Word: ward
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This preposterous attempt to make a hero of Stephen Ward fitted in with the scatterbrained, left-wing politics of most of the signers, Britain's Angry Middle-aged Men, who used him to demonstrate that the Establishment and British society in general are rotten. Amid all this sudden sympathy for Ward it almost became necessary to recall what he had really been like. A top London crime reporter, who knew him long before the case broke, summed it up. He said Ward had corrupted the innocent, worsened the already bad, toyed with people's lives...
Highest Duty. Yet the uneasy feeling persisted that somehow Ward had been made a scapegoat, and that his case and the public's reaction to it carry a disturbing message about British law and morals. Nothing could be more revered, solemn and self-righteous than the British judiciary, but there is now a growing consensus that the Ward case has put in question its vaunted independence from politics...
...Ward's hasty arrest and trial raised the troubling implication that he was prosecuted mainly because he threatened the existence of the government. Under oath, Call Girl Ronna Ricardo said that the police had put her up to making damaging false statements about Ward. To a newspaper reporter last week, Prostitute Vickie Barrett admitted that she had perjured herself when she claimed on the stand that she had whipped men for money in Ward's flat; later she denied her denial...
Though Cabinet, film and noble personalities were mentioned in court as having been involved with Ward or his girls, none of the gentlemen in question were called to testify. The widespread suspicion in Britain is that the defense did not call them because by telling the truth about Ward they would only have damaged his case, and that the prosecution did not call them because it did not wish to embarrass the Establishment. In general, serious observers fear that British courts are assuming, or are being forced to assume, too much authority as an arm of government, and recall...
Never the Same Again. The doubts raised by the Ward case go beyond such specific matters as the function of the judiciary. The wide-ranging inquiry being conducted by Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls,* keeps feeding new rumors into the stream of London gossip, including the suspicion that two more Cabinet members besides War Minister Jack Profumo were involved in the case or its fringes. Says Denning: "It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between crime...