‘I’m a weirdo’
The spectacle of a cabinet minister making a fool of himself convulsed the nation as they read their newspapers, eyes rounded and popping in every corner of the land. In a dismal world it was wonderful to have something ridiculous to laugh at.
Edwina Currie, A Parliamentary Affair (1994)
NICKY: The great moral issue facing modern British politics is corruption.
Peter Flannery, Our Friends in the North (1996)
Too many Conservative MPs have been exposed as perverts, liars and conmen.
The Sun (1997)
If it was John Major’s intention that the Citizens’ Charter should be the enduring soundbite of his premiership, he was to be disappointed. Far more resonant, it transpired, was a phrase he came up with in his speech to the 1993 Conservative Party conference, even if it was wrenched out of context and used against him. It was intended to be a positive message, reclaiming the ground he had occupied at the start of his premiership, before everything had gone wrong. Casting an eye back to the 1950s and ’60s, he denounced fashionable theories that had led to wrong turns being taken on education, family life and housing (‘we pulled down the terraces, destroyed whole communities’), but argued that the innate character of Britain had survived these onslaughts.
‘Underneath we’re still the same people,’ he urged. ‘The old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy – they’re still alive, they’re still the best of Britain.’ Then came the killer phrase: ‘It is time to return to those old core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting a responsibility for yourself and your family.’ His audience understood entirely what he was talking about, and responded with genuine warmth and affection for a decent man who dreamed of simpler, happier times.
Party conferences, however, are not primarily about the activists in the hall, but about the country beyond, for whom the events are filtered through the words of the assembled journalists. The former Tory MP Matthew Parris, now working for The Times, was at the pre-speech press conference and saw how the phrase ‘back to basics’ would be received: ‘Within seconds, journalists were asking sceptical, cheeky or downright lewd questions about divorce, adultery and waywardness among Major’s own colleagues.’ And that did indeed become the interpretation, aided by briefings from the Conservatives’ director of communications, Tim Collins, that the prime minister ‘was intent on rolling back the permissive society’.
Major had wished to signal that policy development should reflect traditional values in education and in law and order, which in itself was a slightly dangerous gambit. The economic news was all positive – in May inflation had fallen to 1.3 per cent, its lowest level in nearly three decades, growth in GDP was averaging over 3 per cent and the unemployment rate was starting to fall – and it might have been politically more astute to return to his earlier theme: yes, it had hurt, but yes, it had worked. To focus attention instead on areas in the public and private spheres where society had taken a wrong turn was merely to invite people to consider, after four Conservative election victories, which group of politicians they would like to blame for these failings. If Major’s message had been understood as he wished, it would have reinforced the growing impression that Thatcherism had left society in a poorer ethical state; when he said that the country needed ‘more Conservatism of the traditional kind’, the unspoken implication was that this had been absent in the Thatcher years.
‘Back to basics’ avoided that frying-pan only to be consumed by the fire of personal morality. And the reason was not hard to discern. For it was not just the media who had stoked up the flames; the right wing of the cabinet had been making an issue of private morals for some time. At the previous conference Peter Lilley had embarrassed himself and viewers by breaking into a parody of the song ‘As Some Day It May Happen’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado:
There’s those who make up bogus claims in half a dozen names,
And councillors who draw the dole to run left-wing campaigns –
They never would be missed, they never would be missed.
There’s young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue,
And dads who won’t support the kids of the ladies they have kissed.
And I haven’t even mentioned all those sponging socialists –
I’ve got them on my list.
The focus on single mothers, in particular, was becoming a common theme. John Redwood delivered a speech condemning the ‘trend in some places for young women to have babies with no apparent intention of even trying a marriage or stable relationship’, and John Patten made his position clear at the 1993 conference: ‘To me there is no greater betrayal than having a child and then walking away.’ Meanwhile Michael Portillo was explaining at a fringe meeting: ‘Conservatives do make value judgements. For us there is a difference between right and wrong.’ As the right-wing backbencher Edward Leigh saw it, Back to Basics was the opportunity to make these value judgements part of public policy: ‘This is our chance to tackle the permissive society. Let’s speak up for family values.’
It was partly in response to this tide of feeling within the party – and perhaps in the country beyond – that the Child Support Agency was established in 1993, charged with tracing absent parents and ensuring that they made a proper contribution to the financial maintenance of their children. This would, it was argued, reduce the burden on the state, whilst also helping to inculcate a sense of responsibility in feckless parents.
Again, though, the charge could easily be laid that this problem had largely developed on the Conservatives’ watch. The proportion of children living in single-parent households had doubled since Margaret Thatcher had taken power and now stood at around one in five. To argue that the Tories were now the solution to a problem they had helped to create was always going to be hard; there might be rejoicing in heaven over the repentant sinner, but the electorate tended to be less forgiving. In any event, the entire Back to Basics agenda was hijacked from the off, as the press seized the opportunity to go after any transgressing Tories they could track down.
The first story to break was entirely atypical. Within a fortnight of Major’s speech, the papers were salivating over stories about Steven Norris, the transport minister, a married man who was said to have (or to have had, it was never entirely clear) five mistresses. His wife, it transpired, knew about the mistresses, though they didn’t know about each other, and she had no desire to play the media game, which made his life a great deal easier. And since Norris was also a popular figure at Westminster, the whole incident passed almost as rapidly as it had arrived, leaving him still in his ministerial office, albeit with the popular nickname ‘Shagger’.
Much the same had been true when, in 1992, it was revealed that Paddy Ashdown had, some years earlier, had an affair with his then-secretary. Aware that the story was about to break, Ashdown seized the initiative by announcing it himself at a press conference, while the woman in the case refused to speak to the press. Again he acquired a nickname – Paddy Pantsdown, donated by the Sun (‘dreadful, but brilliant’, he acknowledged) – but little harm was done. In fact, there was a short-term gain; in response to the question of whether he would make a good prime minister, his opinion poll rating leapt from 34 to 47 per cent.
If this suggested that there was a new tolerance abroad for politicians displaying human foibles, another story from 1992 provided a more depressing perspective. The weekend before John Major announced the start of the general election campaign, a hitherto unknown junior minister, Alan Amos, was arrested on Hampstead Heath in North London. The Heath had long enjoyed a reputation as a cruising area for homosexual men – the previous year the gay campaigner Peter Tatchell had led a team clearing up the area, filling twenty-five bin liners with ‘discarded condoms and other fascinating debris’ – and, although Amos was not charged with any offence, the newspapers drew their own conclusions. GAY SEX SHAME OF TORY MP, ran the Sun headline, while the Daily Star adopted a suitably sanctimonious tone when lecturing him about ‘wandering at dusk at a place which has been turned into a no-go area for decent families by perverts’.
Amos himself denied that he was homosexual and would admit only to having engaged in a ‘childish and stupid’ act, but still felt obliged to stand down as a candidate in the forthcoming election, ‘in the best interests of my constituents, the Conservative Party and the re-election of John Major’, as he put it. ‘Yet another victory for squalid reporting,’ he said, ‘a dangerous abuse of freedom in an open society.’ And there was some justification for his resentment. Had the press not been informed of his arrest and caution, his majority of 8,000 in Hexham would have ensured that he was safely returned to the House of Commons. Once the story was in the public domain, however, he stood no chance, as was demonstrated by the performance of the Liberal Democrat candidate in the constituency, Jonathan Wallace; he took the opportunity to announce that he was ‘gay and proud of it’ and was rewarded with a 10 per cent drop in support.
