Lord Denning; Led Profumo Scandal Probe

Lord Denning, who in a long and distinguished British judicial career led the investigation into the Profumo affair, one of his country’s most notorious sex and politics scandals, has died.

Denning died Friday at the Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester, England. He was 100.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who as a young lawyer appeared before Denning, called him “one of the great men of his age.”

“He was always the soul of courtesy, helping out a young barrister or someone with a hopeless case, and sometimes I was both,” Blair said.

“His judgments were a model of lucidity. He was prepared to use the law for its true purpose--in the interests of fairness and justice.”

In 1963, Denning was asked to conduct the inquiry into what was popularly known as the Profumo scandal. John Profumo, then British secretary of state for war, was forced to resign after lying to Parliament and admitting he shared a mistress, Christine Keeler, with a Soviet naval attache.

Denning concluded that national security had not been compromised, but he faulted then Prime Minister Harold Macmillian, saying that he and members of his government had been remiss in their duty for not digging out the truth about Profumo after rumors of the affair surfaced.

After the trial, Keeler’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies, who became a figure in the case, said that Denning was “one of the nicest judges I know.”

In another notable case years later, Denning ruled that the government did not have the right to prevent Sir Freddie Laker from operating his cut-price Skytrain airline service to New York, a decision that helped usher in low-cost air travel across the Atlantic.

Alfred Thompson Denning was born into neither wealth nor privilege on Jan. 23, 1899, in Hampshire in southern England. The son of a shopkeeper, Denning won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he gained first-class degrees in mathematics and law. He was appointed to the bench at the relatively early age of 45 and dubbed the “baby judge.”

John Mortimer, a lawyer and creator of “Rumpole of the Bailey,” praised Denning some years ago.

“He remains part of a dying breed,” Mortimer wrote, “the great English eccentric with a heart almost entirely of gold.”

A dispute over one of Denning’s books, which cast what he said was an unintended slur on black jurors, forced his retirement in 1983 after 38 years on the bench.

He never smoked or drank alcohol, although he did enjoy fish and chips. He put his longevity down to a healthy lifestyle.