RULES BROKEN – LAWS FAR from BROKE

Is there anything more purely enjoyable than a political scandal in a party that you don’t support? And who would have guessed that such a scandal would break this soon into the life of the Con-Dem coalition government? Brave face though he may put on it, the David Laws humiliation is a disaster for David Cameron. The grumbling on the Tory benches, already rising to a roar over Capital Gains Tax and Cameron’s ham-fisted attempt to neuter the fiercely independent backbench grouping, the 1922 Committee, is further provoked by this evidence of Liberal Democrat unreliability. Make no mistake: there can be no second major error by a Lib Dem member of the Cabinet. Such an eventuality would cause a mass revolt on the government benches. The party will say: “throw the buggers out. It’d be better to go it alone as a minority government”.

David Laws’ folly, sin and crime – all these things, really – was to claim a sum that grew to £40,000 as a legitimate parliamentary expense characterised by him as payment to his landlord for a room rented conveniently for Westminster. The problem here was that the landlord was not simply his landlord. He was also Laws’ lover and had been so since 2001, exactly as long as Laws had been an MP. The rules about second home allowances for members of parliament were crystalised in 2006: no such allowance could be paid to an MP’s spouse or partner.


La Laws, before the storm broke

When first confronted on Friday morning with the intention by The Daily Telegraph to expose his situation in the next day’s paper, Laws took the line that he had not hitherto revealed James Lundie as his partner because the pair desired to preserve their privacy; that they could not properly be considered “partners” insofar as, for instance, they maintained separate bank accounts; and that he had never intended to profit from his expenses claim. Unfortunately, had he wished to maintain Lundie as, in The Telegraph’s phrase, “his secret lover”, and had he indeed intended to profit from his expenses claim, the facts of the case would be no different. Besides, he’s a multi-millionaire (there are 18 such in the Con-Dem cabinet, so they’re not much troubled by the trumpeted government pay cut). Why the hell is he claiming expenses at all?

Laws has been touted by Lib Dems and Tories alike as one of the great talents of his generation. A Guardian columnist this morning even called him “a man of exceptional nobility”. Oh pur-leeze: exceptional stupidity, more like. If he’s so brilliant, how come he made such a bish?

Doubtless David Cameron and Nick Clegg, as well as David Laws himself, soon saw that his position was not tenable. Inevitably, before the end of business on Saturday, he had stepped down. Today he is said to be considering a wounded exit from politics altogether, while government spokespeople and their supporters in the press loudly hope that he may be rehabilitated and restored to office as soon as possible.


James Lundie, Laws' firm partner

Of course, every party blackguards the sinners among its rivals and characterises the fall of its own as “a tragedy” and considerably less culpable than would be the same sin committed by one of another party. In the circumstances, Labour people have demonstrated admirable tact and taste in saying very little. They know, mind you, that expenses-fiddling on their own side of the house has been even more epidemic than among the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Not that any party has been quite as holier-than-thou about it all as the Lib Dems. But there’s also, I detect, a reticence in Labour’s response that may be traced to the gay aspect of the scandal.

From Ian Harvey and his guardsman in St James’s Park in 1958, via Jeremy Thorpe and “bunnies can and will go to Paris” and the Norman Scott murder plot, through the racist right-winger Harvey Proctor and his conviction for gross indecency with minors, to the entrapment of Michael Brown with an under-age boy by a Sunday newspaper, to Ron Davies’ “moment of madness” in a west country cruising ground, the untimely ripping of gay MPs from the closet has always been a messy business.


Ian Harvey, scandalous MP half a century ago

Even MPs who come clean voluntarily don’t avoid a bumpy ride. Alan Duncan, a noted motormouth, is a lot lower on the Tory greasy pole now than he was five years ago. Duncan, always unmistakeably gay, didn’t actually come out until Iain Duncan Smith was Tory leader and I know exactly why. It’s because for some years he shared a flat with William Hague. Hague remained a bachelor until 36, the age at which he became leader of the Tory opposition and the sense that he was “advised” to marry Ffion Jenkins was palpable. Had Duncan come out during Hague’s accident-prone tenure, awkward questions would have been asked. Quite right too.

Hague’s great rival at the time was Michael Portillo. Some two-and-a-half years after the famed “Portillo moment” in the small hours of the day after the 1997 general election, when the Defence Secretary discovered he had been unexpectedly unseated from Enfield South by the out gay Labour man Stephen Twigg, Portillo spontaneously revealed that he himself nursed a gay past. As it happens, I used to know Nigel Hart, the older man (now dead) with whom the young Portillo conducted an affair, rather longer (by Nigel’s account) than Portillo ever vouchsafed.