The respective stories of Ashdown and Norris on the one side and Amos on the other sketched out the ground rules for political sex scandals at the start of the decade, a set of standards summed up by the Conservative MP Rupert Allason in his political whodunit Murder in the Commons (published in 1992 under the pen name Nigel West): ‘Mere infidelity could probably be survived, but a wholly legal act of homosexuality spelt catastrophe for the upwardly mobile.’
There were other cases too that would once have meant ruin but which no longer rated serious or prolonged attention. In the summer of 1992 the Independent ran a story that Virginia Bottomley had had her first child in 1967 before marrying the child’s father, another future Tory MP, Peter Bottomley. Andreas Whittam-Smith, the paper’s editor, defended the disclosure: ‘As Mrs Bottomley speaks to the nation about teenage mothers, I think it is a significant fact worth recording that she was once herself an unwed teenage mother.’ But since neither of the Bottomleys had ever made an issue of the evils of unmarried parenthood, the story disappeared very quickly.
Similarly, when Clare Short was reunited with the son she had given up for adoption back in 1963 when she was just seventeen, she was fearful of the publicity that would result – ‘My expectation was that I would be criticised and drummed out of politics as a wicked woman’ – but the revelation actually brought her widespread support and sympathy in a way she hadn’t previously known. It was simply seen as a feelgood story, all the more so when her son was seen on television accompanying her to the count on election night in 1997.
One other incident from 1992 illustrated the slightly strange state of what constituted a scandal in modern Britain. Norman Lamont, eighteen months on from his Miss Whiplash episode, was reported to have exceeded the limit on his Access credit card, and it was alleged that the last purchase made was for twenty Raffles cigarettes and a bottle of Bricout champagne from a Threshers off-licence in Praed Street in the Paddington area of London. The details were important. Praed Street was repeatedly described as being in a ‘seedy’ part of Paddington, from which we were meant to infer that it was a red light district, while Raffles cigarettes – apart from bearing the name of the most famous amateur thief in English literature – were mostly smoked by women; had the brand been Marlboro or Benson & Hedges, it would have been less fun. The fact that Lamont didn’t smoke cigarettes was also reported, leaving the public to draw their own conclusions.
Unfortunately all these details, while fascinating, were also wrong. Lamont had used his card in the Connaught Street branch of Threshers, half a mile from Praed Street, and hadn’t bought cigarettes, but rather two bottles of claret and one of Château Margaux. It transpired that journalists had approached the Praed Street branch, and that the staff there – manager David Newton and sales assistant John Onanuga – had simply concocted the story that the media wanted to hear. Threshers issued an apology, saying that the two men had ‘admitted totally fabricating the story’ and ‘had no intention of damaging Mr Lamont’s reputation’. They deeply regretted their actions, but it did neither much good; Newton was sacked by Threshers, and in March 1994 Onanuga was deported for having overstayed his visitor’s visa.
Lamont survived this piece of fluff, of course, but it was indicative of how feverish the atmosphere at Westminster and in Fleet Street had become that such a non-story made it into the newspapers at all, let alone onto the front pages for several days. A few months later, in February 1993, the magazine New Statesman & Society reported on this absurd level of gossip, illustrating their piece with reference to an article in the little-known scandal magazine Scallywag, which had printed an entirely baseless rumour about John Major himself having an affair with a woman who provided catering services in London. Major promptly issued writs against both magazines, which were settled out of court.
The ‘back to basics’ speech, however, gave free rein to rumours, and from here on in, it was open season on Tory MPs. A few days after the 1992 conference, the junior health minister Tim Yeo had called for new rules that would permit adoption by single-parent households to be used only as ‘a last resort’. When it transpired more than a year later that during the conference he had been engaged in an extra-marital liaison that resulted in the birth of a child, thus creating another single-parent household, he was obliged to resign from his new job as an environment minister, even though several of the more liberal figures in his party – Douglas Hurd, Norman Fowler, Virginia Bottomley, Emma Nicholson – weighed in on his behalf. Similarly, the obscure MP Gary Waller briefly visited the front pages with another story of an illegitimate child, as did the civil service minister Robert Hughes and junior Welsh minister Rod Richards, who were both reported to have had affairs.
And so it went on, an endless litany of affairs, mistresses and Commons researchers. ‘They run off with these silly girls,’ bemoaned a character in the sitcom Dinnerladies.‘We never had any of that with dear old Ted Heath.’ The list of miscreants was extended on what felt at times like a weekly basis, so that the details of each case blurred with those of the last, and it became difficult to remember which of the obscure figures propelled into the headlines had done what. Nor did it seem particularly important; if one case were missed, then another was bound to come along shortly, so that The Day Today’s invention of a Conservative Party post, the Vice Chairman for Resignation Issues, seemed all too appropriate. Each weekend would inevitably produce, in the words of a Sunday Mirror headline, ANOTHER BACK TO BASICS BOMBSHELL.
That particular headline related to the man who had inherited Margaret Thatcher’s old seat in Finchley. Hartley Booth, a 47-year-old married man who was also a Methodist lay preacher, was said to have become infatuated with a 22-year-old art student. Booth denied any sexual impropriety, but the fun here lay in the details of the allegations: that the affair had quite possibly not been consummated, that he had written love poems to her, and that she was discovered to have previously worked for Peter Mandelson. Elsewhere Richard Spring, the MP for Bury St Edmunds, was said to have enjoyed ‘a three-in-a-bed romp with a woman and a man’, though since all three of the alleged participants were unmarried, it was hard to know what business this was of the newspapers.
And although John Major himself had seen off the rumours about his own conduct (the story of his relationship the previous decade with Edwina Currie had yet to enter the public domain), his son, James, was caught up in the media storm, when news broke that he had been having an affair with a woman who was not only married but thirteen years older than himself. Few newspapers could resist the detail that ‘her husband found them cuddling in the kitchen at their home in Cambridgeshire, with James in drag’, though it was hard not to feel slightly disappointed when this turned out to refer to an incident at a fancy-dress party for which he had turned up in ‘a frilly garter, bra and silky knickers’.
Currie herself was in no doubt where the fault for all these stories lay: ‘the bloody “Back to Basics” campaign is to blame, for it outlawed the one protective factor the Tory Party has always relied on – hypocrisy.’ As Sarah Keays, who had been Cecil Parkinson’s lover in the 1980s, put it: ‘They apply one standard to themselves and another to the rest of the country.’
Through it all ran the saga of former MP Alan Clark, who published the first volume of his diaries in 1993, complete with accounts of his philandering, in both his real and fantasy lives. ‘I will be a figure of fun, like Mellor,’ he worried as publication approached, though in his case the public were simply entranced. He was seen as an old-fashioned bounder, a rogue who operated on a scale so much more impressive than that of his erstwhile colleagues. Even better was the response of his wife Anne, who stood by her husband: ‘I still think he’s super,’ she told the press. ‘I know he’s an S-H-one-T, but that’s it.’ She also exhibited heroic levels of aristocratic disdain: ‘Quite frankly, if you bed people that I call “below-stairs class”, they go to the papers, don’t they?’
