The FIRST CASUALTY of WAR

The Syrian government has declared variously that the missile attack on the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus early on Wednesday did not take place at all, that it took place but that no chemical weapons were involved, and that chemical weapons were indeed involved but that they were inflicted by rebel forces. These statements cannot all be correct. Is any of them true?

There can be no doubt that an attack did take place. Many civilians died; the opposition claims more than a thousand. That people did die is beyond argument. Also not disputed is that the area where they died is characterised by resistance to the government’s attempts to quell the civil unrest – let us not prejudge anything by calling it a civil war – for the last two years.

Dead Syrian children

Moreover, all the recorded evidence so far offered to the world shows people suffering in a way that is not commensurate with an attack by conventional weapons. The victims are not showing blast injuries. Their motor functions are affected, particularly the breathing instinct. The spread of this effect on humans is evidently much wider than any structural damage in the area. There can be no doubt that, whatever killed these people, it was not explosives.

Was it a chemical agent? Only an impartial examination at the site can determine this to general satisfaction. Whether such an examination is possible depends wholly on the Syrian government itself. If Assad denies the inspectors, we shall be entitled to draw a conclusion, as I will consider in a moment.

Meanwhile, I want to try to examine the government’s notion that the footage widely circulated across the world is, in some sense, a “fabrication”. Presumably that would mean that the convulsing children that we have seen are actors, that people are playing at being dead. Is this at all credible? I submit that it is not. Given the chaotic nature of what we see, it would require remarkable creativity to “stage” such chaos without any glitch that revealed deception. Is any of the material released at all questionable? If it were, wouldn’t someone have noticed by now?

Dead Syrian adults

So it seems pretty conclusive that these things are established: i) that there was an attack; ii) that many civilians died; iii) that some kind of non-blast weapon was responsible for the casualties.

Now we come to the bottom line for the Assad government: the attack was inflicted by the rebels themselves. Does this argument have any merit? Well, it is certainly possible to suggest a motive for the rebels: that they wish to blackguard the Assad regime and “shame” foreign governments into intervening on behalf of the insurrection. William Hague’s increasingly bullish statements since Wednesday morning suggest that, if that was the aim, it is having some traction, at least with the British government. Obama remains carefully non-committal.

But is it possible to stand up the argument that the rebels would inflict such a grotesque death on the families of its own people, even if the exercise could be held to have a chance of tipping the argument about intervention?

Hague: bullish

I am reminded of a Jewish friend with family in Israel who told me in all seriousness that, when Israeli planes attack the Gaza strip, Palestinians lay their small children on the roofs of their homes so that they are more likely to be killed and hence the Israelis can be accused of war crimes. Although she has a Cambridge degree and has worked in current affairs broadcasting all her adult life, she could not recognise black propaganda when it was offered. I gently pointed out the notorious precedent that the Nazis spread lies about the morality of the Jews in order to make them appear less than human and so more dispensable, but she wouldn’t make the connection. People are willing to believe anything, however far-fetched, if it reflects badly on their enemy.

If the Syrian rebels did this themselves, a lot of people would necessarily be in on the exercise. How could the rebels be sure that no one would expose the deception? Yet we still await the first report of any defector from the opposition’s cause, decrying the tactics of the rebels, whereas several highly-placed officials in the Assad regime have left the country in disgust. Moreover, it is known that the Syrian government has developed chemical weapons: that is not at issue. When would they deploy such weapons, then, if not in a situation that they themselves account a profound threat to the state? It is always possible that Syrian rebels have gained access to chemical weapons, but there is as yet no independent evidence of it.

The UN inspectors ought to have the expertise to determine whether chemical weapons are in opposition hands. They are presently in Syria but the government will not permit them to visit Ghouta. Why so? That there are inspectors in the country at all is only as a result of protracted negotiations. The government says it cannot guarantee the inspectors’ safety. The rebels have said they will ensure that the inspectors are safe in Ghouta. If the inspectors are prepared to go, what argument remains to Assad? We must conclude that he fears what they will discover. If he wants to stay credible, he needs to pre-empt that conclusion.

Obama: non-committal

If there were an international consensus that the Assad government used chemical weapons against its own people, that would change the game, if only in that (once hostilities cease, if they ever do) Assad could be brought before the international court to face charges of war crimes. But there is no such consensus. Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian foreign office spokesman, declared that a homemade rocket carrying unidentified chemical substances had been launched from an area controlled by the opposition.

“All this cannot but suggest that once again we are dealing with a pre-planned provocation,” his statement continued. “This is supported by the fact that the criminal act was committed near Damascus at the very moment when a mission of UN experts had successfully started their work of investigating allegations of the possible use of chemical weapons there ... Moscow considers important an objective and professional investigation into what happened. And we call on all those who have the possibility to influence armed extremists to make every effort to end provocations with chemical agents”.

Moscow mouthpiece Lukashevich

Of course, if the Russians want to argue that the occurrence of this “criminal act” at the time of the US inspectors’ visit argues for it being an attack by rebels, one might counter that it could just as well be a double bluff, that the Assad regime launched the attack fully intending to tell the inspectors that it must be the rebels’ action. If the rebels are capable of staging an atrocity to look like the work of the government, the reverse is just as feasible and even more likely to be doable.

Russia’s alliance with Syria ensures that the UN’s hands are tied in any attempt to approve some anti-Assad action through the security council. As with so many other international crises, the fact that certain powerful nations may wield a veto leaves the UN powerless and raises the stakes for those nations that would be prepared to make some intervention. I have argued before that the UN’s charter needs to be rewritten and, at the risk of exasperating my regular readers, I am now going to argue it again.

No substantial rewrite of the charter has occurred since it was first drawn up in 1945. The time has long past when the UN needs to be given power independent of individual member states, power greater than any individual member, indeed greater than the sum of individual members.

The veto has to be scrapped. No nation, neither China nor Russia nor the US, can be permitted to continue to block the business of the UN and to override the will of a majority of members. All nations should have the same stake in the global community.

