The Spectator's Notes | 7 February 2013

It was rude and impolitic of David Cameron not to sit in on the parliamentary debate on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. The whole thing was his idea and would not have come to Parliament without his insistence. Of all his measures so far, it is the one that has caused greatest grief to his backbenchers. Yet he did not come to hear their views. His absence has a symbolic significance. It embodies the fact that social conservatism is felt by somewhere between 30 and 70 per cent of the population on most subjects, and yet has no representatives among the leaderships of any of the three main parties. I don’t think this has ever happened before in our history (unless it be in the Heath/Wilson era). It is a momentous disfranchisement.

If homosexual marriage becomes law, what will come next? I would guess polygamy. The only moral obstacle to polygamy in the eyes of the zealots for same-sex marriage is that it offends against their obsession with equality. Muslims, the most important believers in polygamy, hold that a man may have up to four wives, but not the other way round. Surely there is room for compromise here. If the marriage law were amended so that women and men could take equal numbers of husbands or wives (and, of course, for we must be equal in all things, that gay people could also marry polygamously), Muslims would not like this permission to women, but they could safely ignore it. Their men could take their four wives, their women would not dare take four husbands and what the infidels got up would be no concern of theirs. A very modern deal would have been struck between the ultra-liberals and the ethnic-minority reactionaries, with only stodgy old monogamists failing to ‘move on’.