The phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed the British media empire of Rupert Murdoch may become the biggest political imbroglio in the UK in many years … but it's rather tame compared to the Profumo affair, which exploded in the country almost 50 years ago.

In 1963, when the Western world was already on the precipice of monumental changes, it was revealed that John Profumo, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, had an affair with a prostitute named Christine Keeler, who also happened to be the mistress of Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London, and an alleged Russian spy.

The shocking revelations (keep in mind, the Cold War was still raging) followed by Profumo lying about the affair in a House of Commons inquiry, eventually led to his resignation – given the grave security risks he created.

More importantly, it helped bring down the government of Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan's government.
(The tawdry scandal made MacMillan so ill, he resigned a few months later).

While Profumo’s relationship lasted only a few weeks in 1961, rumors about it started popping up the following year.

Keeler was also involved with Jamaican drug dealers and was herself the target of a murder plot by an irate ex-boyfriend. She was quite the party girl, who was simply not the sort of woman that a senior British official should even be seen with.

The British public was so disgusted by the affair that they voted in a Labour government of Harold Wilson into power the next year (1964).

Analysts have frequently pointed out that the Profumo scandal, which occurred the same year as the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. in the U.S., helped to hasten the introduction of the youth/pop culture movement in the western world – led by the Beatles themselves.

For now, the hacking scandal looks pretty bad -- and it may in fact lead to some negative consequences with Prime Minister David Cameron (who is linked to several executives at News International, the company which owned the now-defunct News of the World newspaper).

However, this scandal lacks such elements as sex, drugs, cultural revolutions, nuclear weapons and war that the Profumo story was replete with.

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