Speaking for the first time about the Profumo scandal, Daisy Devine-Platt has slammed the vile portrayal of her grandmother Christine as a “slut” and revealed how she was tormented by the fallout
Daisy Devine-Platt shares more than just a striking resemblance to her iconic gran Christine Keeler.
At 16 – three years shy of Christine’s age when she had the affair with war minister John Profumo that rocked British politics – she is brimming with the same boundless confidence. Her grandma’s sexual liaisons and her subsequent perjury conviction left an indelible scar on Christine’s life, plunging her into poverty and leaving her terrified of the world.
Speaking for the first time about the scandal, Daisy has slammed the vile portrayal of Christine as a “slut” and told how she was tormented by the fallout from the affair right up until her death in 2017, aged 75. She said: “Sometimes I look online and there are horrible pictures and I see the awful way she was portrayed.
“At the end of her life, when she was cancerous and heavy and really sick, people were delighted that she was no longer youthful and pretty. They saw it as punishment. But it’s my grandmother, she was sick and unwell and it’s such a horrible thing to see. She hated to see herself like that.”
Christine’s family are on a mission to clear her posthumously of a perjury conviction after she begged her son, Seymour Platt, in her will to “tell the truth about her life”. She was jailed for nine months in 1963 for perjury in a case unrelated to Profumo.
But her family claim the conviction was designed to smear her over the scandal. They lodged a 300-page dossier on Friday that calls for a royal prerogative of mercy, which would allow the King to pardon her.
Standing with her dad Seymour and mum Lorraine Devine outside the Ministry of Justice in Central London, Daisy said: “I hope Grandma gets the justice she deserves.”
Daisy was seven years old when Christine died, nearly 60 years after her affairs with Soviet attaché Yevgeny Ivanov and Profumo, who was forced to resign in 1963 after lying to Parliament about the liaison. The fallout helped topple Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government the following year.
Days before Christine died, Daisy and Seymour, 53, and Lorraine visited her in her care home. Daisy wore a pretty dress which she still has as a sentimental token of that final visit. “It’s just a little dress you have when you are seven, but I couldn’t part with it,” she said.
Christine’s memory still looms large in the family home. Hanging in the kitchen of their house in Longford, Ireland, is a portrait of her by artist Fionn Wilson.
“It’s a gorgeous picture of my grandma when she was younger,” Daisy said. “When people come in, they say, ‘You do look like her’. I remember her telling me, ‘Oh, you look like me’. She told me my left side is my best side. I was seven. I still pose with my left side now, so something stuck.
“She could never understand my accent, I had a more thick Irish accent when I was younger. So when I spoke to her I’d have to do an English accent. She’d say, ‘Oh the signal is better now’.”
Christine became an icon of the 1960s, captured in that famous black-and-white image posing naked on a back-to-front chair. Daisy said: “Christine Keeler almost isn’t my grandma in a sense. She isn’t this woman that I met. This woman who is posing on a chair, I never met that woman. I just knew Grandma.”
Christine was just 21 when she was jailed for perjury in 1963. She had been attacked by stalker Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon in April that year. But he successfully appealed after it was found she had told jurors two witnesses were not there.
Her family argue there was no doubt the assault took place and that Christine lived in fear of Gordon. She had also allegedly been put under pressure by the witnesses. But they have so far been unable to overturn the conviction. Earlier this year justice watchdogs rejected an application to send her case to the Court of Appeal.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission accepted she could not have “secured a fair trial, particularly in view of the unprecedented level of prejudicial media coverage of her at the time”. But it said: “In quashing the perjury conviction, the Court of Appeal would have a very limited ability to correct the public record in relation to [her] part in the Profumo affair.”
Her family’s last hope is to ask the Justice Secretary to recommend a pardon under the royal prerogative of mercy, which is only used in incredibly rare circumstances. An application can be considered when all other judicial routes have been exhausted, or new evidence demonstrates no offence was committed or the defendant did not commit the offence.
Most importantly, the pardon can be handed down if “the person was morally and technically innocent of the crime”. Solicitor James Harbridge, who helped compile the application, said: “It’s truly amazing this whole chain of events remain ongoing, even though Lucky Gordon admitted at his own trial that he slapped Christine.
“The jury took less than 15 minutes to convict him in June 1963, but here we are in May 2025, still seeking justice for the victim and her family.” Dr Felicity Gerry, a human rights barrister who is supporting Seymour, said: “Every woman you speak to says her conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. She was exploited and sent to prison. She was ‘slut-shamed’ her whole life for the Profumo affair.”
The Ministry of Justice said: “We take miscarriages of justice very seriously and the Justice Secretary considers all applications for pardons.”
Christine Keeler’s family looks to Labour for support
Seymour has spent nearly 10 years fighting to prove his mother’s jail sentence was a desperate bid to discredit her. He now hopes the Labour Party could finally help clear Christine Keeler’s name – particularly as she shared a cell with Health Minister Wes Streeting’s grandmother.
Seymour said: “I try not to be political but I’m bloody delighted that it’s a Labour Party and not the Tory Party, to be blunt. I’d love Labour to look at this with fresh eyes and be humane to correct an inhumane decision.”
In 2022 Mr Streeting told how his grandfather William Crowley was an armed robber who was “in and out of prison” most of his life and had known the Krays. He said Crowley “took down” his grandmother Elizabeth “Libby” Crowley, who was jailed for possession of a stolen radio and sent to HMP Holloway.
She shared a cell with Christine and they became friends, sharing the belief they were both victims of the men in their lives. On BBC podcast Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Mr Streeting branded Libby’s conviction a “real injustice”.
He said: “The tragedy of that makes me really angry, even now.” Referring to his grandmother’s friendship with Christine, Mr Streeting added: “Talk about chalk and cheese, you had this working-class East Ender in my nan Libby and then you had Christine Keeler of high society.
“But I remember my nan talking about Christine Keeler and feeling very strongly that she had been a victim of injustice and what had happened to her had been wrong. They stayed in contact for many years after she left prison.”