Support for Assad

The UN needs to have the power – by which I mean the military power – to intervene in any breakdown of peaceful coexistence and to impose a cessation of hostilities. This might be between any two or more nations squaring up to each other – say, Israel and Lebanon or Azerbaijan and Armenia – or within a sovereign nation where the ruling party is fighting any kind of insurrection – Somalia or Colombia or Libya or Egypt. Where the UN deems it necessary, its troops would depose the government and take over the day-to-day management of the nation’s affairs. After all, whatever else you may believe about Assad, he has patently lost control of his nation. He is, to borrow Norman Lamont’s resonant words, “in office but not in power”.

How could the UN muster such power? I propose that each member nation be obliged to contribute to the UN’s peace-keeping forces the same level of funding, personnel and matériel that it commits to its own national defence. So if, for the sake of argument, the US’s total military budget were $800bn, it would be required to commit the same amount to the UN force. The Swiss government’s share of the UN force bill might be $4bn. In this way, the UN would be furnished with military might sufficient to overwhelm any conceivable national militia and its troops would be as international as possible. With a scheme like this in place, most nations would see both the necessity and the opportunity to scale down their domestic expenditure on what they term defence. That in itself would render the world a more stable place.

Such an imposition on all member states would profoundly alter the psychology of defence. The UN needs to establish as a baseline that any engagement in military combat is intolerable to the community of nations. As it is, the “just wars” are always those fought by a nation’s own troops. From the outside looking in, other nation’s wars are, at the very least, regrettable. More often they are indefensible. And, however righteous the combatants, all wars occasion atrocities on all sides. It is idle to pretend that other people’s wars are crueller and bloodier than those in which we take part.

But, I hear you object, you cannot ride roughshod over the sovereignty of individual nations. To that I say: the game has changed. Nations are no longer discrete entities whose disputes remain within their borders. Look at the flood of refugees from Syria into neighbouring countries. How can those countries, none of them wealthy, cope with the demands that Syria’s folly makes upon them? And why should they be required to do so? Furthermore, what is the cost to the planet of all this destruction visited upon it? Why should other nations be expected to clean up the mess of this – it needs to be stated – indulgence by the government and the citizenry of Syria?

The UN needs to be an organisation that holds as its core belief not only that waging war is destructive and regrettable but that waging war will not be tolerated by the community of nations, however wealthy and righteous and self-important the combatants might be. So my revamped UN would have the power – both judicially, by statute, and literally, by force of arms – to police the planet and snuff out any outbreak of hostilities within hours. All the members of the UN would have to agree to accept this awesome global authority and to isolate any nation in every practical manner until the UN deemed that its full membership of the community of nations had been earned again.

UN inspectors arrive in Damascus

If this dispensation had been in place, the hostilities in Syria would have been halted in the first week. Assad would have been obliged to resolve the contradictions in his nation or step down in favour of a temporary administration controlled by the UN that would have addressed the differences among the populace and set up fair and free elections. By the way, under my new model UN, every nation would be obliged to allow a comprehensive delegation from the UN to oversee and examine national elections and to declare whether they have been acceptable, the UN’s final judgment being paramount and not subject to appeal. Any head of state or indeed any individual candidate found to have transgressed would be barred from future office.

Imagine the different course of events in Egypt over the last two and a half years. Mubarak would have lost control of the country to a UN peace-keeping force. He might still have been tried and imprisoned by the courts. Free elections might still have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Had there been demonstrations against Morsi, they would have been permitted. But what was, by any objective measure, a military coup this summer would not have been allowed to take place. And so there would have been no massacre of protesters.

Well, you will say, none of the security council nations is going to surrender its veto, so this is a pipe-dream. I could simply snap back: ok, so what’s your solution that won’t simply make matters worse? At least I am making a concrete, constructive proposal that has yet to be tried and found wanting.

I am realistic, though. There is only one means by which what I propose could be achieved. Someone would have to run for the US presidency on a programme that included this proposal for the revamping of the UN. The chorus of abuse that would argue that this would be an abject surrender of American power and self-importance would need to be argued down. The candidate would have to win the argument and win the election and then embark on a long and hugely testing round of diplomacy to persuade sufficient of the other security council nations to agree. Yes, it’s a big ask. But what is the point of going into politics if it is not with the intention of changing the world?

DROPPING BY

Recently Google published its annual survey of search criteria, which survey it is pleased to call Zeitgeist. Hardly any of the names featured on the list means anything to me, so I am clearly well outside the zeitgeist. I suspect, though, that, unlike me, most of those who have sought the persons on the list never have cause to use the term zeitgeist in any other context (unless, of course, there is a pop combo, unknown to me, called Zeitgeist – which seems perfectly likely).

This blog, like many (most?) others, features a visitor counter to keep me (and indeed my readers) abreast of the rate of visits made to the site. It appears as a numeral framed off-centre in an elongated rectangle predominantly of yellow on the right side of the screen, below the archive list, the “about me” paragraph, the site search box and the roster of regular readers, stubbornly stuck at five (go on, register: it costs nothing). The counter, as it declares, is supplied by blogpatrol.com and it is a free service.

Blog Patrol gives me access to quite a lot of useful information about my visitors. Not their identities or their email addresses, you will be relieved to know, but their countries of origin (which always fascinates and thrills me as I imagine readers in circumstances, cultures and time zones far removed from my own) and the specific search criteria of those who have arrived by search engine. This last information is the most electrifying of all.

By a long stretch, the single search term that has brought more visitors than any other to this blog (and continues to do so) has been Elin Nordegren. I first mentioned her, rather in passing, when I wrote about her then husband, Tiger Woods, at the time that his life and golfing career first began to unravel (‘Go Get ’im, Tiger’ November 29th 2009). Because the photograph of her that I found through Google Images was so amusing – she looks, if she will forgive me, like the archetypal gentlemen’s club cocktail waitress that seems to be the type to which Woods is unfailingly drawn – I included the image in the posting. For a while, my visitor numbers went through the roof. Never slow to capitalise on a good thing, I attempt to repeat the trick here:

Here she is, boys, back by popular demand: Elin Nordegren

The other big draw – at least at the time – was William Hague and his bedroom-sharing escapade with his aide Chris Myers (‘Don’t Be Vague …’ August 28th 2010 and ‘Smear Studies’ September 5th 2010). This blog was almost the first to name Hague, way before the print and broadcast media did so, and that, I imagine, generated much of the traffic. Hague survived, Myers didn’t, which is the way round you would expect with Tories.