When a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge, Portillo had fallen under the spell of the legendary Maurice Cowling, the dizzyingly high Tory who held court at that college for thirty years. Cowling’s acolytes included Roger Scruton, Oliver Letwin, Niall Ferguson, Charles Moore, Norman Stone, Edward Norman, Andrew Roberts and David Watkin. Reported Anne McElvoy: “Peterhouse had a gay and bisexual life, conducted through dining and drinking clubs, and Portillo was a popular figure in an atmosphere of studied eccentricity and ritual dissolution” [The Independent September 30th 2000]. “Peterhouse was a great institution,” Scruton reckoned, “but probably is no longer – it was gratuitously destroyed by the admission of women” [quoted in The Guardian September 10th 1999].


Maurice Cowling, the Sage of Peterhouse

Whether Maurice Cowling was the queen or just the high priest of this hive of Tory preening is hard to ascertain. That he married for the first time at the age of 70 could betoken a “monastic life” (see below) or one of ungovernable promiscuity in any one or more of several directions or merely an understandable desire, upon retirement, for quiet companionship with someone amenable after a long hothouse career. Perhaps I would have found out the truth, had I fulfilled my old English master’s wish for me to follow him as a Petrean (he was there before Cowling’s time). Sadly – or rather I think I mean thankfully – I fetched up at London University instead and was taught by such radical Socialists as Ted Honderich.

Certain commentators have protested that the revelation of David Laws’ sexual orientation is nothing to do with the case and hence should not attract comment. I disagree. A great deal is made of the notion that Laws was “only” trying to keep his arrangements private, that even his family did not know of them – so he claims, but he wouldn’t be the first gay person who had never come out to a family that knew perfectly well on which side of the street he walked. When, already knowing that he was fit and neat-looking (very cute when he was young), I read that he was unmarried and lived what was called “a monastic life”, I immediately knew that he was gay. As Ben Summerskill slyly noted in The Observer, “observers often speculated that he might well be gay … How many straight men have perfectly flat stomachs at 44?”

Looking further into it, I discovered that the reason why he refused to join the Tories – with whom he was as one on economic and other policy (being the chief begetter of the famous Orange Book of 2004 that proposed a return of the Lib Dems to favour the free market rather than the post-Beveridge social market) – was that he deeply disagreed with them on social policy, particularly over Section 28. This was the notorious measure included in Margaret Thatcher’s Local Government Act of 1988, outlawing the ”promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities, primarily in schools. Labour didn’t get around to repealing it until 2003.


The Thoughts of Chairman Laws

Of course, I hesitated to name him as gay in my posting of May 12th because, even these days, accounting a heterosexual homosexual may be deemed libellous. No one remotely close to Laws’ solicitor is remotely likely ever to see this blog, but I don’t believe in offering hostages to fortune. The Telegraph says that it had no plans to “out” Laws in its lead story on Saturday and that it did so only because, in trying to pre-empt the scandal, Laws had publicly outed himself. This is somewhat fanciful: how could the paper have run the story at all without making clear that Laws was paying his partner? The paper already had long-lens shots (which it duly published) of Laws and Lundie separately leaving the house.

Before the scandal broke, Laws gave an interview to The Times to be published last Saturday, the text of which he substantially amended on Friday night. “When I grew up,” he then told the paper, “being gay was not accepted by most people including many of my friends. So I have kept this secret from everyone I know for every day of my life”. (This is according to an account in The Guardian; all trace of the text of the interview in The Times seems to have been removed from the paper’s online record).

Sexual acts between two adult males in strictly defined circumstances were decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act in 1967. I was then twenty. David Laws was one. Once the gay liberation movement got under way in the early 1970s, I came out. David Laws was then still under ten. Even Ian McKellen, a late starter, came out as long ago as 1988, when Laws was 22. The idea that remaining in the closet is one’s right and in some way worthy and even perhaps admirable was difficult enough to sustain in the 1980s. Thirty years later, when out gay people routinely hold high office across the world, openly gay ambassadors represent the USA and Australia, gay mayors have been elected in Berlin, in Paris, in Providence, Rhode Island and Houston, Texas and transgender mayors elected in Cambridge, England and Silverton, Oregon and even the head the government in Iceland is a lesbian, Laws’ reticence looks like what it is: moral cowardice.

Another whiney bit of self-justification offered to The Times on Friday night was that Laws was brought up Catholic and that he had never told his white-haired old Catholic mother that he favoured the cassock over the surplice. Yes, here’s another example of a life blighted by religious bigotry and the lies of supernatural superstition. Because, if you hide your nature, you do eventually find yourself telling lies. In the first version of his Times interview, Laws was asked if he had a partner. His answer was “no”. Liar. He lied about his expenses too. And he evidently didn’t tell Clegg or Cameron that he had attempted to cover his tracks in his expenses claims, even though he was well aware that both leaders had made a big deal of fresh starts, clean sheets and full transparency. Exceptional nobility? Pah!

And before we all get terminally swept up in the “tragedy” of David Laws, let’s not forget that the reason he had come to be so highly regarded in the short time since the election was that he was thought to be nearly as good as a real Tory at fronting the Conservatives’ programme of slashing and burning benefits, jobs and front-line services.