This latter comment was occasioned by the story that Clark had seduced a married woman as well as both of her daughters, which gave him enormous lad credentials. It got even better when the whole family arrived in Britain from South Africa (‘a sad old cuckold with a couple of hard-faced slappers’, in Ian Hislop’s words), and the woman’s husband, Judge James Harkess, threatened to seek out Clark and horsewhip him. Sadly, Harkess backed out of this nineteenth-century course of action, and instead resorted to employing the publicist Max Clifford to make his case. Nonetheless, Clark had managed to find the political equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone, transmuting bad behaviour into an improved public image. The same could not be said for the Conservative Party, for whom the Clark stories kept the pot of scandal bubbling.
Even Clark’s airing of his dirty linen, however, was as nothing compared to David Ashby, a Leicestershire MP, who was alleged by the Sunday Times (for by now it was not only the tabloids who were indulging in such tales) to have left his wife of twenty-eight years because of his ‘friendship with another man’. It was claimed in subsequent reports that he had shared a bed with a man whilst on holiday in France, which he agreed was true but only for reasons of economy, adding pointedly: ‘I have got to keep my wife in the style to which she is accustomed.’
Rather than keeping his head down and waiting for the storm to blow over, Ashby sued the Sunday Times for libel over a related story – that he had also shared a bed with a man on holiday in Goa – and thus launched a court case that provided more information than anyone could truly be said to need. His wife called him ‘queenie’ and ‘poofter’, he alleged in court, she physically assaulted him, he said, and taunted him about his impotence (he called a doctor to testify that he was indeed impotent). Giving evidence against him, she denied much of this, but claimed that he had told her of his homosexuality when he moved out of the marital home. At one point in the trial Ashby also burst into tears in the witness box, and proceedings were further enlivened when he gave a demonstration of the bizarre contraption he wore in bed to prevent his snoring.
After twenty days of this, the jury found against Ashby, leaving him with huge legal costs to meet and a wrecked political career that never recovered. In 1996 he was deselected by his constituency party as their candidate in the forthcoming general election. ‘It is the usual blind prejudice,’ he explained: ‘love the Queen Mum, hate queers, hate foreigners, get out of the Common Market, keep the Queen’s head on the coins.’ He later expanded on this in a live radio interview, saying of the local Tories: ‘They’re a bunch of shits, aren’t they, and we know they are.’
The fact that Ashby, however misguidedly, felt obliged to parade the most private details of his life in court was an indication of the bitter human cost of the newspapers’ gleeful assault on the government. The other side of the story, the experience of families caught up in the storm, was the subject of one of the better television dramas of the time.
In Paula Milne’s three-part series, The Politician’s Wife (1995), Trevor Eve played Duncan Matlock, a highly ambitious politician who is minister for families and has designs on the leadership. When he is revealed to have had an affair with a Commons researcher, who turns out to be a former prostitute, an all-male establishment closes ranks, trying to spin his infidelity as a brief fling, even though the party hierarchy know that it was a long-term relationship. Duncan’s wife Flora (Juliet Stevenson) is initially persuaded to do the right thing, both for her husband’s career and for the party. ‘Bloody bad time, Flora,’ the chief whip (Ian Bannen) tells her. ‘We’re being ravaged by publicity-hungry dissidents who think nothing of defying the leader, the whips, every loyalist ethic the party ever stood for.’ When she subsequently discovers the truth, however, she goes about exacting a quiet, convoluted and devastating revenge in which she engineers a political and financial scandal, manipulating the party machine to destroy him. ‘I came to see,’ she tells her local association, with heavy irony, ‘that, important though the family is, the real issue here is duty to the party.’
For many of those whose private lives were opened up to the vulgar gaze, the real issue was the media. Writing in the aftermath of his trial, Ashby bitterly denounced ‘the press who wildly throw phrases like “public right to know” and “exposing hypocrisy” around as if that is a valid reason for destroying a person’s family and career’. It was also true, though, that newspaper readers happily colluded with the media, revelling in the discomfort of men who – with the occasional exception of David Mellor or Norman Lamont – could scarcely be called household names.
And much of the pleasure derived from the fact that it was the Tories who were the victims of the muck-raking. There were Labour stories of misbehaviour, such as the revelation in 1994 that Dennis Skinner had a mistress in London to complement his wife in his Derbyshire constituency, but they made little impact since the public appeared uninterested. Two years later Our Friends in the North ran a fictionalised account of local government corruption that echoed the days of T. Dan Smith and John Poulson. It seemed deeply unhelpful to the Labour cause (‘Bloody Labour Party!’ exclaims one character. ‘Crooks, the bloody lot of ’em’) and came hot on the heels of allegations about corruption and accusations of religious sectarianism and nepotism in the Labour authority of Monklands, where John Smith had had his constituency.
Yet none of this was allowed to interfere with the dominant media narrative of Tory sleaze, a word that was gaining political currency even before Major’s ‘back to basics’ speech. ‘Sleaze-baiting is particularly evident now,’ wrote Andrew Marr in June 1993, ‘because it seems to reflect a deeper truth: disgraceful news seems somehow more credible, more authentic, than good news.’ The headline to that piece was HOW MUCH WORSE CAN IT GET?, suggesting that things had reached rock bottom for the government. They hadn’t, and the opposition could scarcely contain its glee. ‘It was perceived that Labour were above reproach, and the Conservatives beyond redemption,’ fretted John Major, while Alan Clark reported a former Tory minister asking in frustration: ‘Is the Labour Party made up of two hundred virgins?’
By now there were too many groups with a vested interest in keeping the stories flowing. Much of the public felt almost personally betrayed by a government that, having been returned with such huge support, had then proved to be incompetent; with retaliation at the ballot boxes still a long way off, the best revenge was to turn them into a laughing-stock. There were those on the right of the Conservative Party who happily, if covertly, joined in, seeing in the Back to Basics fiasco a chance to discredit for ever the non-Thatcherite wing of the party. And there was a press equally keen to ensure that no privacy law, of the kind once threatened by David Mellor, should be allowed to surface; the more scandals that were published, the stronger the argument became that politicians only wanted such regulations because they had things they wanted to hide from the electorate.
Mixed up in this farrago of moralising indignation were a couple of genuine tragedies. In January 1994 the wife of Lord Caithness, a transport minister, killed herself with a shotgun, reportedly after learning that her husband was leaving her for another woman. He resigned his post immediately and the story made very few waves, suggesting that perhaps personal loss still had the power to instil a sense of proportion. Such a theory, however, was exploded the following month when the death was announced of Stephen Milligan, the MP for Eastleigh.
The circumstances of Milligan’s demise could hardly fail to escape notice. His body was found at his home, dressed in women’s underwear, with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head. He had died from strangulation with a length of flex, the apparent victim of a session of autoerotic asphyxiation that had gone wrong. Again his was hardly a name instantly recognisable to the public, though at Westminster he was popular and highly regarded. A former journalist with the BBC and the Sunday Times, he had been elected in 1992 and was the first of the new intake to get a government job, making his presence felt with his loyal contributions to the Maastricht debate. At the age of forty-five, he was a rising star in the party and he had high aspirations. ‘I would like to be foreign secretary,’ he told his friends the day before he died. His death represented a real blow to the Tories, beyond even the loss of his seat to the Liberal Democrats in the ensuing by-election. ‘Bad not just for the Tories, but for the whole political class,’ was Giles Radice’s conclusion, though there was no doubt who took the brunt of the scorn. WOULD THE LAST DECENT PERSON IN THE TORY PARTY SHUT THE CLOSET DOOR, trumpeted a less than sympathetic Daily Mirror headline.
