Sex, drugs and rock and roll are fine; but don’t beat your wife
When does a politician’s private life affect his fitness for office? Have the boundaries moved, offering our leaders more scope for secret gardens and untidy private arrangements? Studying parliamentary scandal, I have come to a surprising conclusion: that our British sense of the frontier between private sin and public life has changed little since Victorian times. It is only the sins which change.
Reading the newspapers this Christmas one might gain a different impression. In discussion of the David Blunkett affair, a mistaken view that times have changed and we no longer see the private lives of public figures as any of our business has gained currency and bids fair to become a new conventional wisdom. Voters are more tolerant of private irregularities in a politician’s life, it is said; the press and the public have a new respect for a minister’s right to a personal life ‘behind closed doors’, and we are becoming more like the French, protecting the privacy of their classe politique.
It is easy to see how people have reached this conclusion. No Tory minister in John Major’s government could have survived the revelations which (at the time of writing) the present Home Secretary has survived. If Mr Blunkett is forced from office this will probably be because of some alleged misuse of his official position. Few can be found to declare that taking a married woman as his lover disqualifies a man from the highest Cabinet offices.
Casting our thoughts wider, that picture of a ‘none of our business’ attitude to the domestic affairs of our political class is reinforced. Labour MPs have survived entanglements with rent boys, semi-naked snapshots on ‘Gaydar’ Internet sites, drunken brawls and complicated love lives. We feel deeply relaxed about Michael Howard’s wife having parted from a previous husband; we have giggled about Steven Norris’s five mistresses; and we have allowed ourselves to observe that news of John Major’s one-time affair with Edwina Currie rather spices up his reputation.
There is a widespread feeling that the orgy of media muck-racking which took its toll on so many of Mr Major’s own ministers went too far, and was in retrospect the last gasp of centuries of prurience which we have somehow and suddenly ‘outgrown’. We look back at Charles Parnell’s late-19thcentury relationship with Mrs Kitty O’Shea, which ruined him, David Lloyd George’s narrow escape from ruin when his adultery could not be proved in court, at Cecil Parkinson’s affair with Sara Keays a hundred years later, which capped his political career, and at Tim Yeo’s love-child, which cost him his ministerial job. We mutter that Mr Blunkett is lucky that 21st-century Britain is so much more tolerant of private sin.
This is nonsense. Ours is a deeply moralistic age. Our generation is no more tolerant of private sin than the generation which went before. Our century has no more ‘mature’ a view of the distinction between work and play than the ancient Egyptians did. What has, however, altered is the relative seriousness we attach to different moral failings. Each age has new taboos. Break these, and the defence that your private sin has not affected the performance of your public duty is quickly forgotten. How would wife-beating affect a Cabinet minister’s competence at work? Yet show me a wife-beating MP exposed and I’ll show you a political career wrecked.
Adultery, promiscuity, the failure of a marriage, and what the Bible would round up under the general term ‘fornication’ remain sinful enough to be interesting to the popular press, but are today lowerplaced on any scale of evil than they used to be. There is a widespread view that most people do play around a bit. Sexual caprice and recreational sex are viewed more tolerantly.
A similar relaxation has occurred in the popular view of serious relationships. It is widely agreed that love can be real and admirable outside marriage. The term ‘within the context of a loving and stable relationship’ more or less sums it up. And though (outside the more enlightened parts of London) homosexuality has not been normalised to quite the extent that fashionable metropolitan opinion sometimes supposes, it is not thought the unspeakable vice that it seemed when I was a boy. Certain ‘soft’ drugs are, likewise, not the reputation-killers they used to be. All these changes are reflected in the view our news media take of what a politician can ‘get away with’ in his or her private life.
But consider what a Victorian or Edwardian politician might have expected to get away with in his private life, and you will at once see that some sins have since moved in the opposite direction: up the scale of heinousness. A gentleman then might be rumoured to have an exotic collection of pornographic pictures for his and his friends’ private delectation, without any assumption that this was a matter of public interest. Lewis Harcourt, later Viscount Harcourt, the First Commissioner of Works, kept one of the finest collections of child pornography in Europe, and Eton parents were warned never to let their sons go for unaccompanied walks with him. His behaviour was not considered acceptable (when it came to the attention of the police he killed himself) but London society did not report him to the police, or the newspapers. Colleagues who knew protected him.
No modern politician would survive a story about downloading child pornography from the Internet. No modern politician would survive stories of domestic violence involving partners or children. Those sins which we might broadly summarise as involving ‘abusive’ behaviour have moved up the scale of seriousness, replacing the downward-moving sins of ‘consensual’ behaviour. ‘Non-PC’ is the new wickedness — or, rather, we have a new definition of political correctness, different from our forebears’.
Financial crimes — insider-trading, fiddled expenses, bribery, dubious business practices of every sort — will today, if exposed, wreck a career in public life. In Victorian times directors of railway companies became MPs to push through their private Bills. Lloyd George survived the blatant sale of honours — yet half a century later Harold Wilson was scarred by even the hint of impropriety in his ‘lavender list’. Reginald Maudling’s era was more forgiving of his evident greed than ours would be.
Each age finds different ways of walling its leaders’ secret gardens. Each age re-orders the list of what they may — and what they may not — cultivate behind those walls. But secret gardens they remain, and where media raids seem to breach the walls, this is explained less by an altered idea of privacy than by revisions in our ideas of wickedness. No more than a hundred years ago will we tolerate in high office a wicked man. It is our ideas of wickedness which change.
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