John Profumo: John Profumo, who was at the centre of Britain's most sensational sex and security scandal of the 20th century, did penance for parliamentary dishonour with more than 30 years of charity work among the poor in the East End of London.
Friends believe he more than made up for the ruin he brought on a brilliant political career by lying to the House of Commons over his relationship with a woman who was also seeing a Russian intelligence officer.
In 1975 he came in from the cold with a CBE for his work at Toynbee Hall, the East End settlement where he began the long road to rehabilitation washing dishes and helping meths drinkers.
In 1963 he was secretary of state for war and a rising star of the Tory Party, close to Harold Macmillan, a favoured visitor at Buckingham Palace, a war hero and the dashing husband of a famous film star.
Then, seven shots fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Christine Keeler triggered Britain's most notorious political sex scandal of modern times.
The Profumo affair convulsed Westminster for nearly six months.
Macmillan's cabinet was shaken by Christine Keeler's revelations that she had had sex with both Profumo and Cmdr Eugene Ivanov, a Russian intelligence officer and the Soviet assistant naval attaché in London.
In March 1963, battered by parliamentary gossip, Profumo delivered a personal statement to MPs denying any "impropriety whatever" in his relationship with Keeler.
His claim that a platonic affair had ended in 1961 was accepted by the cabinet. Downing Street described the matter as closed.
But while Macmillan and cabinet colleagues took Profumo at his word, MPs and newspapers remained sceptical.
On June 4th, 1963, after a welter of rumour, accusation and denial that had rocked the Conservative government, John Profumo was forced to resign when osteopath Dr Stephen Ward was arrested and charged with living on immoral earnings.
It was Ward, the son of a country parson, who in 1961 had brought Christine Keeler to Lord Astor's country home at Cliveden, Berkshire, where Profumo first set eyes on the doe-eyed brunette climbing nude from the swimming pool.
She was 19 and he was 48, married to Valerie Hobson, star of classic Ealing comedies such as Kind Hearts And Coronets. (Hobson, who was born in Larne, Co Antrim, loyally stood by her husband throughout this terrible personal crisis and died aged 83 in November 1998).
John Dennis Profumo came from a Sardinian family who had emigrated to Britain in 1885 and built their fortunes on insurance.
His father was an Italian baron and a king's counsel. John was born in 1915 and brought up as an English gentleman. From Harrow he went to Oxford. He joined the army in 1939 and ended the war a brigadier.
He entered the Commons at only 25, winning Kettering at a byelection in 1940, to become the youngest MP in the house. He remained the longest-surviving Tory to have voted against Neville Chamberlain in 1940, which helped to bring down the prime minister and open the way for Winston Churchill.
After the war he lost his seat, but got back into parliament in 1950 as MP for Stratford-upon-Avon. Two years later he was in government office, as joint parliamentary secretary at the ministry of transport.
Macmillan made him secretary of state for war in July 1960 with a brief to boost army recruitment. He made a success of it and seemed set for further advancement - foreign secretary seemed likely, and he was even tipped as a future prime minister.
Then he met Keeler. Their affair was brief and casual, and the matter might have ended without public knowledge but for a bizarre set of circumstances. Keeler was also sleeping with Ivanov, whom she had met through Ward, and with a West Indian petty criminal called Johnny Edgecombe.
Dr Ward, who had many Tory MPs among his patients, was alleged to be the central figure in a "top people's" vice ring. The involvement of the Russian was seen as a potentially serious threat to national security.
Newspapers, to which Keeler sold her story, held back from publishing details, but gossip began circulating. The affair advanced not by public disclosure but via a grapevine of rumour that got considerably bigger all the time until the truth could be concealed no longer.
It had all the alchemy of a TV soap opera with a glossary of high-society names, weekend house parties, call girls, MI5 and government ministers thrown in for good measure.
Harold Macmillan's cabinet secretly feared that Ward would exploit the publicity surrounding his trial to name other establishment figures involved in sexual scandal.
Newspapers ran teasing stories about the war minister performing his duties, next to items about Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies.
The story did not begin to break until the jealous Edgecombe went after Keeler and opened up with a revolver outside Ward's home where she was staying. Police involvement revealed for the first time the seedy tale of prostitution, espionage and deceit.
The Profumo affair rocked the Tory establishment to the roots during the final months of the Macmillan administration. The rumours surrounding the case, including one that a Conservative minister appeared at an orgy wearing only a maid's frilly apron and a mask, led to an inquiry by Lord Denning, the master of the rolls.
He found all the rumours to be untrue. The Denning report became one of the hottest-selling government publications ever.
Ward committed suicide after being found guilty on some, but not all, charges.
In the end the seediness of the Profumo affair proved fatal to 13 years of unbroken Tory rule. Before the year was out, Macmillan resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who lost the general election.
John Profumo suffered scandal without reply. The summer he fell, he made a vow of silence and kept it over the following years. His wife's death was a terrible blow to him, but he carried on his work as best he could.
John Profumo: born January 30th, 1915; died March 10th, 2006.