The details were too much for John Major to comprehend; he was out of his depth when it came to such arcane sexual practices as breath-play. It was, said the prime minister, ‘a desperate personal tragedy’, concluding that ‘he must have been pretty unhappy and pretty miserable’. That verdict drew instant criticism. Judge Tim Milligan, a cousin of the dead man, insisted: ‘Stephen was neither miserable nor unhappy. On the contrary, he was thoroughly fulfilled in his work at Westminster and his Eastleigh constituency.’ Gyles Brandreth, one of his closest friends in the Commons, was equally unimpressed. ‘Stephen was gloriously happy,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He’d had another good week in parliament. He was looking forward to promotion. I imagine he went for his round of golf and came home and thought he’d play his little sex game as a weekend celebration – as a treat.’
It was left to Ian Jack, a former journalist colleague of Milligan, to point out a truth largely ignored – that, despite the regrets of unfulfilled potential and the embarrassment caused to the bereaved family and friends, none of this was of much consequence to the dead man himself: ‘Personally, I hope Stephen Milligan died a happy man. There seems every possibility that he did.’
If Major struggled to deal with the fallout from Milligan’s death, the police certainly failed to cover themselves in glory. As with Alan Amos, details of the incident reached the media with remarkable speed, so much so that Milligan’s father found out his son was dead via a news bulletin, and the first his mother heard was when a newspaper reporter phoned with the question: ‘How do you feel about your son being strangled?’ A Scotland Yard inquiry was launched to discover how this apparent breach of protocol, not to say decency, could have happened; it reported that no police officer was to blame, and hinted that the story was probably leaked by political figures. Commissioner Paul Condon also took the opportunity to deny ‘suggestions that officers regularly took bribes from reporters’.
Even if that were true, there were other elements in the police handling of the case that left something to be desired. In the initial reports a detective was quoted as saying: ‘The first indications are that he died during a homosexual bondage-type encounter. We believe he was a homosexual.’ There was no reason whatsoever for such a conclusion to be drawn, save, it seemed, that, like John Major, the police were unable to believe that ‘normal’ people might indulge in such minority practices.
There were, of course, scandals involving gay MPs during this period, as well as persistent rumours about senior members of both main parties, including Michael Portillo, Peter Lilley and Gordon Brown. But the tone was changing in response to a new mood in society. In separate incidents Michael Brown and Jerry Hayes, MPs for Brigg and Cleethorpes and for Harlow respectively, were pilloried in the press not for homosexuality as such, but for allegedly having sex with ‘underage’ lovers. In both cases the other people involved in the stories were not yet twenty-one, which was until the autumn of 1994 the age of consent for male homosexual acts, though it was a near-run thing. The coverage of Hayes’s alleged lover – Hayes always denied that they had had sex – was splashed in the Sun in 1997 but related to events at the beginning of the decade, while Brown was outed in the period between the vote to lower the age of consent and the implementation of that change in the law.
That vote had come about largely because of the contribution made by a handful of MPs on the liberal wing of the Conservative Party, at a time when John Major was signalling the need for greater tolerance. In the late 1980s Margaret Thatcher’s government had identified homosexuality as the most vulnerable element in the supposed permissive legacy of the 1960s and, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act, had sought to prevent the ‘promotion’ of ‘homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. In the struggle against that measure, the actor Ian McKellen had come out and, with the launch of the group Stonewall, had become a leading figure in the campaign for gay rights; now he was not only invited to Downing Street to discuss the issue with the prime minister, but was also given a knighthood in the first honours list of Major’s premiership.
Neither of those developments was uncontroversial. Major’s invite was attacked by the right (‘another chance to show that he is “nicer” than his predecessor’, sneered Frank Johnson in the Sunday Telegraph), and the acceptance of a knighthood was denounced as a sell-out by some in the gay movement. Even so, the gestures were partially successful in their aim of trying to signal an end to overt Tory prejudice. Major also changed the regulations that discriminated against homosexuals in the civil service, and let it be known that he was in favour of decriminalising homosexuality in the armed forces.
But the real target for reformers was the unequal age of consent, the key provision written into law that institutionalised discrimination. This was not merely a symbolic piece of legislation. Although the level of police harassment of male homosexuals had fallen from its peak in the late 1980s, the most recent year for which figures were available showed that in 1992 there had been 244 prosecutions for consensual gay sex involving men aged between sixteen and twenty-one.
In 1994 Edwina Currie proposed an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill that would reduce the homosexual age of consent from twenty-one to sixteen, the same as that for heterosexuals. Sponsors of the amendment included MPs from all parties and amongst those voting for it were forty-two Conservatives, including cabinet ministers Tony Newton and William Waldegrave, as well as such prominent figures as William Hague, Michael Brown, Jerry Hayes and Steven Norris. The more traditional Tory attitudes, however, were also much in evidence. ‘What Mrs Currie is seeking to do,’ complained Tony Marlow, ‘is to get this House to vote to legalise the buggery of adolescent men.’ The veteran backbencher Elaine Kellett-Bowman was already on record with her thoughts: ‘Sodomy is unhygienic, unhealthy and still the major cause of the spread of AIDS.’
Nor was this a divisive issue for one party alone. John Smith said it was ‘a matter of equality and freedom’, and Labour’s home affairs spokesperson, Tony Blair, made what Currie called ‘a humdinger of a speech’. (She also observed: ‘He will make a fine and popular PM some day, if his party have the sense to choose him.’) But the amendment was defeated with the assistance of thirty-five Labour MPs, including David Blunkett, Ann Taylor and Michael Martin, the future home secretary, government chief whip and Speaker of the House respectively.
The House then proceeded to the next vote, as a result of which approval was given to a compromise proposal – a reduction to eighteen years of age. Although it failed to satisfy the thousands of demonstrators gathered in Parliament Square, this was at least a step towards equality. The reform had the backing of John Major and of the home secretary Michael Howard, who explained that he couldn’t go any further because ‘We need to protect young men from activities which their lack of maturity might cause them to regret.’ As an aspiration for legislators, that seemed a trifle ambitious.
Some European countries were starting to introduce legal recognition for same-sex partnerships, but for now the reduction in the age of consent was as far as the British Parliament was prepared to go. In 1996 Glenda Jackson, the former actress turned Labour MP, tabled an amendment to the government’s Housing Bill that would have given homosexuals living in council or housing association properties the same rights as heterosexuals enjoyed, so that if the person in whose name the tenancy was held died, his or her partner could take over the tenancy and remain in the property. The provision was opposed by the environment secretary, John Selwyn Gummer, and defeated at committee stage.
That same year the ban on homosexuality in the military came to the fore. Until 1994 there had existed a curious state of affairs whereby all homosexual acts were illegal in the armed forces, and an offender could both be given a dishonourable discharge and sentenced to a jail term; since the forces had no provision for such imprisonment, the sentence was served in a civilian prison, even if the offender had committed no crime recognised by civilian society. That situation changed with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the armed forces and merchant navy, but it remained a sacking offence, and the defence secretary, Michael Portillo, was unwilling to cede any further ground. He had most of Fleet Street on his side, expressing an attitude that was summed up in the Sun’s typically forthright leader column: ‘The British soldier needs to worry about the enemy ahead. Not some queer behind him.’
An amendment to the Armed Forces Bill was tabled in the names of a cross-party trio of Edwina Currie, Gerald Kaufman and Menzies Campbell, but was easily defeated, largely because the Labour leadership decided that this was too controversial an issue to be addressing so close to an election. As shadow home secretary, Tony Blair had been quite clear where he stood. ‘People are entitled to think that homosexuality is wrong,’ he had said. ‘What they are not entitled to do is use the criminal law to force that view on others.’ As leader of the party, however, he displayed little inclination to pursue gay rights too vocally, and abstained on the armed forces vote, although it was official Labour policy.