Somebody came several times to this blog with the search “HAGUE AND Myers sitting in a tree” (searcher’s use of upper case). I hope he found what he was looking for, but if it was a photographic image or a reported sighting, I never came across it myself.

A great many people got very exercised about the Hague/Myers matter. A man living within walking distance of us wrote to The Sunday Times complaining that it was a pretty poor show when two chaps couldn’t thriftily share a room without people making something of it. I wrote in reply, pointing out that this wasn’t a case of two teenaged backpackers on a budget cycling tour bunking down together, it was a millionaire Foreign Secretary and a man young enough to be his son whose entire career depended on the older man’s patronage, but the paper obviously thought this was too extreme to publish.

The Moet & Chandon room at the Hotel Du Vin in Birmingham where, staff confirm, William Hague entertained his young fellow spartan

Other search criteria have been considerably more perplexing. I have had visitors looking for references to eBay and to Michael Jackson. When I checked just now, there were approximately 215 million results of a Google search for the late Jacko and 425 million for the on-line trading site. I do not imagine – and do not imagine that I tested the theory – that the two mentions of Jackson in my blog index (there may be other unlinked references) appear in the first 214.5 million of those results or that the three mentions of eBay are ever again likely to be reached in a Google search. Whoever came to my blog on his (her? – no, surely his) quest for stuff on Jackson must have devoted hundreds of hours to that quest before getting to me and, on visiting Common Sense, been deeply disappointed. Not even a pic! Here’s one as consolation:

Jacko or at least a fair facsimile

Another search that must have required a multitude of stops before it arrived at this blog was the question: is ed miliband circumcised (searcher’s lower case and lack of question mark). As the Labour leader is Jewish, I think the answer is an unforeskinned conclusion, but why ask me?

Some devotee of James Lundie has sought him on this site, once accounting him “handsome” and once “fit”. The James Lundie who once appeared here is the partner of the former coalition cabinet minister David Laws. There also seems to have been a Scottish footballer of that name (not knowingly referred to by me before) but of course “fit”, in modern parlance, can mean, nicely defined as well as regularly exercising.

One search that made me smile was “Simon Longland leaves Harrods”. This evidently had not exactly been a headline across the international press. I put it into Google myself and was informed that there were no results if the line was placed in quotes. Without the quotes, there were 576 results, the first three of them pieces from The Financial Times about this Longland character who is – or was – fashion accessories general merchandise manager at Harrods’. This blog was listed eighth, on the strength of my referring to Sir Jack Longland, the late chairman of the wireless quiz My Word, linked up with a different reference on the site to “leaves” in the sense of foliage. It’s this kind of serendipity that makes using search engines a somewhat laborious business.

Another unfamiliar name that brought me a visitor was cited in the search “donna e carroll adultery”. Again searching for the phrase myself, I found this blog listed because I entitled one posting ‘The Woman Taken in Adultery’ (a piece about the Northern Irish political couple Peter and Iris Robinson). The Mrs Carroll sought appears to have been the subject of a trial in Wisconsin in 1990 at which archaic laws concerning adultery were invoked – it sounds quite diverting. That Google should list my blog under this search seems excessively tenuous.

Two queries about other public figures needlessly brought searchers to this blog: “sue lawley rumour” and “pj proby benefits fraud”. Google appears to carry no satisfaction for anyone wanting to spread a rumour about Ms Lawley and my only reference to her concerned her asking Gordon Brown on Desert Island Discs if he was gay. There was an evidently inconclusive story about the famously trousers-splitting ’60s pop star and a fraud inquiry some years ago but as there has (until now) been no reference to Proby on this blog, it is curious that Google should ever have directed anyone here.

Some of the criteria are just weird. The search itself is weird and any notion that I might provide satisfaction is even weirder. One seeker after truth had as his quarry “the song from movie here on earth where chris klein is drinking by himself in the %”. I’ve seen a few movies so I know who Chris Klein is and the search makes a bit more sense when you know that Here on Earth is a movie title. Klein was a coming man a decade ago but is so no longer and, my enquiries reveal, has, as it happens, been in and out of alcohol-related rehab. But this is his debut on my blog.

Here are some other searches that have disturbed this quiet corner of the net:
– chappie-shasta ohv 1990 Dedicated to Chappie
– como ter um bumbum como os dregs quij
– bruce1btrfancy wheel 60[1]
– 2010 GMTC steel &metals market research Bars rank
– MIAO NATIVE PEOPLE
– youtube zonal restriction
– winking 101 in russia1 acter
– show iqra carner in min caster
– beaumondeau
– sweet words of pismotality
– the heights where is big coke is processed
– HnKO«P Ã COUPT
Why any of these searches should bring their perpetrators to my blog is most mysterious. The last appeared in Cyrillic and I used some ingenuity to get all the letters reproduced but they have not been retained as I determined them in transferring to the blog.

However, these mysterious quests all add to the gaiety of nations and, as far as I am concerned, such visitors are all most welcome, no matter how eccentric their requirements. Come one, come all, I say.

For the sake of balance, here is a recent portrait of Miss Ann Widdecombe

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Now, any idea what this is? –

“The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA.
But it’s December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up north”.

Well, it’s the verse, usually omitted (certainly by Bing Crosby in his most famous version) of Irving Berlin’s imperishable seasonal standard ‘White Christmas’. And of course it goes some way to explaining the particular yearning quality of the song. People in California and other southern and western states, especially those who have moved there, are rather apt to envy those in the north and east of the US the more wintry weather that they often experience. If you want to hear the song complete with verse and not just with refrain, go to Phil Spector’s vintage album, A Christmas Gift for You (the first real collectable pop album, released in 1963), where Darlene Love sings it very nicely; or the first of Barbra Streisand’s two magnificent Yule collections, A Christmas Album of 1967 or Bette Midler’s Cool Yule CD of 2006.

