Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The truth about life as a gay Tory MP

Chris Pincher (Photo: Parliament UK)

Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a dressing-gown ‘like a pound shop Harvey Weinstein, with his chest and belly hanging out’ to massage the neck of an Olympic rower?

Such are the allegations. ‘What,’ you may think, ‘is the world coming to? It was never like this in my day!’

How wrong you’d be. It was very much like this in the 20th century. There is in fact something tragically old-fashioned about the whole story. This is how it used to be for many when I was an MP, and there were dozens of other gay Tories at Westminster, and nothing was said, and everything was steeped in alcohol, and little was off-limits so long as it could be denied, and sex was quick, loveless and panicky. Just ask some of the Commons catering staff at the time.

Chris Pincher MP is not some herald of a dystopian future of sexual abandon and shameless abuse: instead the picture is of a sad fiftysomething throwback to the 1980s when Mr Pincher turned 20 and the Metropolitan Police haunted London pubs as agents provocateurs trying to catch gay men smiling too insistently in the lavatories so they could be charged with ‘importuning’. Or hanging around by night in parks and on commons where sex was fast and furtive and – almost literally – on the run. There was so little opportunity to make proper friendships; and an enduring homosexual relationship, if you dared be open, condemned you to disqualification from politics, from advancement in most professions and from much of the public sector and the business world.

In a part of your life you were a kind of outlaw. Recreation was to be found drinking in the places the other outlaws all knew too.

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