Scandal ain't what it used to be, and neither are smear campaigns. That which Liam Fox pronounced himself the victim of must be among the strangest in British history, extraordinarily restrained and polite. Because whilst allegations relating to state security must be taken very seriously indeed, everybody knew there was another matter underlying this. Until Chris Bryant's comments in the House about how anybody, even in politics, ought to be allowed a friend, few had even hinted at it.
That matter, of course, is Fox's sexuality. It has been approached with caution for two reasons. Firstly, it's a personal matter. Secondly, the issue here isn't really whom Mr Fox is attracted to per se, but whether or not he was having a romantic relationship with the ubiquitous Mr Werrity. There is a difference between what interests the public and what is genuinely in the public interest. But there are other aspects to Fox's behaviour that make his sexuality acutely relevant to public matters.
Bryant is a politician whom I have always admired for pursuing his profession at a time when it was very difficult to do so as an openly gay person. I dropped out of a promising political career myself because I felt I would simply have no chance in what was then an intensely homophobic media climate, and I know a number of other prominent people - now working in journalism, the civil service or the charity sector - who did likewise. One cannot, then, accord much blame to those who might have chosen to keep their sexuality a secret in order to pursue such careers, especially if, as is bound to be the case for some, they valued their political principles more highly than personal freedom and openness.
There is a danger, however, in having politicians in senior positions who harbour secrets which they dare not see exposed. Fundamental to changing the law on homosexuality in England was the Dirk Bogarde film Victim, which centres on a lawyer who is compromise by blackmail relating to his sexuality. Viewing the film, the public came to understand that not only is homophobia damaging to individuals, a climate of secrecy about such a matter creates dangerous opportunities for extortion. It creates a risk of corruption and, should that apply to a Minister of Defence, the potential dangers to state security could be considerable.
In politics, these risks are managed by a system of vetting whereby individuals working closely with the government are asked about their secrets and vulnerabilities. This does not necessarily apply to ministers, but efforts are made to ensure that those in positions of power cannot be compromised. Additional security was, in recent years, provided by the close relationship between Downing Street and certain media magnates, but now that relationship has started to sour the risks are increasing, as today's sniping at Fox by The Sun reveals.
The Sun story has not gone down as well as its editors might have expected. Aside from a pretty flimsy premise (which suggests there could be no legitimate reasons for secrecy around who visits the Minister of Defence), it has roundly been perceived as homophobic. But whilst attacking Fox over the suspicion of homosexuality is contemptible, there is a legitimate side to journalistic probing in this area. It would be entirely legitimate to attack Fox for hypocrisy.
Those of you who remember the Family Values moral crusading of the Conservative Party in the 'eighties will be familiar with this one. Ultimately, if you are going to condemn others for certain types of behaviour then you had better not be caught doing it yourself. Whether it's having threesomes with other people's wives and daughters or ordering a distraught secret lover to have an abortion, it is not going to advance your political career.
Most of the Conservative Party has moved on from those days, at least when it comes to homosexuality. But Liam Fox has not. Right from the start of his career, when he was involved in student politics at the University of Glasgow, he was spouting exclusionary rhetoric about gay people. Since 1998 he has voted against the liberalisation of laws relating to homosexuality nine times, and has absented himself from such votes a further ten times. This position, increasingly extreme within the context of his party, has endeared him to its right wing, which has been instrumental in advancing his career. To put it bluntly, without the support he bought at the expense of gay people, it is unlikely he would have become Minister of Defence, and he certainly wouldn't have come to be seen (at least until recently) as a strong potential challenger to David Cameron.
Of course, it is quite possible to argue that even if he were gay he might genuinely believe homosexuality to be morally wrong, and may thus have voted in good conscience. Some of his choices, such as voting against measures designed to protect children from homophobic bullying, might still seem harsh, but of course he is entitled to them. What he is not entitled to is the freedom to make those choices on behalf of an electorate which is unaware of the contrast between what he says others should do and what he may in fact be doing himself. To draw a parallel, an MP caught engaging in tax avoidance whilst urging that others be punished for it could not reasonably expect to get an easy ride from the press.
If Fox is in fact gay or bisexual, several concerns arise. He has been exploiting right wing supporters who might never have backed him had they been aware of his behaviour. He has enjoyed the freedom to indulge his own passions whilst seeking to deny that to others. And he has, through his secrecy, potentially put state security at risk. It is often said that the first duty of a government is to protect its people. If the Minister of Defence is compromised, that is no small thing.
There is of course another possibility, which is that Fox may be gay but suffering from internalised homophobia, perhaps in relation to his religious beliefs. But as far as the security issues go, this isn't just about sex, it's about the strength of a particular emotional attachment. Imagine that Mr Werrity were in fact a young woman. The papers then would likely have been even quicker to shout scandal! in relation to all those meetings, as I'm sure Christine Keeler would confirm. And sexual attraction in denial can make emotional influences all the more powerful - there's nothing like the lure of forbidden fruit.