White Christmas? Bah. Technically, a white Christmas is one on which snow is recorded as falling on the day. Various parts of Scotland had a white Christmas. But everyone else in Britain saw nothing but white for weeks and we were sick to the back teeth of it by Christmas Day. Yes, I know southern California and even Los Angeles actually had flooding (most bizarre) and that blizzards have brought the eastern seaboard to a standstill in the last few days, but these people are johnny-come-latelys. Since the third week of October, there have only been three days, at the start of this month, when there wasn't lying snow in the UK and since those three days it's been deep and crisp and even, turning to impacted, frozen and frankly dangerous. Over the last couple of days, a steady thaw has set in and suddenly there’s the unfamiliar view of grass and pavements and roofs. But there’s further snow in the forecast. The boffins are now saying that this has been the coldest December in Britain since 1890. I don't doubt it.

Anyway, our celebrations were put on metaphorical as well as actual ice. My partner and I were both ill for the duration, he much more than me (and he is the chef), and what’s more while he is a brilliant nurse and I an ideal patient, the reverse cannot be said to apply. So the seasonal fare all went into the freezer, the presents finally got opened on Wednesday night and still it is largely a house of sickness. I don’t somehow think there will be much wassailing at New Year’s here either. So bah. And humbug.

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I blubbed my way through the concluding pair of episodes of Ugly Betty, shown back-to-back in Britain on E4 the other week. I’m sorry to see the show end, because it has certainly diverted me over its four-year run, but that wasn’t what got me blubbing. Nor was it the playing out of Betty’s own particular (peculiar) career path. No, it was the resolution of the treatment of Betty’s kid nephew that got to me. Justin’s subplot has traced the growth of a gay boy from 12 to 16, really without ever putting a foot wrong, a remarkable achievement in a mainstream US television comedy drama. Whether the Colombian show from which it derives, Yo soy Betty, la fea, is quite so enlightened, I cannot say.

Happy 2011 to all my readers.

SMEAR STUDIES

I make no apology for returning to the matter of William Hague and the famous “gay rumours”. Last weekend, I was one of the bloggers to reveal that the unnamed cabinet minister, whose sexuality (according to the lead story in The Daily Telegraph) was being questioned in the blogosphere, was indeed the Foreign Secretary. In the eight days since, the story has developed in quite unforeseen ways.

The present situation first came to light because Hague recently appointed Chris Myers as his third special advisor. A number of observers recognised Myers as someone who had frequently accompanied Hague during the election campaign. On Thursday, The Guardian quoted “a source” in Hague’s constituency of Richmond, Yorkshire, to the effect that “it often seemed as though Myers was there for the ride rather than any other purpose”.

By that time, the notorious political blogger who posts under the name Guido Fawkes had sought through the Freedom of Information Act to discover whether Hague and Myers had ever shared a hotel room while on the campaign trail. I imagine someone must have tipped him off that such was a scent worth pursuing. And on Wednesday, knowing that Fawkes would be running with the information that Hague and Myers did indeed share a room on more than one occasion, Hague decided to attempt to nip the story in the bud. So he released his personal statement.

Reporting it for BBC News on Wednesday evening, political editor Nick Robinson called it the most extraordinary statement by a politician he had ever seen. He didn’t elaborate but perhaps he didn’t need to. Hague’s statement declared that “any suggestion that [Myers’] appointment was due to an improper relationship between us is utterly false, as is any suggestion that I have ever been involved in a relationship with any man. This speculation seems to stem from the fact that whilst campaigning before the election we occasionally shared twin hotel rooms”.

Hague and Myers last year

Well, now, who could be blamed for raising an eyebrow if a 49 year-old multi-millionaire shares a room with a 25 year-old of either the same or the other sex? Who would not imagine that a seasoned politician might think twice before doing such a thing, even if he were so tight-fisted a Yorkshireman that he resented paying Yorkshire hotel rates? Come to that, doesn’t Hague have a home in his constituency? Why would he need to stay at a hotel at all?

Hague’s statement goes on that “Christopher … has now told me that, as a result of the pressure on his family from the malicious allegations, he does not wish to continue in his position”. On Friday, The Northern Echo reported Myers’ family being “besieged” as “journalists kept vigil” even though “it was unclear … if Mr Myers … was inside the detached property”. Presumably the paper had a reporter of its own there, doing a spot of besieging. But of course this “vigil” was as a consequence of Hague’s statement, not a forerunner of it. I can find no evidence of media interest in the Myers family before Hague issued his statement, so it seems most unlikely that Myers resigned to bring “pressure” to a halt, but rather that he stepped down in order to pre-empt it.

Aside from that, which was the result of Hague electing to go public, there seems no reason at all why Myers should resign. He is not perceived to be at fault, even by Hague’s political opponents. If he was really so useful as a special advisor to the Foreign Secretary as that politician seemed to think, despite his singular lack of verifiable credentials to be so, Hague should have kept him. After all, as shadow Foreign Secretary, he flew the boy (first class at MoD expense) with him to Afghanistan, including a two-night stop over on Bahrain, and also took him more than once to Belfast. Myers seems indeed to have been indispensable.

Hague’s statement concludes with considerable detail about his wife Ffion’s history of miscarriages. This is perhaps the most perplexing part of the statement. What does it have to do with anything? Only people of very limited intelligence believe that being married and wanting children, whether or not the wish can be fulfilled, is conclusive evidence of a lack of homosexual instincts or behaviour. Oscar Wilde himself had a wife and children.

The result of Hague’s personal statement was to make the rumours a perfectly legitimate subject for the mainstream media. From this point on, the fact that Hague’s sexuality had been queried was out in the open and could not be packed away again. The story was no longer confined to blogs. Because of this, many at Westminster (not least in the wiser reaches of the Tory Party) have questioned Hague’s judgment. Those sceptics know that many will believe that smoke must mean fire. Hague will always be thought by some to be at least bisexual if not someone engaged in a lavender marriage.

