Spooks

So which one did you fancy, the blonde one or the brunette? No, not Agnetha or Anni-Frid, for back in the early sixties this question could just as easily have been asked about Christine Keeler and that minx from Pontiets, Mandy Rice-Davies.

Now there is a motor racing connection of sorts to the Profumo affair, for just as the scandal was about to break Miss Keeler was whisked away to Madrid in a plane piloted by “racing driver” Paul Mann. At least that’s what the papers called him, although no-one now seems to recall a driver of that name. Some sources claim that Mann worked for MI5.

This reminds me that it’s said that Jock Horsfall - the MI5 officer killed at Silverstone in 1949 - used his battered Ford transporter to carry the body of “Captain Martin” - in reality Welsh vagrant Glyndwr Michael - to a submarine at Holy Loch. Perhaps you remember the film The Man Who Never Was about this successful attempt to mislead the Germans into thinking there would be an invasion of Sardinia.