Andrew Lloyd Webber was so intrigued by the mystery surrounding Stephen Ward, the society osteopath at the heart of the sex and spying scandal known as the Profumo affair, that he wrote a musical about him.

It flopped on the West End stage but now, six years later, Lloyd Webber has taken a step towards unravelling the truth behind the man who was convicted as a pimp but went to his death protesting that he was a patriot who had served his country.

The impresario has released a cache of documents from the scandal, including a previously unseen letter that Ward sent to Harold Wilson, the future Labour prime minister, claiming that he was an intermediary during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, trying to