There was, in this debate at least, a clash of values. On the one side was the claim to individual human rights and equality before the law, on the other an insistence that the overriding priority of the armed forces was efficiency. An army that retained an officer class was never going to be a model of democratic values, civil rights or egalitarianism, and there was a case to be made that one of the few public services capable of doing its job shouldn’t be interfered with in the name of equality. The presence of homosexuals, explained the retired Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Armitage, would have ‘quite a serious impact on unit cohesion, on unit discipline and therefore on fighting effectiveness’. It was hard, however, to separate such arguments from what mostly came across as simple prejudice, as satirised on Chris Morris’s television show Brass Eye by a character worried about the possibility of homosexuality in the Royal Navy: ‘Homosexuals can’t swim, they attract enemy radar, they attract sharks, they insist on being placed on the captain’s table, they get up late, they nudge people while they’re shooting, they muck about. Imagine the fear of knowing you have a gay man aboard a boat.’
But the tide was turning, and the pressure from outside Parliament was building relentlessly. During the 1994 debate, twenty agony aunts – including such household names as Claire Rayner, Marjorie Proops and Anna Raeburn – had written to The Times in support of Currie’s amendment: ‘How can a law be said to protect teenagers when it turns them into criminals and threatens to prosecute them for expressing love for another person?’ The fact that such a message was promoted on a weekly basis by the advice columns of almost every popular newspaper did more than any politician ever could in changing public opinion. The Daily Telegraph acknowledged as much when it marked Proops’s, death in 1996 with a leader column imagining a mea culpa letter written by the dead woman from Heaven. ‘I said they should change the laws to allow homosexuality, abortion and easier divorce,’ it read. ‘From where I sit today, some of those old teachings don’t look so stupid.’
Also influential was the inclusion of gay male characters in films like The Full Monty and Four Weddings and a Funeral, and of lesbians in the television series Between the Lines and Drop the Dead Donkey, as well as in the soaps Emmerdale, The Bill and Brookside. The last of these famously featured in 1994 the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on British television, between Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) and Margaret Clemence (Nicola Stephenson), the same year that two boys were seen kissing in the teen drama Byker Grove.
Britpop was making its own contribution. In 1992 the Manic Street Preachers had produced a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘All rock ’n’ roll is homosexual’, a typically provocative overstatement, and the new music also found room for openly gay stars like the bisexual David McAlmont and Skin, the lesbian singer with Skunk Anansie, each of whom received extensive coverage in the mainstream press in a way that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years earlier. Brett Anderson of Suede had proclaimed early on that he saw himself as ‘a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience’ (prompting Blur’s Damon Albarn to retort: ‘I’m more homosexual than Brett Anderson’), and amongst those lobbying MPs for a change to the age of consent was Simon Gilbert, the group’s drummer. ‘I first had gay sex when I was thirteen,’ he told the papers. ‘By the time I was sixteen it was the law which was my biggest fear.’
There was also Huffty, the lesbian co-presenter of The Word who looked, in her words, like ‘the stereotypical dyke, with the shaven head and the big boots’. She only lasted for one series of the show and her career then stalled, leaving her unable to realise her dream of making a Geordie soap opera titled It’s Queer Up North: ‘I’d play a lesbian ram-raider in a shell-suit and big trainers, kd lang would play my mother and Kevin Keegan would play my father.’
With the glaring exception of football, the world of Cool Britannia, even in its more laddist corners, seemed happy to accept homosexuality. When Tony first arrives in Men Behaving Badly, Gary suspects that he might be gay and is deeply troubled: ‘I won’t be happy till he’s out of my flat.’ His middle-aged, frumpy secretary Anthea, however, is the voice of reason. ‘I don’t think that matters, does it?’ she says. ‘My nephew’s gay. He told us last year during the Top of the Pops Christmas special.’
It had been argued in the 1960s that the great liberalising reforms of Harold Wilson’s government were largely driven by a political elite against the wishes of most of the country, so that even Lord Arran – whose campaigning had largely been responsible for the limited legalisation of male homosexuality – was anxious that public opinion should not be challenged too openly. ‘Any form of ostentatious behaviour, and form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful,’ he told the Lords, as the Sexual Offences Act was passed in 1967. Thirty years on, however, it appeared as though Britain was changing despite the government, not because of it.
The fact that politicians were now running behind the wider culture was entertainingly illustrated in 1994 when the married-couples game show Mr and Mrs, perhaps the blandest programme on British television, announced that it would henceforth consider applications from gay and lesbian couples who wished to compete. The following year London Transport announced that it was modifying its rules to allow those undergoing a sex change to hold two travelcards, with photographs of themselves in both genders, so that they could travel more easily. Also in 1995 Guinness commissioned Britain’s first unequivocally gay advert, showing a male homosexual couple in a domestic setting, complete with a decorous but definite kiss, all accompanied by the strains of Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand by Your Man’. When word got out about the commercial, however, it attracted some negative criticism and Guinness appeared to lose their nerve. The advert was never shown, to the regret of its director Tony Kaye: ‘I think it was charming and it was very funny and would sell a hell of a lot of beer.’
Indeed one of the most striking features of the 1990s was the public’s growing acceptance of what were becoming known as minority lifestyles, and it was the perception of gay sex that symbolised the transformation. When the British Social Attitudes survey reported in 1990, the number of those believing homosexual relationships to be wrong was recorded at 69 per cent – down a little from its high point during the right-wing backlash a few years earlier, the time of Section 28 and AIDS – and the gap between that figure and those who believed that such relationships were not wrong stood at 55 per cent. When the same questions were asked a decade later, the gap had narrowed to just 10 per cent, and those believing homosexuality to be wrong were now in a minority.
Some of this change was indirectly the result of AIDS, the response to which had focused the energy of gay campaigning groups. Similarly when the police began a series of raids on London fetish clubs, a cause was found around which different minority groups could coalesce. These clubs were primarily concerned with fetish clothing, particularly rubber and leather, and were allied to the sadomasochistic scene (though most operated a ‘no fur’ policy in deference to animal rights, a development that would have horrified Leopold von Sacher-Masoch). Typical was Club Whiplash, raided by police in 1994 following an undercover operation by ‘vice squad officers who hired leather outfits to infiltrate the S&M subculture’. The intention was clearly to intimidate – stalls selling leatherwear and belts had their goods confiscated, as though possession of a leather cap were itself illegal – and charges were brought under the Disorderly Houses Act, ‘a 250-year-old law prohibiting public dancing’. When the case came to trial in 1996, the jury returned verdicts of not guilty. That was the same year in which the tenth staging of the Sex Maniacs’ Ball was also stopped by the police, prompting the creation of the Sexual Freedom Coalition to fight further such actions.
The information and guidance produced by government and charities in response to the AIDS epidemic had also, it was argued by some, demystified gay sexual practices. Related to this was the resolution of a longstanding legal anomaly. Ever since the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, it had been legal for male homosexuals over the age of twenty-one to engage in anal intercourse, but it remained strictly illegal for heterosexual couples, even if they were married. In popular mythology, anal sex remained the preserve of gay men, though the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, published in 1994, revealed that the lines were less clear-cut than generally depicted; between 12 and 14 per cent of heterosexuals had some experience of the practice, while nearly half of gay men aged between 25 and 34 did not. One consequence of the change in the age of homosexual consent was that for the first time, anal intercourse became legal for anyone over the age of eighteen, and there was a rapid rise in the open discussion of the activity, breaking its status as a taboo and its exclusive association with homosexuality. (‘I am the Billy Graham of anal sex,’ claimed Frank Skinner, whose live act included a great deal of material on the subject.)
