New Labour, new lovers?

By Gavin Bowd

Britain was once world-famous for its gay spies: Oxbridge graduates Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean and Anthony Blunt, who put their furtive talents at the service of the Soviet Union. Now, to paraphrase that moralist Anais Nin, New Labour is having to cope with spies in the house of gay love. The revelations began with the mysterious case of Welsh Secretary, Ron Davies, who resigned after a "grave error of judgment" on Clapham Common.

According to Davies's version of events, he was "asked to dinner" by a man to whom he gave a lift. Davies was subsequently mugged by him and two friends. This perplexed the worldly British public: was Clapham Common, a famous gay cruising ground, really a place frequented after dark by lonely gourmets, perhaps brandishing their whisks? Was Davies just tired of Welsh rarebit? Despite blaming his veiled misdemeanour on his "genes" and a brutal childhood, the unfortunate Davies was banished to political oblivion.

The plot thickened when a journalist and former Conservative MP, Matthew Parris, declared that Peter Mandelson, trade and industry secretary and Tony Blair's King of Spin, was "almost certainly gay". The notoriously homophobic Sun declared historically that Mandelson's sexuality had no bearings on him as a minister, but invited him to have the "courage" to "come out". Mandelson did not take the bait, and successfully had suppressed a tabloid story about his partner.

The third revelation came when The News of the World informed Downing Street of its intention to publish a "political exclusive" about a liaison between "a rent boy" and the agriculture minister, Nick Brown. Brown was pushed into making public his sexual tendencies, but significantly was not pushed to resign by Tony Blair.

Brown, Mandelson and Davies join a growing band of identifiably gay Labour MPs. Indeed, it seems increasingly that Labour politicians are more likely to be found in the back rooms of Soho than in the miners' welfare clubs of northern England. Where, one wonders, will it all end? The deputy prime minister, John Prescott, seems a rough, tough, gruff northerner with a taste for trains and powerful cars. But what secrets lie in his past as a steward on lonely ferries plying the North Sea? And what about the Tory Party? William Hague is mischievously suspected of a marriage of convenience with his beloved Ffion and all sorts of rumours about Hague's possible successor, Michael Portillo, are emerging from the cloisters of Oxbridge and beyond. The militant gay rights group Outrage! claims to have a list of 30 closeted gay and lesbian MPs.

Does the fact that Mandelson and Brown have stayed in post show a new tolerance of gays in Britain? Certainly, that bastion of traditional morals, The Daily Mail, recently published a profile of the openly gay Culture Minister Chris Smith, accompanied by tender photographs of Smith, his partner and their dog. The Tory Party distanced itself from remarks by one of its Thatcherite dinosaurs, Lord Tebbit, when he declared that gays should not be ministers for security reasons. They might, he suggested, "do each other favours". Which implied that only eunuchs could serve in government.

But there are limits to gay equality in Britain. The normally liberal Guardian did not hesitate to publish salacious extracts from the police report on Davies's adventures on Clapham Common. Tony Blair invoked his Christian values to justify equalising the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual acts but the proposed legislation was stymied by the old men and women in the Lords.

More colourful is the case of Peter Tatchell, the leader of Outrage! This year, Tatchell disrupted the Easter sermon of the Archbishop of Canterbury to protest against the Church's disapproval of gay sex. On 30 November, Tatchell will be prosecuted for "indecent behaviour in a Church", under Section 2 of the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860 (formerly part of the Brawling Act 1551). While Tatchell is on the verge of becoming another gay martyr, his comrades in Outrage! continue their struggle against "hypocrisy", challenging homophobic MPs to take an "arousal test" and through its "Queer Intelligence Service" outing such esteemed clerics as the Bishop of London and the Vatican's very own Cardinal Ratzinger. Outrage! are also alarmed by the rise in Britain of Islamic fundamentalism and the robustly anti-gay line it takes.

All of which would bring a smug smile to the face of Edith Cresson and the supposedly "unrepressed" French. But across the Channel, private life is also causing political turmoil. Proposed legislation to give gay couples limited rights in the domains of tax and welfare have foundered on opposition from the Right and the Catholic Church while the Socialist establishment is blushing at revelations about their former foreign minister, Roland Dumas. According to a new book, Whore of the Republic, Dumas was for years provided with the company of a mistress paid for by the oil company Elf-Aquitaine, which -- surprise, surprise -- has special interests in France's ex-colonies.