The affair might have gone un-noticed but at the time Miss Keeler was also involved in a relationship with a Soviet intelligence officer and navel attache, Yevgeny Ivanov. As the Cold War was at it's height, fears that British security had been compromised caused questions to be asked in the House of Commons. Mr Profumo denied his affair with Miss Keeler but the truth came out and he was forced to resign from the cabinet.

This iconic image of Christine Keeler was shot by Lewis Morley after she signed a contract requiring her to pose nude for publicity photos for a film.

She tried to back out of the deal but when the film producers insisted, she agreed to sit astride a bentwood chair so that although she was nude, the chair hid most of her body.

Christine Keeler and Lewis Morley were already well-known, but the photo brought fame to the Arne Jacobsen model 3107 chair.

The film was never distributed but the photograph became an icon of the London swinging sixties and was satirised and imitated many times, once even by Lewis Morley himself.

Christine Keeler was convicted of perjury in a related trial and served nine months in prison. Her close friend, London osteopath Dr Stephen Ward, was prosecuted for living off the immoral earnings of prostitution including that of Christine Keeler but committed suicide before the verdict was passed.

In the late 1980s Christine Keeler published an autobiography and collaborated in a film called "Scandal". She published a book, "The Truth at Last: My Story" in 2001 in which she suggests that Stephen Ward was spying for the Russians and was murdered and that she was being manipulated by the British establishment.

John Profumo left politics and became a charity worker and was later awarded the CBE by the Queen. He died at the age of 91 in 2006.