While old-school Tories like Norman Tebbit and John Redwood publicly shook their heads in dismay and David Cameron, still on holiday/paternity leave, issued an unquestioning but oddly bloodless message of support, the Richmond Tories piled in to bolster their MP. Such warmth wouldn’t be hard to find, for Hague has the largest majority of any constituency member in Britain, which tells you quite how Tory is that part of Yorkshire. The chairman of the Richmond Conservative Association, Christopher Bourne-Arton, told The World at One that he fervently hoped those bloggers would return to the “slime-pool” from which they had arisen. He evidently was so pleased with this piece of withering scorn that he delivered himself of it again on the television news that evening.

All that being said, Hague is badly wounded. His record is already tainted by misplaced enthusiasm for such unreliable allies as milords Archer and Ashcroft. So soon after the David Laws embarrassment, he has allowed it to become widely suspected that le vice anglais is alive and well and thriving in the Con-Dem coalition. And of course the very fact that Hague takes the matter so seriously and that people talk glibly of “smears” and “slime-pools” tells you just how homophobic public discourse still is in 21st century Britain.

It’s not as if such tales are anything new. Two married ministers under Thatcher and Major were regularly rumoured to be really gay. Michael Portillo eventually declared that he had been gay as a young man, though advising that those days were now over. Peter Lilley was more apt to treat the tales with lofty disdain. I remember somebody in an Any Questions? audience raising with Lilley the matter of his sexuality and moderator Jonathan Dimbleby promptly and severely shutting down any opportunity for further comment – he seemed far more exercised about it than Lilley himself.

Around that time, a fellow journalist told me that she had heard William Hague remark: “I don’t understood all the fuss about Peter Lilley. He had my cherry long ago”. I do not disinter that detail to make more trouble for Hague. Indeed, I give it no credit: even Hague would not be so naïve as to make such a remark in the hearing of a journalist. But it says something about how Hague was viewed on Fleet Street, even at that young age.

Peter Lilley, fresh as cherry blossom

Not that the mainstream media have been so very gleeful in pouring supposed mud over Hague’s shiny head. Julian Glover, The Guardian’s young-looking specialist in gay Torydom, wrote a typically confused piece on Thursday under the title ‘The Dark Side of Gay Liberation’. Among his arguments was that “gay and lesbian politicians, and those suspected of being in this group, are now quite routinely expected to make a declaration of their sexuality, as straight ones, by and large, do not … No one rings up ministers to ask if they are secretly attracted to women”. Leave aside that, in Glover’s world, all ministers would seem to be male. What he forgets, though, is that heterosexual politicians make statements of their heterosexuality all the time. It is after all only a week ago that every front page carried carefully posed photographs of David Cameron with his new baby. MPs who are married with children – which means nearly all of them – pretty much without exception and from time immemorial have featured photographs of this reassuringly “normal” family life in their election literature. The underlying meaning of this tradition is not hard to fathom, nor does it require stating explicitly.

The Guardian re-runs such pieces as Glover’s on its website under the banner ‘Comment is Free’ and invites readers to respond in a thread. I posted a comment on Thursday afternoon, the burden of which will be familiar to those who have read the previous posting on this blog. I recast it like this:

“Well of course we all accept that Hague isn't gay because Brutus is an honourable man and it's unparliamentary to accuse a chap of being economical with the actualité. But can we agree that William has been cavalier with the appearance. Out of Oxford, his best pal was a certain Alan Duncan. They both signed up as Shell Oil trainees and they shared two successive homes, the second of which Duncan bought with his business gains and charged William a monthly rent of a case of champagne. That house was convenient for the Commons in – oh, mother – Gayfere Street.

It was Duncan who persuaded Hague to run for Tory leader after John Major stood down, Duncan who managed his campaign, Duncan who was appointed his parliamentary political secretary (an unprecedented, never repeated title) and who was briefly his media advisor until his advice proved crap. It was only after Hague was succeeded as leader by Iain Duncan Smith that Alan Duncan came out, fully ten years after entering the house. Why? Because had he come out while Hague was leader, awkward questions would have been asked about a man who only married at 36 when about to lead the party.

So, sure Hague is undoubtedly and securely straight. But he's certainly spent a lot of time in the company of people who may make him look a bit gay”.

Very much to my surprise, I noted next day that this comment had been removed from the thread by the moderator. Appending to it a note arguing that there was nothing offensive or libellous in the comment, I posted it again. Again it was removed. I then posted this:

“My comment on this matter has twice been removed by the moderator. I have carefully read the so-called community standards and my comment is in breach of none of them. It is grammatical, articulate, pertinent, witty and not repetitious (as far as I am aware) of any other comment in this thread. It is not abusive, homophobic, gratuitously or otherwise offensive. It does not accuse Mr Hague of being gay, untruthful, unfaithful to his wife, incompetent at his job or anything other than – or worse than – being heedless of appearances.

If it may be thought libellous, then let me point out that the facts to which I allude in the posting are contained in an article by Paul Routledge in The Independent of September 21st 1997. This may be read at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/comment-williams-clumsy-friendprofile-alan-duncan-1240267.html

No action for libel was evidently taken against that newspaper at the time it was first published or since it was placed on the internet. As a consequence, no Guardian lawyer has grounds for ordering my comment to be removed.

I bitterly resent being censored by the moderator of this thread. There seems to be no mechanism whereby his (it cannot surely be a 'her') Stalinist decisions may be either expounded or appealed. The only recourse the diligent poster has is to attempt to repeat the imagined outrage. I shall shortly post my original comment for a third time. If it and/or this present comment is/are removed, I shall be taking up the matter with the Press Council and the Scott Trust.

Comment is free? Ha”.

A little later, I posted the original comment again. Both postings were fairly swiftly expunged. I was staggered. I then posted this short note:

“Who is the moderator, to whom is he answerable and how may one address him openly?