The growing acceptance of homosexuality was in inverse proportion to the public fury directed towards paedophilia, and in 1997 a story broke to delight the hearts of all tabloid editors. Back in the early 1970s Gary Glitter had made some of the best singles of the era, irresistibly monolithic stomps with call-and-response choruses that were guaranteed to fill the floor at every youth club disco. He was also one of the sharpest manipulators in the pop business and, having waited eleven years between his first record and his first hit, he was determined never again to slip away into obscurity.
After the hits had dried up, he had rebuilt his career through sheer perseverance and established himself as a major live draw, turning his Christmas shows into a sell-out event, an annual rock and roll pantomime, while he was also to be found appearing on prestigious bills like the 1996 Prince’s Trust gig in Hyde Park, alongside Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and the Who. ‘Amongst great British institutions,’ wrote Q magazine, ‘Gary Glitter now stands somewhere between Paul McCartney and the Queen Mum.’ His position as one of the ironic icons of Cool Britannia was confirmed when Oasis included the chorus of ‘Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again’ on the opening track of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and when he was invited to perform in the Spice Girls 1997 film Spiceworld.
That movie appearance never happened. In November 1997 Glitter took his computer in for repairs to a branch of PC World, where a technician discovered images of child pornography on the hard drive and reported the fact to the police. At the same time a woman sold her story to the News of the World (via Max Clifford) alleging that Glitter had had a longstanding relationship with her, starting when she was fourteen years old. As the police investigations proceeded, he still played his traditional Christmas shows, though they weren’t sell-outs as normal, and the following year he was charged. The trial itself didn’t come to court until November 1999, when he faced charges that he repeatedly abused a girl from 1980, when she was fourteen, through to 1982.
The reporting of the case was not without its salacious side (GLITTER LIKED ME TO WEAR WHITE UNDIES AND CALL HIM DADDY, leered the Sun) and ultimately it was tabloid excess that scuppered the prosecution. The court was told that the alleged victim’s deal with the News of the World meant that she stood to earn a further £25,000 – in addition to the £10,000 already paid – if Glitter was convicted. This, it was felt by many, brought her evidence into doubt, and though the arrangement was legal the presiding judge deemed it ‘a highly reprehensible state of affairs’. Glitter was acquitted, but immediately after that verdict he pleaded guilty to fifty-four charges of making indecent photographs of children, these being sample charges relating to a computer collection of around 4,000 images, some of them featuring the torture of the very young. The judge sentenced him to four months in jail, and Glitter completed the transition from loved pantomime dame to loathed hate-figure.
Other sexual minorities, whose social status lay somewhere between homosexuals and paedophiles, took longer to find acceptance, but ground was gradually gained (or lost, depending on one’s perspective). At the end of the 1980s a police investigation, under the codename Operation Spanner, was launched after a video made for private consumption was discovered, depicting scenes of sexual torture so extreme that officers suspected that serious assaults and possibly even murder had been committed. What they discovered instead was an extensive network of homosexual sadomasochists, most of them middle-aged, spread across the country.
Over four hundred men were arrested at one time or another, before sixteen were prosecuted and fifteen found guilty in December 1990 of criminal behaviour under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. The splendidly named Judge James Rant presided and was at pains to make clear that there was no prejudice in his courtroom: ‘This is not a witchhunt against homosexuals. The unlawful conduct before the court would result equally in the prosecution of heterosexuals or bisexuals. Nor is it a campaign to curtail the private sexual activities of citizens of this country.’ But, he added: ‘The courts must draw the line between what is acceptable in a civilized society and what is not. In this case, the practices clearly lie on the wrong side of that line.’
The case turned largely on the question of consent, on whether inflicting sexual violence on another person should legally be construed as assault if the other person agreed to the act, and therefore on whether it was permissible to allow oneself to be assaulted. At one end of the spectrum, of course, was sexual intercourse itself: which in the absence of consent was very definitely a crime but which was perfectly legal between consenting adults. The acts involved in the Spanner case were somewhat to the other end of the continuum, ranging from urtication, through branding, the insertion of wires into penises and the sandpapering of testicles, up to the nailing of a foreskin to a board.
Much of this, though unorthodox, was far from being confined to gay men. The practice of driving nails through the foreskin, for example, had featured in an early Gérard Depardieu film, Maîtresse (1976), while Nick Broomfield’s documentary Fetishes (1996) was to record similar heterosexual acts in a professional establishment in New York. In any event, as one of the defendants put it, ‘it’s really no worse than having your nose or ears pierced’. He added: ‘It’s the same as going potholing really. Unless you have done it, you can’t understand what the thrill of it is.’
The case went to appeal in 1992. The judgement was upheld by Lord Lane (best known for keeping the Birmingham Six in jail), who cited as precedent a 1934 trial in which a man who caned a woman in the context of sex was found guilty of assault. From there, it proceeded to the House of Lords, by which stage the story was becoming a cause célèbre, with even The Times concerned at the implications. ‘Consensual sadomasochism should not be made a crime,’ argued a leader. ‘If the activities in the Operation Spanner case are to be made illegal, why not spanking or whipping for sexual gratification, both of which take place by consent, sometimes even in houses owned by famous men?’ Indeed, not only men. According to reports in 1997, a group of British expats in Hollywood, including most prominently the actress Elizabeth Hurley, enjoyed an after-dinner game in which they took turns to be spanked and had to guess the identity of the spanker. It was, Hurley was quoted as saying, ‘silly and naughty’.
The appeal was nonetheless rejected, with one law lord arguing that ‘there must be some limitation upon the harm which an individual can consent to and receive at the hands of another’. In 1999, a decade after the initial arrests, the case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which again upheld the original verdict, on the grounds that it was a matter for individual states to determine where the line should be drawn on inflicting harm, even between consenting adults.
During the course of that decade, however, society had adjusted its opinions and the judiciary too began to reflect the changing times. In 1996 a man was prosecuted for using a hot knife to sear his wife’s buttocks with his initials. He had been reported to the police by her doctor and was convicted of assault causing actual bodily harm, even though she had been a willing party to the act, indeed had initiated it. The conviction was overturned on appeal on the grounds that ‘sexual activity between husband and wife in the privacy of the matrimonial home is not, in our judgement, a matter for criminal investigation, let alone criminal prosecution’.
There had also been a tentative start to building bridges between the police and the gay community, at least in London. The career of the serial killer Colin Ireland, sentenced in 1993 to five life terms for murdering five gay men in sadomasochistic bondage sessions, necessitated a degree of cooperation that had long been absent from the Metropolitan Police’s dealings with gay men.
In broader cultural terms, there was a notable move of sexual minorities into the mainstream. Some developments were not entirely obvious, as when the British designer Craig Morrison, who had previously exhibited his work at events such as the Rubber Balls organised by Skin Two magazine, launched spiky rubber rucksacks onto a market that was only too happy to make them fashionable items for everyday use. At the same time, tattoos and body piercings – once seen as the preserve of sailors and outlaws – became increasingly commonplace.
