The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 071-405
1706; Telex 27124; Fax 071-242 0603
WE ARE NOT AMAZED `N
one of the worst French novels from which careful parents try to protect their children can be as bad as what is daily brought and laid upon the breakfast-table of every educated family in England, and its effect must be most pernicious to the public morals of the country.'
So wrote Queen Victoria to the Lord Chancellor in 1857, complaining of the way in which divorce cases were reported by the press. Most people, probably, would feel a sense of amused superiority on reading her words today. Was this not the woman who gave her name to a whole epoch of prim- ness and prudery? Were not even the piano legs at Balmoral clothed to prevent the sug- gestion of improper ideas? (No, they were not.) We are told that our age has freed itself of Victorian inhibitions, that it has reached a level of frankness and unshockable matu- rity of which no one in the 19th century could have dreamed. And yet only a few days ago the breakfast-table of every edu- cated family in England was presented, as an item of top-ranking news, with the story that an MP had written amorous poems to his 22-year-old research assistant. It appeared that he had kissed and cuddled her too; but, as he romantically explained, I did not have sexual relations with her, for various reasons.'
Mr Hartley Booth also stated that 'it's the most awful thing in my whole life. I feel like death over it. I sought the help of a leading evangelical clergyman to pray me out of it.' Dickens, perhaps, might have rel- ished that last detail; but most Victorian newspaper readers would have been amazed that such a peccadillo could be thought a matter of any public interest at all. They would quickly have turned the page to read the stories which caused Queen Victoria such concern — stories involving, as the divorce laws then required, proof of cruelty, bestiality, sodomy or rape.
Nineteenth-century Englishmen were altogether less shockable than we are today. When it became known that the For- eign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, had attempted to rape one of the Queen's ladles-in-waiting at Windsor Castle, swift action was taken: the Prime Minister asked him to send her a letter of apology. Would
Mr Douglas Hurd be let off so lightly today? The Prime Minister himself, Lord Melbourne, had appeared in court a couple of years earlier, charged with committing adultery. Though he was acquitted, he was widely believed to have kept mistresses in the past, and his obsession with erotic flag- ellation was not altogether a secret.
It is true that an earlier Foreign Secre- tary, Lord Castlereagh, had committed sui- cide for fear of being exposed in a sexual scandal. He had accompanied a prostitute to her room (as was his habit) only to find that 'she' was a male transvestite, whose accomplices then tried to blackmail him on a charge of homosexual rape. The Duke of Wellington advised him to have the black- mailers arrested, and explain the full story: so long as people knew he thought the prostitute was female, no damage to his political career would result. That Castlereagh did not follow this advice was taken as a sign that he was mentally deranged.
Today it seems to be the whole nation that suffers from derangement. Recently our newspapers have been filled with details of one MP's solitary sexual prac- tices. This had become a matter of news because those practices, sadly and stupidly, had resulted in his death; but they were not a matter of any political or national signifi- cance whatsoever.
To say that our politicians should be more like Palmerston or Melbourne is not to commend flagellation or condone rape. It is merely to point out that politicians should expect to be judged on their politi- cal achievements, not their sexual failings.
Ah, the reply goes, but politics is con- cerned with morality, because it lays down the law to the rest of us. That Parliament affects our moral lives, through such things as social legislation, is certainly true; those who claim that politics can be utterly sepa- rated from morality must be living in a dif- ferent world. But social legislation is intro- duced for reasons which are stated and argued. It is those arguments which should matter, not the private lives of the people who wield them. If someone presents rea- sons for bringing in laws to strengthen the institution of the family, the discovery that he himself is a homosexual does not destroy his arguments, any more than the discovery that a cricket selector is himself butter-fin- gered destroys his stated reasons for prefer- ring one fielder to another.
Stupidly, however, our politicians have accepted the idea that their policies and private lives must be parts of a seamless web. Hence their election manifestos filled with pictures of wives and children, as if this proved anything about the validity of their social policies. They should stop issu- ing these irrelevant boasts about their exemplary home lives, and ask us instead to vote for them simply for their policies and their political skills. Only then will they be able to reply to the press with that soundest of Victorian maxims: 'Publish and be damned'.
Previous page