What can there possibly be in this posting to attract removal?”

and, as far as I am aware (life is too short to keep checking), it remains on the thread. I took up the matter with the Press Complaints Commission but am not sanguine about a result because their website requires one to file the complained-of article and my complaint concerns the censorship of my own article. I am not sure that the PCC has a mechanism to satisfy me. I thought about writing separately to the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger (whom, a long time ago when he briefly became a television critic, I described in print as “another know-all who knows fuck-all about television”), and to Dame Liz Forgan, chair of the Scott Trust (which oversees Guardian Media Group matters), but then I decided I couldn’t be bothered.



The Hagues with Alan Duncan: other than a cartoon of himself, this is the only image that appears on his profile page on his own website

I did write to the letters editor of The Guardian this letter intended for publication:

“Dear Sir,

Someone uniquely well placed to shed light on the William Hague question is Alan Duncan. He befriended Hague at Oxford and both men became Shell Oil trainees. They shared two successive homes, the second of which Duncan bought with his business gains and charged Hague a monthly rent of a case of champagne. That house was convenient for the Commons in – ahem – Gayfere Street.

It was Duncan who persuaded Hague to run for Tory leader after John Major stood down, Duncan who managed his campaign, Duncan who was appointed his parliamentary political secretary (an unprecedented, never repeated title) and who was briefly his media advisor until his advice proved unreliable. It was only after Hague was replaced as leader that Duncan came out, fully ten years after entering the house. Why? Because had he come out while Hague was leader, awkward questions would have been asked about a man who only married at 36 when about to lead the party.

Civil-partnered and with his own sexuality beyond doubt, Alan Duncan's assurance of William Hague's truthfulness in declaring as ‘utterly false ... any suggestion that I have ever been involved in a relationship with any man’ would clearly assist his position enormously.

Yours faithfully”

It wasn’t published. As a regular contributor to the paper’s correspondence columns, I have an email relationship with the letters editor, Nigel Willmott, so I sent him a personal note:

“Dear Nigel,

Is there some agreement between the government and the media generally and/or The Guardian specifically that the Hague history contained in my email of 12.33 pm yesterday – highly pertinent and accurate though it was – will not be aired? I think we should be told.

Oh, and I'm not letting this rest.

Yours sincerely”

Willmott replied thus:

“Hi Stephen

I can't speak for the whole of the Guardian ... on the Letters page we have (that is, I as editor enforce) a guideline that we do not get involved in gossip and speculation about people's private lives. We are old-fashioned enough to believe there is such a thing.

I am not a great fan of William Hague as a politician, but I fail to see what his sexuality has do with his public role - except as in that this innuendo is affecting his ability to do that job. I think the invasion of public figures' private life for its own sake demeans our public culture.

I don't know or care whether he is gay - but if so, whether he chooses to make his sexuality public or not is up to him (or perhaps him and his wife).

There may be issues that stem from the affair - perhaps his judgment and the process for appointing his adviser, or in making his statement – that may be fair for debate on our page at some stage. But we will remain uninterested in speculation about his private life per se.

None of our guidelines is written in stone and we accept as the affair goes on (if it does) areas of his private life may become legitimate areas for debate as they become a public issue, but for the moment, I am not interested in your letter, which as far as I can tell is interested only in establishing his sexuality.

Otherwise, we will continue to look forward to receiving your usually excellent letters.

bst Nigel”

My response to that – the proper one, I think – was to write him a better letter, in the light of a collation of views published in the feature section, G2, under the heading ‘Does it matter who William Hague shares a hotel room with?’:

Dear Sir,

It matters (G2 cover story September 3) because, as party leader, William Hague vehemently opposed the repeal of the cruel and oppressive Section 28, introduced by the previous Tory government to outlaw an even-handed attitude to sexuality by teachers and others answerable to local authorities. Hague even sacked one of his frontbenchers, specifically for voicing support for Labour's decision to repeal the clause.

At that time, Hague's closest political ally was Alan Duncan. Indeed, the pair shared two successive homes, so Duncan was clearly also Hague's closest personal friend. It doesn't signify whether such friendship was platonic or not and, speaking for myself, I would not care to know. It does signify that Hague was so ideologically blinkered that he could overlook his good friend's self-declared homosexuality and punish that of everyone else. I leave to others their opinions as to how far this might suggest that Hague is conflicted about sexuality.

Yours faithfully

Willmott replied:

“Hi Stephen

thanx ... this is maybe something we could go with ...

bst Nigel”

I make no remark on a man who, from his photograph, looks to be not significantly younger than me using the modes of the texting generation. At any rate, my letter did not appear and I sent him a brief note:

“Nigel –

Ach, you're such a tease ...

Regards”

On Any Questions? this weekend, who should fetch up but the aforementioned Alan Duncan. Would he speak as unguardedly as he usually does? Would he hell! Holiday relief moderator Martha Kearney very properly introduced Duncan as one who had befriended Hague at Oxford and who had been the first sitting Tory MP to come out. In answer to the opening question about a “brilliant” politician being undermined by rumour, Duncan said: “First of all, you’re quite right to use the adjective ‘brilliant’. We’re dealing with a very special politician here and I think the way he has been pilloried this week has been contemptible. I think that, based on rumour, innuendo with no foundation in fact, bloggers and the press have got completely out of control. I know William, I know Ffion and I don’t like the way they have been treated. I think the way he has behaved and the way Ffion has behaved have been admirable – composed, calm, dignified – and I think it’s wrong for British politics that a couple like this should have been subjected to what they’ve been subjected this week”.

Duncan guys Hague in a House of Lords entertainment, February 2009: don't, whatever you do, imagine that this is camp

This had my lower jaw sagging. How has his pal been “pilloried”, pray? Who has treated Mrs Hague in any way other than at a very long arm’s length and without spin of any kind? What is the history of Hague lodging with the gay Duncan if it is not a foundation in fact?

After a depressingly conventional discussion among the rest of the panel, Kearney put it to Duncan that “one paper even suggested that the rumours date back to the time you shared a flat with him”, to which Duncan replied: “I don’t think that’s true at all but here you go, you’re off again and I don’t like the nature of your question. You’re starting once again just the kind of tittle-tattle which has been the foundation of this and is unjustified”. Kearney should never have let him get away with this, should have raised the Section 28 issue that I alluded to in my letter, but the mood of the whole panel was against her.

