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Christine Keeler, the model who was at the centre of a scandal that shook British politics, has died aged 75, her family have said.

Keeler’s son, Seymour Platt, 46, told the Guardian she died on Monday at the Princess Royal university hospital in Farnborough.

“My mother passed away last night at about 11.30pm," he said.

She had been ill for several months and was suffering with lung disease.

It is over fifty years since John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, lied in the House of Commons about having an affair with call girl Keeler.

The denial resulted in the exposure of a searing story of sex, suicide, intrigue and espionage - and demolished Profumo's world of red-leather despatch boxes, scrambler telephones and the panoply of a Minister of the Crown.

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(Image: Popperfoto) (Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Keeler was reportedly was briefly married twice, both ending in divorce.

She had two sons - James from her first marriage and Seymour from a second - and a granddaughter, it was reported.

What was the Profumo affair?

KEELER was said to have met Profumo in 1961 through the party scene for aristocrats and VIPS after working as a cabaret dancer in London's Soho.

Profumo was a rising star of the Tory Party, close to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a favoured visitor at Buckingham Palace, a war hero and the dashing husband of a famous film star.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Then, seven shots fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler triggered Britain's most notorious political sex scandal of modern times.

The Profumo affair convulsed Westminster for nearly six months.

Keeler was jailed for nine months for perjury.

(Image: UGC) (Image: Hulton Archive)

Macmillan's Cabinet was shaken by Keeler's revelations that she had sex with both Profumo and Commander Eugene Ivanov, a handsome Russian intelligence officer and the Soviet assistant naval attache in London.

At the height of the crisis, Cabinet ministers feared some of their colleagues might become the targets for scandal-mongers.

(Image: Popperfoto)

In the end the seediness of the Profumo affair proved fatal to 13 years of unbroken Tory rule.

Before the year was out, Mr Macmillan resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who lost the general election.

Profumo suffered scandal without reply.

(Image: Rex Features) (Image: Daily Mirror)

The summer he fell, he made a vow of silence and never opened his mouth again to answer any criticism or misrepresentation, however unfair.

The only time he spoke of it was to his son David who produced the memoir Bringing The House Down.

Profumo served penance for parliamentary dishonour with more than 30 years of charity work among the poor in the East End of London.

(Image: Getty)

Friends believe he more than made up for the ruin he brought on a brilliant political career.

In 1975 he came in from the cold with a CBE for his work at Toynbee Hall, the East End settlement where he began the long road to rehabilitation washing dishes and helping meths drinkers.

Profumo's wife's death was a terrible blow to him, but he carried on his work as best he could.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

In 2003, the 40th anniversary of the Profumo scandal, all-party efforts were made in the Commons to restore his Privy Counsellorship.

Profumo died in hospital on March 9 2006 after a stroke.

In October The Mirror reported how the scandal being turned into a TV drama.

The Trial of Christine Keeler will tell the personal story behind the political scandal in 1963 which helped to topple Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.

The six-part BBC drama by the writer of the hit show Apple Tree Yard will explore the 19-year-old dancer’s concurrent relationships with Profumo and Eugene Ivanov.