Transcripts of interviews for the Denning report may still exist as suggested in the Peter Hennessy book mentioned by Tim Luckhurst (Still waiting for the full story on Profumo, Letters, 7 January), but Lord Denning told me in 1987 that it was the physical material that he believed had been destroyed, including the photographs of sex parties belonging to Stephen Ward that had been removed by police from the safe at Odhams (publisher of the Mirror newspaper) in late June 1963.
Copies of those photographs had already been made by the GRU officer Yevgeny Ivanov. At the end of the cold war, in a brief window of openness, KGB officers offered them for sale to British newspapers, but the deal fell through when the archives were suddenly closed down.
In his letter, Alf Dubs says the trial judge ordered that the transcript of the trial must be kept secret for 90 years. In fact I obtained a copy of it 35 years ago from the lord chancellor’s office. What is missing, however, is the crucial summing up and direction to the jury by the judge, Sir Archie Marshall, who was determined to see Ward convicted.
Dr Stephen Dorril
Co-author, The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward
• This letter was amended on 9 January 2020. An earlier version gave the name of the judge in the Stephen Ward trial as Lord Parker.