Other manifestations were surprising, to say the least. ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’, the last single by the decade’s biggest boy band, Take That, was accompanied by a video of the four remaining members tied up by a dominatrix wearing a scarlet dress and Dr Martens boots. At the end of the decade even Steps, the most innocuous of pop groups, were seen in a video wearing outfits designed by the fetish label House of Harlot.
And running right through the period was Channel 4’s cult series Eurotrash, ‘an extraordinary programme’ in the judgement of Tony Benn. ‘You wouldn’t have believed this could appear on television. There has been such a change in public standards. There is a whiff of decadence about it.’ More positively, as Elizabeth Coldwell, then editor of Forum magazine, pointed out, the show ‘poked fun at bizarre sexual practices while subtly condoning them’. It was increasingly difficult to be shocked by minority tastes after a couple of years of exposure to jokey features on cyber sex, foot fetishists and masturbation machines made from cows’ tongues (this latter was before the BSE crisis, of course).
There was also the emergence of star comedians including the transvestite Eddie Izzard, who described himself as a ‘male tomboy’, Steve Coogan’s incarnation as Pauline Calf, and Lily Savage, the drag character created by Paul O’Grady. Savage had spent much of the 1980s as the sensation of London’s gay cabaret venue the Vauxhall Tavern before breaking into a wider comedy circuit (billed as a ‘Radical Marxist Sex Kitten’) and then into television.
With Savage’s rise to fame, the longstanding camp element in light entertainment finally came out. ‘I’m not really a queer or a homosexual,’ gay comedian Larry Grayson had insisted back in the 1970s. ‘I’m just behaving like one. That’s the big difference.’ The public didn’t necessarily believe such protestations, but it was deemed necessary to keep making them for the sake of a mainstream audience. Grayson continued his denials of homosexuality when he took over as host of The Generation Game, but O’Grady made no such concessions when Lily Savage hosted a revival of the BBC game show Blankety Blank in 1997. Nor did other television presenters like Graham Norton, Dale Winton or the newly out Michael Barrymore.
The trailblazer for this was Julian Clary, who had become a familiar television presence at the start of the decade, appearing in a series of startlingly theatrical costumes and delivering some of the wittiest put-downs of the age that took camp homosexuality onto prime time. ‘I always wanted to be mainstream and successful,’ Clary reflected in 1995, ‘but I got bored with it.’ At the time his career was still suffering from the effects of a single joke, delivered while presenting a prize at the 1993 British Comedy Awards and broadcast live on ITV. Appearing in pristine black tie, Clary noted that the stage set reminded him of Hampstead Heath, and then took the opportunity to have a little fun at an ex-chancellor of the exchequer who was in the audience. ‘I’ve just been fisting Norman Lamont,’ he said, though the punchline – ‘Talk about a red box!’ – was sadly lost in the audience laughter.
Lamont had earlier been booed while presenting an award to the makers of Drop the Dead Donkey, but was keen to show he could take a joke. ‘I’ve enjoyed the evening immensely,’ he told the press afterwards. His equanimity wasn’t enough to shield Clary from criticism, however, and the tabloids had a field day expressing their shock and horror at the gag. An on-air apology for Clary’s comments was subsequently broadcast and the comedian found television work hard to come by over the next few years. John Junor, the great Fleet Street veteran of outraged morality, was one of many keen to express his indignation, but also noted in his Mail on Sunday column the presence of Stephen Fry on television and Channel 4’s alternative Queen’s speech on Christmas Day, due to be delivered by the venerable Quentin Crisp. ‘Aren’t the gays taking over our culture?’ he wondered. Though as Clary observed, fisting wasn’t restricted to homosexuals: ‘It’s an activity open to anyone lucky enough to be born with a hand and an arsehole.’
By the end of the decade, Clary’s comments might not have made such an impact. In 1999 the drama series Queer as Folk debuted on Channel 4 and opened with a sequence in which a 29-year-old man picks up a 15-year-old boy outside a club in Manchester’s Canal Street and takes him home for a sex session, where he asks whether the boy likes rimming. The ensuing scene was bound to upset some tabloid critics: ‘witty, well-acted and totally repulsive’, concluded the People, with ‘stomach-churning sex scenes’. It also caused some commercial problems; Beck’s Beer publicly withdrew its sponsorship of the show, ‘which proves we can make a difference by making a fuss’, gloated the Sun’s Garry Bushell. But as the show’s creator Russell T. Davies pointed out, there were still curious double standards in operation: ‘If Stuart had taken Nathan home and murdered him rather than had sex with him, it would be on at 9 pm on ITV rather than Channel 4 at 10.30 pm.’
The real significance, however, was that for the first time there was a British drama in which all the central characters were gay, and which took great delight in teasing the heterosexual world. ‘It’s all true. Everything we’ve ever been told,’ reported one character in mock horror, having ventured into a straight pub. ‘There are people talking in sentences that have no punchline and they don’t even care.’
Meanwhile the word ‘transgender’, a political umbrella term covering those previously known as transvestites and transsexuals, began to be heard, and such people became visible for the first time. A 1995 advert for Levi’s showed a drag queen having a shave in the back of a New York taxi, to the surprise of the cabbie who had assumed his passenger was female; it was passed for British television by the Independent Television Commission, albeit with screenings restricted to post-watershed broadcasts. In the same year Loughborough College of Art began offering a short dressmaking and fashion course for transvestites, while a 1999 documentary in the BBC Two strand Trouble at the Top told the story of Divine, a firm in Northamptonshire who rescued a failing shoemaking business by concentrating on shoes for transvestites and fetish footwear, an episode that inspired the 2005 film Kinky Boots. Even Bruce, Hyacinth Bucket’s posh brother-in-law in Keeping Up Appearances, is a cross-dresser in private.
Perhaps the most significant development in this field, however, came in 1998 with the arrival in Coronation Street of Hayley Patterson (played by Julie Hesmondhalgh), the first transsexual in a British drama series, let alone in a soap. The following year she changed her name by deed poll to Hayley Cropper, following a ceremony that united her with Roy Cropper (David Neilson). At this stage, transgendered people were still considered legally to be their original gender, so they couldn’t marry; the law was changed in 2004, and Roy and Hayley were able to wed.
That legal development reflected the way that politicians were now running to catch up with public taste. As ever, the question of gay rights was the touchstone and in 2000 the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act finally brought the age of consent for male homosexuals down to sixteen, in line with that for heterosexuals, though a new limit of eighteen was also introduced for those whose partner was ‘in a position of trust in relation to that person’, following an amendment by Labour MP Joe Ashton. The Bill passed the House of Commons with a big majority, but was twice rejected by the House of Lords, following strong opposition from the churches; the government invoked the Parliament Act to force it through their Lordships’ chamber.
Those changes were made, of course, by a new government. During John Major’s premiership, despite his undoubted inclination to liberalise the law, he was hampered by the right wing of his party, with whom he was already at war over Europe.
There was no obvious reason why a Eurosceptic position should be allied to an illiberal attitude towards sexual morality, but the fact remained that there was a strong correlation, at least on the government benches. In the 1994 vote on the compromise amendment, reducing the gay age of consent to eighteen, a majority of Conservative MPs voted in favour of the change: 169 for, 134 against. But amongst those Tories who had voted at least once against their leaders on Maastricht, there was an overwhelming majority against the amendment: thirty-two out of forty-five rebels voted to keep the age limit as it stood, with a further three abstaining. In terms of how the future of the party would be shaped, the voting patterns of the three cabinet ministers referred to by Major as ‘bastards’ were intriguing. None of the three voted for a reduction to sixteen, but both Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley supported the compromise at eighteen; John Redwood was the only one to vote against. A similar phenomenon was evident in Fleet Street, where the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Sun – the most Eurosceptic national newspapers – were adamantly opposed to any change in the law.