I sent an email to Any Answers?: “Alan Duncan was William Hague's closest political ally before and during the latter's leadership of the Tory Party. Indeed, as Martha Kearney pointed out, the pair shared a house (indeed, two successive homes), so Duncan was clearly also Hague's closest personal friend. It doesn't signify whether such friendship was platonic or not and, speaking for myself, I do not care to know. It does signify that Hague was so ideologically blinkered that he could overlook his good friend's self-declared homosexuality and punish that of everyone else by, as leader, vehemently opposing the repeal of the cruel and oppressive Section 28, introduced by the previous Tory government to outlaw an even-handed attitude to sexuality by teachers and others answerable to local authorities. Hague even sacked one of his frontbenchers, specifically for voicing support for Labour's decision to repeal the clause.

I leave to others their opinions as to how far this might suggest that Hague is conflicted about sexuality. But in the political sense I have indicated – and only in this sense – whether or not Hague has had relationships with men is important.

Yours faithfully”.

I didn’t expect my email to be read but the selection of phone callers chosen – no emails – infuriated me. I wrote again, before the end of the broadcast: “What is the point of Any Answers? if all the callers you choose make the same point and the moderator doesn't deal with it? Your callers repeated and repeated the argument that two people of the same sex ought to be able to room together to save money without raising suspicion of an ‘improper’ relationship or, as one caller preposterously put it, ‘being criminalised’.

But how many of these callers who volunteered that they had shared with ‘a friend’ are multi-millionaires? And how many of them shared with someone young enough to be their child? And how many of them would presume nothing ‘improper’ if a 49 year-old man shared a room with a 25 year-old woman? Would they say ‘oh, I expect they were saving money’?

Yours faithfully”. Both emails received automated replies.

The Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell, also on the Any Questions? panel, reckoned that, once the issue escaped the blogosphere, the BBC and The Guardian “were the most vociferous or covered it most extensively”. I thought this was pretty rich, given that it was The Telegraph that first aired the matter last Saturday and this Saturday was still running with it (we only see the paper that day because it then has much the best of all colour magazines). Yesterday, the paper’s chief keeper of the Thatcherite flame, Simon Heffer, weighed in against the hapless Hague. The man I call Siphon Effluent vouchsafed that “the statement about Mrs Hague’s miscarriages was a abominable abuse of her in the interests of his political career” and “[Hague] raises questions, by his conduct, of whether he has the credibility to stay in office”. Effluent is no supporter of the Cameron project and, since the former Thatcher protégé Hague threw in his lot with what Effluent would deem the wets, he could not be expected to extend to Hague any benefit of any doubts.



Damian Thompson; Andrew Sullivan

Elsewhere, the paper’s blogger Damian Thompson revealed himself to have been a contemporary of Hague’s at Oxford. On his blog, he reports that everyone at Oxford noted Hague’s lack of interest in having a girlfriend. In his newspaper article, he notes that the enormously articulate Andrew Sullivan, long resident in the States and recently an eloquent supporter of President Obama (though still fundamentally a Republican), was once a protégé of Hague’s. Sullivan is famously, noisily gay.

So it remains plangent that Hague can insist that “any suggestion that I have ever been involved in a relationship with any man” is false and make that vicious and unforgiveable stand he took over Section 28 and yet have his personal life interthreaded with queens. Let’s face it, he is never going to be free of this.

DON’T BE VAGUE …

Is it a libel if one describes a person as gay when he or she is not so? If it is indeed libellous, why would it be so? Homosexuality is not against the law in Britain, so long as it is between consenting adults in private. In what would consist the libel? Is being gay a stigma in the eyes of the law, even though it is not illegal?

And are there degrees of liability in such a case? Would a false accusation of homosexuality still be held to be defamatory per se or would the plaintiff now need to show that it was defamatory per quod, that is to say that actual damage was caused, whether directly financial or indirectly financial – in the sense of adversely affecting the plaintiff’s career? These are shifting sands and no juridical toe has been dipped in them since the end of 2005 when Robbie Williams was awarded substantial damages against The People newspaper for carrying an allegation that he was secretly gay and that his then imminent autobiography would perpetrate a deception upon the public by accounting him heterosexual.

Clearly an important ingredient in the matter is the direct accusation or veiled suggestion within the supposed libel that the subject is a liar. This is a further fraught area. Is it defamatory to accuse someone falsely of being a liar? In the world of politics, mendacity is taken very seriously. In neither house are you permitted to call a fellow member a liar or to imply as much. Alan Clark famously described himself as having been “economical with the actualité”, a thrust that he would have made against a fellow politician at his peril.

All these questions arise in the light of today’s lead story in The Daily Telegraph, headed “Cabinet minister may act over false claims of gay affairs”. You can read the piece at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7968924/Cabinet-minister-may-act-over-false-claims-of-gay-affairs.html

The very headline raises a number of questions. Is something that “may” happen legitimately a news item? Shouldn’t the newspaper take a more even-handed line with the story, for instance by placing the word “false” in quotation marks? To state falsity baldly implies that the paper accepts without question that the claims are false. Putting the word in quotes would more properly and appropriately indicate that the cabinet minister in question holds that they are false. But if the paper does not believe that there is any fire under the smoke, why is it running the story at all, let alone as its lead?

Coyly, the paper never hints at the identity of the cabinet minister. Such fastidiousness is unusual in the press, including The Telegraph itself which, in repeating rumours in the past while denying or questioning them, has not been backward in naming those touched by the rumours. Simultaneously, the paper today carries the news, shared with all its fellows, of the statement by the junior minister Crispin Blunt that he has separated from his wife and has “decided to come to terms with his homosexuality”. On another page, the paper repeats the “gay rumours” concerning the MI6 operative whose body was found earlier in the week. These rumours it roundly denounces as “smears”, seemingly picking up the term from the dead man’s family. I will not have been alone, immediately the story first broke, in suspecting that we would sooner or later hear of a real or imagined gay angle to this bizarre killing.

