Four weeks ago, I made one of the toughest decisions of my life. Ever since I was a child I’ve known I was different but I’ve done my best to conceal that fact. For most of my adult life I’ve pretended to be ‘normal’ and my late mother, God bless her, went to her grave without knowing the truth. But I cannot continue to live a lie. At the beginning of the election campaign I finally came out. Ladies and gentleman, I am a Tory.
Not surprisingly, many of my friends said they already knew this. Indeed, they claimed to be amused to discover I was under the impression that I had successfully concealed it from them. As one of them put it, the closet I was in had a glass door. ‘Surely, no one is shocked by the news?’ asked a Facebook friend.
But some have not been so understanding. As someone put it on Twitter: ‘Trying really hard to differentiate Toby Young, writer and general witty guy, and Toby Young, Tory twat.’ One friend told me that several of our mutual acquaintances are deeply shocked, particularly as my late father was the author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto. ‘What would Michael have thought?’ is a common refrain. There is a suggestion that by coming out I haven’t just embarrassed myself, I’ve brought shame on my family.
Naturally, my reaction to this is one of anger — anger with myself for not having been more honest about the way I am. By remaining closeted for so long I have been tacitly accepting that society is right to disapprove of people like me. After all, if I didn’t think that being blue was something to be ashamed of, why keep quiet about it? By pretending to be ‘normal’, not only did I fail to confront society’s prejudice, but I was making life harder for those of a similar disposition.
I undoubtedly feel a lot better for having finally come clean and the question is whether I should help others make the same step. Is there a case for ‘outing’ closeted Tories?
The danger, of course, is that you might get it wrong. So far, I’ve only ‘outed’ one person — the Blairite journalist David Aaronovitch. A couple of weeks ago we were both appearing on The Review Show on BBC2 and we had a political discussion beforehand which left me with the impression he was going to vote Conservative. Later, during the live television broadcast, he made a dismissive remark about the fact that I was a Tory and I immediately retaliated by ‘outing’ him. In fact, he’s a staunch Labour supporter and he has subsequently informed me that my revelation had caused him no end of difficulties.
Another, less controversial practice we could import from the States is the coming-out party. When I lived in New York in the mid-1990s a fellow journalist had one of these. I gave him a copy of The Wizard of Oz on DVD, while someone else presented him with the complete works of Barbra Streisand. Another friend even baked him a pink cake.
So what would you give a formerly closeted Conservative at his coming-out party? A bust of Wellington? The complete works of Ayn Rand? A ten-bird roast? My own preference would be for a signed copy of Maurice Cowling’s Conservative Essays.
The fact that there are still so many Tories out there who haven’t dared come clean about what they really are is testimony to the fact that David Cameron hasn’t quite succeeded in decontaminating the Conservative brand. Historically, the opinion polls have underestimated support for the Tories because members of the public are often too embarrassed to admit they intend to vote Conservative, and I suspect the same will turn out to be true of this election. The modernisers still have a long way to go before we’re all out and proud.
Rather than exposing closeted Tories, our best hope may be to appeal to people’s courage. I’m reminded of the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, the famous anti-Nazi activist: ‘First they came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.’
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