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The former model at the heart of the Profumo affair Christine Keeler has died aged 75 after a long illness.

She was thrust into the spotlight after enjoying a secret romance with Cabinet minister John Profumo in 1961 at the height of the Cold War.

Scandal engulfed the Government after later it emerged that the then 19-year-old Keeler had also been sleeping with Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché at the Russian Embassy in London.

Ms Keeler, who had been battling an obstructive lung disease for several months, died on Monday night at the Princess Royal university hospital in Farnborough, Hampshire.

Her son Seymour Pratt, who now lives in Ireland with his family, said the Profumo affair had a long-lasting effect on his mother’s life.

He told the Guardian: ‘There was a lot of good around Chris’s rather tragic life, because there was a family around her that loved her.

‘I think what happened to her back in the day was quite damaging.’

Ms Keeler met Conservative minister Profumo – 27 years her senior – after leaving her home in Middlesex and working at Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho.

Dr Stephen Ward, a London osteopath, introduced the young dancer to Profumo, while at a party thrown by Lord and Lady Astor.

The scandal hit the headlines after seven shots were fired at Ward’s house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler a year later in December 1962.

It emerged the then 19-year-old Keeler had been sleeping with former Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then 48, and at the same time a handsome Russian spy Evgeny Ivanov.

But when the news broke, Profumo lied to the House of Commons about his affair. He was soon found out and Keeler sold her story to the News of The World for £23,000.

In June 1963, he quit in disgrace, amid allegations Keeler had been asked by Ivanov to discover from the War Minister when the West Germans might receive U.S. nuclear missiles to be stationed on their soil.

Profumo had been 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 actress Valerie Hobson, one of the great beauties of her day.

But Keeler, whose other lovers have included A-Team actor George Peppard, legendary womaniser Warren Beatty and Prisoner of Zenda star Douglas Fairbanks Jr, said in an interview years later that the Establishment was far more interested in painting it as a sex scandal and chose to ignore whispered claims of a widespread spying network.

She said: ‘I know the truth and it is far more shocking than what the public has been fed by the British Establishment. Sex was a game – spying was a serious business.

‘Far better that the Establishment be caught with its pants down than involved in stealing secrets. That was the thinking.’

The consequences for the Tory party were catastrophic and Macmillan’s Cabinet was shaken by the revelations.

Tales of organised orgies followed, including whipping parties at a house in Mayfair where, it was said, one of the guests became over-excited and died of a heart attack.

Lord Denning released the government’s official report on September 25, 1963, and the Prime Minister stepped down due to ill-health not long after. The Tories were then voted out the following year.

In December 1962, the police were called to Ward’s home when another of Christine’s ex-lovers, ­Johnny Edgecombe, fired shots at the lock while she and showgirl pal Mandy Rice-Davies cowered inside.

The police investigation led to Ward’s arrest and charges for living off immoral earnings and the revelation of Christine’s affair with Profumo.