We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality, as Thomas B. Macaulay, the 1st Baron of Macaulay and Paymaster-General during Queen Victoria’s reign between 1846 and 1848, once wrote.
And this blog nods sagely back through the decades as we read on about the days dealings in gay politics in the United Kingdom.
Follow this, because this is going to read like the script of Soap, and I do mean that seminal 1970s comedy show lampooning the soaps.
As you may be aware, we had a little election this year in which the old regime under Gordon Brown got soundly tossed out in favour of bright new faces in the form of David Cameron and his side-kick Nick Clegg. Hilarity or tragedy ensued, and the characterisation is much dependent on who you ask.
One of the faces, bright and scrubbed, and not having that haggard ‘been-in-office-for-a-while’-look yet, was Mr William Hague, who got the nod to become the Foreign secretary. And as any high rank profile politician he needed his own retinue of advisors.
One of these advisors hired was a Mr Chris Meyers, a 25 year old graduate from Durham County university, with no experience at all in the higher levels of the Conservative Party, or in any workplace at all for that matter. The British tabloid press, in the form of the Daily Mail, hint that there might be a reason for the hiring beyond mere competence.
In other words, “OMG Hague has hired his male lover!!!! xD”. Okay, maybe not expressed like that, in so many words, or in those words at all, but rather through some serious innuendo. Mr Meyers promptly quits, and Mr Hague delivers a tearful denial involving his family and attempts to form that family.
In other words, it has been a few eventful days, particularly in the light if Prison Minister Crispin Blunt’s coming out the other day, and it all leaves this blogger with the question: does it matter at all? Is it a storm in a tea-cup?
The outing mechanism should be used sparingly and with care, and be reserved for cases where you know for certain that a politician is working against gay equality while actually being gay. We don’t know if this is true with Mr. Hague. There are very thin evidence about it, as far as we know.
William Hague certainly fits the criteria for someone that should be outed if he was indeed gay: voting against the repeal of the notorious Section 28, voting against gay adoptions, and so on and so on. If he turns out to actually be gay, then he is certainly fair game. But we don’t know yet.
That hasn’t, of course, stopped the British public – and its medias – from being gripped with one of its fits of morality. And the words of Thomas B. Macaulay floats back to us from the past, as true today as it was when he uttered them. Or to echo the old saying, with its very queer connections: There’s nowt so queer as folk.
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