Could it all be nonsense? Could Fox be straight? Of course (and it could be that any corruption he may be involved in is purely mercenary, with no mitigating emotional element). Still, in light of all the revelations over the years preceding this one, it will be difficult for him to convince many people of that. And it is public business, because the consequences of hypocrisy and secrecy could be dire for all of us.
All these matters mean that Fox's position must now be considered untenable. Not only is he a liability as Minister of Defence (his civil service minders must be tearing their remaining hair out trying to work out how to vet his appointments) but it seems likely he will have lost that critical wedge of support that made him a future leadership contender. The game is up. Short of a Portillo-style reinvention, there are few ways forward. Those of us who considered but could not face Bryant's struggle may feel some sympathy, but if this is a tragedy, it is a tragedy of Fox's own making.
Showing posts with label gay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gay. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Sunday, 10 July 2011
The Damage Done
As a journalist, I'm as sorry as anyone to see good people lose their jobs as a result of the closure of the News of the World. But I'm not sorry to see the paper itself go. I hope to see Rebekah Brooks and the Murdochs properly taken to task for what they've done. I hope to see a future which has more room for decent publications that respect their staff and readers alike.
In the meantime, having written about the political implications of the scandal, I feel it's important to address an area that has received too little attention in all of this: the human cost of tabloid journalism.
By 'tabloid journalism' I don't mean everything ever written for a tabloid newspaper. There are good people at most of them, many trying to please their readers whilst pursuing a socially responsible agenda. But we all know that there's another sort of journalist - and editor, and owner - involved in the business too. These are the ones I encounter day to day through my work at Trans Media Watch. They are the ones whose victims come looking for help, with nowhere else to turn. Rarely celebrities. Generally just ordinary people whose private lives have been splashed across the pages in lurid detail, along with photos (often their own, used without permission) to identify them to the neighbours. Often they are subject to outright slander but they lack the financial means to challenge it. Their stories are heartbreaking. Some lose jobs. Some lose their families. Some are assaulted in the street. They are the ones paying the price for the "much loved family newspaper".
I'm lucky. I've never been the victim of a direct attack by a tabloid myself. But then again, I find myself thinking, hasn't their presence indirectly affected my life to a considerable degree?
Let me explain.
I've been passionate about politics from a very early age. At fifteen I was a member of the Labour Party; by seventeen I was on its local housing committee, working to ensure social provision for those facing a financial squeeze under Thatcherism. There wasn't much new blood in the party at that time and I was treated as something of a rising star. I was asked if I would consider getting involved at conference, perhaps addressing the whole party. A promising career beckoned.
I walked away from it for two reasons. The first was the Kinnock purges, which, though I didn't altogether disagree with his intent to reshape the party, created an internal atmosphere in which neighbour spied on neighbour; it was deeply unpleasant to be around. But the second, more pertinent today, was that I'm queer.
I realised that, at that time, it would simply be impossible for me to take on any senior political role without being torn to pieces the moment a tabloid found it convenient to attack my sexuality or gender. This was the 1980s, and I inhabited a landscape full of screaming headlines whipping up panic about how homosexuals might harm our children. They were the same reason I daren't hold a girlfriend's hand in public; the reason I would walk around the block twice to be sure no-one was following me before I entered my favourite bar. The thing was, even if I hadn't been afraid of such an attack on a personal level it would still have ruined me politically; it made the whole thing seem pointless. It was broadly agreed that, for all the gradual legal progress that might be made by gay rights campaigners, nobody would ever accept a queer in office.
I'm not so vain as to expect you to reel in horror at the thought of my lost opportunity (I'm not unhappy with the way things worked out for me in the longer term anyway). What I do want to make clear is the far reaching effect that kind of tabloid intimidation had. It curtailed the ambitions of individuals who weren't even on the papers' radar. How much talent did our country lose access to as a result? How many brilliant people - potential sports stars and entertainers as well as politicians - gave up and chose to live quiet lives underneath the radar, wasting their talent, because of what they very reasonably feared would happen to them otherwise?
That's all in the past, you might say. It's better now. But if you spend as much time watching the tabloids as I do you'll soon see that it's not. The campaigns against gay people are less overtly vicious now and are couched in different terms, but they're still there. Attacks on transsexual people are frequent and often try to paint them as paedophiles or other kinds of sex attacker. There may no longer be ugly headlines about black people but we see plenty about Muslims, Poles and Roma people, often followed by stories which rely heavily on fabrication. Disabled people are frequently portrayed as workshy scroungers regardless of whether they're really incapable of working or, in some cases, they actually are in work. And the attacks on people who simply have the misfortune to grow up poor are horrific. This is an industry built on hate.
Sometimes the tabloids get it wrong, misjudging how much hate their readers will tolerate. Attacking the victims of the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster went too far and cost The Sun the support of a whole city. Jan Moir's Daily Mail piece about Stephen Gately provoked outrage that went far beyond the gay community. Yet day to day, the attacks continue. A Monday afternoon's titillating scandal can ruin the life of a hapless individual who happened to draw the wrong kind of attention. And those who have already been the victims of crimes know that tabloid attention can make it worse, whether they're the targets of phone hacking or rape victims whose experiences have been salaciously detailed opposite page three.
