‘In his warm embrace? Oh no, that’s just his arms. If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.’
‘The Shoop Shoop Song’, Cher
The hallowed door of Number 10 opened in July 1997 to a string of cultural celebrities such as Whitehall had never seen before. Alienated, disillusioned voters tired of the political class had elected Tony Blair, a young and idealistic cultural supremo with a brave new world feel of ‘putting the people first’. He set out his investiture stamp of show business values with a dazzling array of names: Ralph Fiennes, Lenny Henry, Tony Robinson, Helen Mirren, Harry Enfield and Eddie Izzard were but a few of the acting luminaries there, and the range of characters included newspaper editors such as Piers Morgan, writers such as Margaret Forster, Margaret Drabble and her husband Michael Holroyd, designers (Vivienne Westwood, Caroline Charles) and, naturally, the new aristocracy of pop stars led by Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, who declared, ‘When the fookin’ Prime Minister [sends you an invite], fookin’ ell, you’ve got to go.’ And naturally, of course, there was Sir Ian McKellen.
At the party, themed ‘Cool Britannia’ – no longer Rule Britannia – Margaret Forster was deeply impressed by Tony Blair, who made an obscure reference to a book ‘I had written about Carr’s biscuits’. She was naively taken in by his ‘homework’. Margaret Drabble, a little more scornfully, attended ‘the party with more curiosity than hope, having voted Lib Dem’. ‘I’ve no idea why we were invited. Not many writers were there (left-wing figures such as Harold Pinter and John Mortimer were notably absent) and a lot of showbiz people whom I didn’t recognise. Tony Blair spent a lot of time in an alcove being photographed with Oasis. I didn’t know what Oasis was, but he did.’
She did, of course, recognise Ian, her erstwhile contemporary. He had played her lover in Deutsches Haus years before at the ADC Theatre, Cambridge, in which he had planted on her many kisses and heartfelt tender words. He had also been her lead in the adaptation of her novel, The Garrick Years.
This time Ian had his eye on a different quarry, and was set to make a similar impact. Tony came over to McKellen, the fellow master thespian. Ian – very unexpectedly – said to him, ‘May I kiss you, Prime Minister?’
McKellen, master of the grand gesture, pulled out of the hat the most memorable moment of the party.
The Prime Minister, of course, eyes flashing enthusiastically, inclined a cheek at once and then, to unbelieving onlookers, Ian leant towards him, and delivered a lengthy smacking kiss on the lips.
Tony probably did not anticipate what he was in for, but as John Tydeman, Ian’s oldest Cambridge friend, explains, ‘Ian’s a cuddler, a hugger and a kisser – and it’s always on the lips, whether gay or not.’
When is a kiss not just a kiss? Ian had given Tony his own Tony Award, his seal of approval, generous, unconditional, big and open-hearted. We should remember Blair at this point had only been premier for three months. The comment of the Bishop of Carlisle in Shakespeare’s Richard II, after the big celebration (‘A woeful pageant have we here beheld / The woe’s to come’) still had some time to play itself out.
We should beware reading too much into it, for only several years later, shortly after The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was finished, we find from Ian, interviewed in the Radio Times, that the love-in with Tony had been abruptly broken off. He accused Blair’s government of betraying the homosexual rights agenda, condemning it as being no better at tackling gay issues than John Major’s was, describing it as ‘woefully ignorant about gay people and their problems, as most politicians at the time … I don’t detect the present Government is any more willing than he was to move things ahead. It’s still legal to sack someone for being gay, which is appalling.’
Asked about the irony of his acceptance of a knighthood from Margaret Thatcher, he was quick to answer, ‘I’ll always be glad I was offered it after I’d come out – and Maggie knew she was giving it to an openly gay man, not a species she is renowned for favouring.’
A ‘Labour Party source’ refuted Ian’s surprising charge, but Blair had clearly caught the McKellen kissing bug, going on to kiss Gaddafi and, surprisingly even in 2017, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the EU, in a fulsome embrace.
Much later, Ian moved on to profess allegiance to Jeremy Corbyn in rather eyebrow-raising terms, but then admitting a preference to be Alastair Campbell rather than Corbyn. Shades of Iago, perhaps?