the 1989 film Scandal, never quite captured. I don’t suppose he thought they’d be making movies about him a quarter-century later, but he accepted it. Profumo is Italian for “scent”, which gives the fallen political star a whiff of Ben Jonson: he caught the heady intoxication of cheap perfume one summer’s night, and, though he swapped his evening dress for a hairshirt, he understood the smell could never be washed out…

In 1963, “Profumo” was shorthand for establishment hypocrisy. Across 40 years, he reclaimed the narrative, as a story of shame and redemption, of acting honorably, making the best of a sticky wicket and all the other allegedly obsolescent virtues of his class the sex and hookers had supposedly rendered risible. Had Stephen Ward not thrown a teenage girl’s bathing suit into the topiary, John Profumo would have been noted as the last surviving member of the House of Commons to vote in the confidence motion of May 8th 1940, after the fall of Norway. He was one of only 30 Conservative MPs to join the opposition in declining to support the continued leadership of Neville Chamberlain and thus to usher Churchill into Downing Street. That vote changed the course of the war. But instead his place in history is as the man who saw a call-girl naked in a swimming pool.