For anybody who has failed to sit up and take notice of this, the way in which the News of the World was willing to treat the families of Milly Dowler, Jessica Chapman and so forth must make a difference now. It must show the contempt in which these newspapers hold those whom they claim to serve. It must, because as a society we simply cannot go on like this. Former News of the World journalists seeking redemption have already discussed several suicides which they believe their stories contributed to. The human cost of this kind of journalism is too high. It is time to stand up, all together, and say that we will not tolerate it any more.
In the meantime, having written about the political implications of the scandal, I feel it's important to address an area that has received too little attention in all of this: the human cost of tabloid journalism.
By 'tabloid journalism' I don't mean everything ever written for a tabloid newspaper. There are good people at most of them, many trying to please their readers whilst pursuing a socially responsible agenda. But we all know that there's another sort of journalist - and editor, and owner - involved in the business too. These are the ones I encounter day to day through my work at Trans Media Watch. They are the ones whose victims come looking for help, with nowhere else to turn. Rarely celebrities. Generally just ordinary people whose private lives have been splashed across the pages in lurid detail, along with photos (often their own, used without permission) to identify them to the neighbours. Often they are subject to outright slander but they lack the financial means to challenge it. Their stories are heartbreaking. Some lose jobs. Some lose their families. Some are assaulted in the street. They are the ones paying the price for the "much loved family newspaper".
I'm lucky. I've never been the victim of a direct attack by a tabloid myself. But then again, I find myself thinking, hasn't their presence indirectly affected my life to a considerable degree?
Let me explain.
I've been passionate about politics from a very early age. At fifteen I was a member of the Labour Party; by seventeen I was on its local housing committee, working to ensure social provision for those facing a financial squeeze under Thatcherism. There wasn't much new blood in the party at that time and I was treated as something of a rising star. I was asked if I would consider getting involved at conference, perhaps addressing the whole party. A promising career beckoned.
I walked away from it for two reasons. The first was the Kinnock purges, which, though I didn't altogether disagree with his intent to reshape the party, created an internal atmosphere in which neighbour spied on neighbour; it was deeply unpleasant to be around. But the second, more pertinent today, was that I'm queer.
I realised that, at that time, it would simply be impossible for me to take on any senior political role without being torn to pieces the moment a tabloid found it convenient to attack my sexuality or gender. This was the 1980s, and I inhabited a landscape full of screaming headlines whipping up panic about how homosexuals might harm our children. They were the same reason I daren't hold a girlfriend's hand in public; the reason I would walk around the block twice to be sure no-one was following me before I entered my favourite bar. The thing was, even if I hadn't been afraid of such an attack on a personal level it would still have ruined me politically; it made the whole thing seem pointless. It was broadly agreed that, for all the gradual legal progress that might be made by gay rights campaigners, nobody would ever accept a queer in office.
I'm not so vain as to expect you to reel in horror at the thought of my lost opportunity (I'm not unhappy with the way things worked out for me in the longer term anyway). What I do want to make clear is the far reaching effect that kind of tabloid intimidation had. It curtailed the ambitions of individuals who weren't even on the papers' radar. How much talent did our country lose access to as a result? How many brilliant people - potential sports stars and entertainers as well as politicians - gave up and chose to live quiet lives underneath the radar, wasting their talent, because of what they very reasonably feared would happen to them otherwise?
That's all in the past, you might say. It's better now. But if you spend as much time watching the tabloids as I do you'll soon see that it's not. The campaigns against gay people are less overtly vicious now and are couched in different terms, but they're still there. Attacks on transsexual people are frequent and often try to paint them as paedophiles or other kinds of sex attacker. There may no longer be ugly headlines about black people but we see plenty about Muslims, Poles and Roma people, often followed by stories which rely heavily on fabrication. Disabled people are frequently portrayed as workshy scroungers regardless of whether they're really incapable of working or, in some cases, they actually are in work. And the attacks on people who simply have the misfortune to grow up poor are horrific. This is an industry built on hate.
Sometimes the tabloids get it wrong, misjudging how much hate their readers will tolerate. Attacking the victims of the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster went too far and cost The Sun the support of a whole city. Jan Moir's Daily Mail piece about Stephen Gately provoked outrage that went far beyond the gay community. Yet day to day, the attacks continue. A Monday afternoon's titillating scandal can ruin the life of a hapless individual who happened to draw the wrong kind of attention. And those who have already been the victims of crimes know that tabloid attention can make it worse, whether they're the targets of phone hacking or rape victims whose experiences have been salaciously detailed opposite page three.
For anybody who has failed to sit up and take notice of this, the way in which the News of the World was willing to treat the families of Milly Dowler, Jessica Chapman and so forth must make a difference now. It must show the contempt in which these newspapers hold those whom they claim to serve. It must, because as a society we simply cannot go on like this. Former News of the World journalists seeking redemption have already discussed several suicides which they believe their stories contributed to. The human cost of this kind of journalism is too high. It is time to stand up, all together, and say that we will not tolerate it any more.
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