Perhaps the convergence of two issues that seemed so disparate stemmed from the knowledge that such decisions would soon be taken out of the hands of the British legislature altogether, that the European Court of Human Rights was shortly to rule – as it did – that the ban on homosexuality in the armed forces was illegal and that having different ages of consent was discriminatory. The perception of a meddling Europe intervening in what the British liked to think of as moral concerns was reinforced in 1999 when the European Commission issued a handbook for those seeking to improve standards in prostitution. ‘Even a “madam” who has never had sexual contact with her clients may want advice on how to sterilise her whips,’ it suggested.
There was a limit on how far the parliament elected in 1992 was prepared to go on issues of liberalising the law, and on how much of his rapidly dwindling political capital John Major was prepared to expend, particularly at a time when sexual scandal was engulfing his government on such a frequent basis. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, fearful of saying anything that might appear controversial, made no promises on sexual rights in its manifesto for the 1997 general election.
Despite this silence, however, it was symbolically important to Tony Blair’s government that things should be seen to have changed, and the law was subsequently amended in fits and starts. The new, more relaxed attitude had the additional benefit that fewer politicians were likely to see their careers end in tabloid scandal. There were still examples – most notably the tragic case of Paisley South MP Gordon McMaster, who committed suicide in 1997, alleging that others in the Labour Party were spreading rumours that he was homosexual – but they were now exceptions rather than the rule.
The change was apparent in 1998, when the News of the World proposed running a story about Nick Brown, then Labour’s agriculture minister, and his alleged relationship with a rent boy. Brown denied the allegations but, rather than wait for publication, he was encouraged to offer the paper an alternative story in which he would come out as a gay man. ‘The result was,’ reflected Tony Blair, that ‘the story turned from a sordid scandal into an honest confession and Nick was saved.’ It was a slightly odd use of the word ‘confession’, but by no means unique; even the Guardian report of the time used the same terminology: ‘Brown confessed to being gay.’
Elsewhere the Sun greeted the story with a comment column headlined ARE WE BEING RUN BY A GAY MAFIA?, which called on all homosexuals in public office to come out, but insisted that it didn’t wish to invade anyone’s privacy, while the paper’s columnist, Richard Littlejohn, linked the outing of Brown to ‘the government’s determination to lower the age at which schoolboys can be sodomised’. Perhaps the best response to such hysterical coverage came from Michael Gove, then writing for The Times, who suggested mischievously that John Prescott might also be gay: after all, he had joined the merchant navy, had waited on tables and was married to a woman who was ‘a camp icon to rank with Bet Gilroy or Barbra Streisand’.
In fact, such mockery was no longer necessary, for this was effectively the last great flourish of the Sun’s longstanding campaign against homosexuality in all its forms. A fortnight before the Nick Brown story broke, Matthew Parris, a columnist on The Times and the Sun, had appeared on BBC Two’s Newsnight programme and mentioned in passing that there were two out homosexuals in Blair’s cabinet: ‘Chris Smith is openly gay and Peter Mandelson is certainly gay.’
It was hardly a shock revelation, for Mandelson had been outed by the News of the World in 1987 and again by the Sun in 1995, and he made no secret of his homosexuality in his everyday life. ‘I know he’s that way,’ worried Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, ‘but why does he have to flaunt it?’ But Mandelson had never made any public comment or declaration on the subject and seemed to have no inclination so to do, presumably on the grounds that it was no one else’s concern; consequently it was seldom mentioned explicitly. Parris’s casual comment, therefore, caused a certain panic, particularly at the BBC where the director general John Birt, a former colleague of Mandelson on LWT’s Weekend World programme, issued instructions that no further mention was to be made on air of the minister’s sexual orientation.
Mandelson’s network of media contacts extended beyond even Birt, however, and a couple of weeks after the Newsnight interview, David Yelland, the editor of the Sun, informed Parris that his column in the paper was to be terminated. ‘From the conversation I had with Mr Yelland,’ remarked Parris, ‘I drew the impression the two things are linked.’ At the same time Yelland announced a change of policy: ‘From now on the Sun will not out homosexuals unless there is a major public interest reason to do so.’ There was a degree of irony that this should be coming from the flagship of the News International empire, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, had only recently been heard remarking that ‘The trouble with Blair is that he spends too much time listening to that poof Mandelson.’ Nonetheless, the shift in tone was welcomed as evidence that Fleet Street, like the political class, was finally catching up with public opinion.
As a final indication that a new social order had been established, Peter Tatchell found himself in 1999 acclaimed as a hero by the right-wing press. Tatchell had been the victim of extraordinary tabloid vilification since the mid-1980s, first when he stood unsuccessfully as Labour’s candidate in the Bermondsey by-election, and then when he came out and became the most famous gay campaigner in the country. A leading figure in the direct action group OutRage!, he had courted further controversy with stunts that included a demonstration during a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury, intended to highlight the Church of England’s position on homosexuality. On that occasion he had been prosecuted for ‘indecent behaviour in a church’ under the obscure Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act, and given a witty fine of £18.60, a reference to the date of the legislation. The press reaction to his campaigning was less than supportive. ‘Odious is too polite a word to describe Peter Tatchell,’ opined the Sun in 1997. ‘But the more accurate words cannot be printed in a family newspaper.’
The portrayal of Tatchell as a ‘loony left’ extremist changed, however, in November 1999 when he attempted to effect a citizen’s arrest of Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe who had taken over from the likes of Idi Amin and Jean-Bédel Bokassa as the British media’s favourite African hate figure. Tatchell’s actions, undertaken at considerable personal risk, drew attention to Mugabe’s virulent hatred of homosexuality – ‘British homosexuals are worse than dogs and pigs because they do not differentiate between males and females,’ he argued – and thereby struck another blow for gay equality, for few in Britain wished to associate themselves with Mugabe. (Mugabe was later to claim that Africa minister Peter Hain was Tatchell’s lover, which provoked mixed reactions: ‘Hain is taking it calmly,’ reported Robin Cook. ‘Tatchell is furious.’) It wasn’t long before Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, was praising Tatchell as ‘a classic Christ-type figure’ who ‘refuses to be deflected from his mission, in spite of having been beaten up more times than St Paul’.
By 1997 Midsomer Murders was happy to use the expression ‘arse bandit’, so that DI Barnaby could correct such terminology, and it was clear that things had changed. In 2001 a gay man named Brian Dowling won the second series of the reality television show Big Brother, having come out to his family shortly before going on the show. His mother’s response summed up the transformation of attitudes in Britain: ‘Are you trying to be fashionable?’
It was all a long way from the days of Alan Amos and Michael Brown. That dictum of Rupert Allason (another who voted against the lowering of the age of consent) that ‘a wholly legal act of homosexuality spelt catastrophe’ for an ambitious MP no longer applied. Being gay, even being openly proud of being gay, was no longer an impediment to holding office. In 2012 Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London who had in the 1980s been amongst the first major politicians to fight for gay equality, looked back to the early days of Blair’s premiership. ‘As soon as Blair got in, if you came out as lesbian or gay you immediately got a job,’ he remarked. ‘It was wonderful.’ It was also a piece of sound practical politics, learned from the catastrophe of Back to Basics.