The cabinet minister story has been circulating on the internet and it is the work of but a moment to identify the subject, if one couldn’t already guess. It is William Hague, the Foreign Secretary. In truthfully asserting that he is the subject of rumour, I do not, I think, commit any offence against him. I am not crediting the rumour. It is not for me to judge whether it be true or false.


William & Ffion Hague

But William Hague is a grown-up and a politician in the public eye. Indeed, he has been in the public eye for more of his life than any of his peers – 33 of his 49 years – because he famously scored a hit with the Tory Party and the then leader Margaret Thatcher when he addressed the party conference at the tender age of 16. So it is reasonable to examine his behaviour and to ask whether he might have avoided the possibility that rumours of homosexuality might attach themselves to him.

Hague married Ffion Jenkins shortly before he himself became leader of the Tory Party. He was then 36, young to be leader, old to marry. Bachelor MPs inevitably provoke questions. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Gordon Brown was asked by then host Sue Lawley: “are you gay?” He said “no”. He didn’t appear to take umbrage. Nothing more was made of it. Brown finally married at 49 but I have never heard the whisper of a suggestion that he was gay or thought to be gay by anyone. (Someone once told me, laughably yet earnestly, that Tony Blair was gay; not a belief shared by many, I suggest).


Thatcher with her 16 year-old fan

If he wanted to avoid any suspicion about his sexuality, William Hague went about it in a decidedly cavalier fashion. At Oxford, he was befriended by Alan Duncan – they both became President of the Union, a customary rung on the ladder to a political career. They subsequently shared a Battersea flat and both became management trainees at Shell Oil. Duncan then swanned off to make his fortune in business. Duly achieved, some of the fortune was ploughed into a swanky house convenient for the Commons and Hague became Duncan’s lodger at the rent of a monthly case of champagne. The street in which they played house, they may perhaps have enjoyed telling people, was Gayfere Street.

Hague became an MP at a by-election in 1989 and Duncan joined him on the government benches in 1992. When John Major stood down after the 1997 election defeat, it was Duncan who persuaded Hague to stand in his own right rather than as number two to Michael Howard. Hague somewhat unexpectedly won the ballot. But his time leading the party was unhappy, partly because Duncan was initially his advisor and gave lousy advice. Hague had made Duncan his parliamentary political secretary, a post that had never existed before and has not been reinstated since Duncan stepped down from it and from being Hague’s press advisor.


Akan Duncan with his civil partner James Dunseath

After the Tory failure at the 2001 election, Hague was replaced as leader by Iain Duncan Smith. It was only a few months later that Alan Duncan publicly acknowledged for the first time what everyone at Westminster and on Fleet Street had always known: that he was gay. What wasn’t remarked at the time - though it certainly occurred to me – was that the reason why Duncan had passed ten years in the house before coming clean was that it might have occasioned questions about his relationship with Hague. Now that Hague was yesterday’s man, it was of no interest to anyone.

But Hague is now Foreign Secretary and questions about him appear to bear renewed pith. What has sparked this particular flurry is the appearance in the Daily Mail of pictures of Hague with one of his aides, a 25 year-old called Chris Myers. Ostensibly, the paper was running the picture sequence in order to mock Hague's reversion to the baseball cap that did his image such damage when he was first Tory leader (he is clutching the cap in the picture I reproduce below). But of course the real interest lies in his choice of strolling companion. Myers has recently become Hague’s third special advisor. The government has undertaken to cull the number of special advisors, but no Labour foreign secretary required more than two such.


The man of the people down the pub

To describe Hague’s appearance with Myers as “informal” would hardly be to overstate. Admittedly these photographs were taken last year, when Hague was only shadow Foreign Secretary. On the other hand, it illustrates that the pair were at the very least on matey terms before Myers’ elevation.

Now I must make clear that I neither make nor intend any innuendo about this relationship. All I submit is that Hague has been reckless with his image, knowing as he must do that the press will put two and two together and make 180 if given half the chance. If he wants these rumours to be stilled, he needs to govern his behaviour. And, if I were he, I wouldn’t submit myself to media interview for a good long time. Because if someone asks Sue Lawley’s question, he will have to say a blunt, simple and entirely truthful “no”. Anything else would bring him down. That is why the per quod action is pertinent to any libel suit he may decide to pursue. But of course he won’t be resorting to the courts. The precedents for such action are not encouraging.


With aide Chris Myers

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.

CABINET in the SKY

A few quick musings on the new cabinet. After having a really atrocious election, fluffing and blustering through interviews on subjects she did not grasp, Theresa May is the new Home Secretary, far higher up the ranks than she ever was in opposition. There’s only one explanation and that is Cameron’s dire shortage of women in his new team, even fewer than Gordon Brown had. Indeed, she, Caroline Spelman at Environment and Cheryl Gillan in the Welsh Office are the only women announced and May has to double up on policy for women and equality. Although Sayeeda Warsi will attend cabinet too, you can’t call hers a government post because she is there as party co-chairman under the age-old non-job title of Minister Without Portfolio. Her fellow co-chairman, Andrew Feldman, will not attend cabinet. The Lib Dems, even more poorly supplied with leading women, bring none to the cabinet, though Sarah Teather has often been touted as of ministerial potential.

Though he has found a position for Iain Duncan Smith to go with fellow ex-party leader William Hague, Cameron has given nothing to his erstwhile leadership rival David Davis. I wonder whether he offered and was refused or whether he has written Davis out of the history of his rise.

Meanwhile, the only gay member of Cameron’s shadow cabinet, Nick Herbert, is one of the casualties of coalition. No one outside his circle evidently knows whether the apparently monastic Lib Dem David Laws would be qualified to fill this breach. Talking of sexual chemistry (which I wasn’t), I learn that the new Foreign Secretary is flying to Washington as early as this Friday. You can bet your life, however, that Hillary Clinton will not go all giggly and moist over William Hague to quite the degree that she very publicly did over David Miliband. She will be fervently hoping that Miliband is indeed the shoo-in to be Labour leader that he clearly looks. It seems weird that, were the boyish Miliband to succeed, he would be the oldest leader among those of the three main parties, if only by fifteen months.