Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to look at what really happened at the Lambeth Conference, rather than what we were told happened. And there is convincing evidence that the rumour of a conspiracy by US evangelical churches to manipulate the agenda, and buy the voices of bishops from the developing world, has substance.

Ian T Douglas, the Associate Professor of World Mission and Global Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass, has followed the process in some detail, and published his findings in the May edition of the US religious magazine, The Witness. It is a complex story, but also an object lesson in the way that US fundamentalists are conspiring to undermine everything that gay people have achieved in the past 20 years.

It began some five years ago, when concern was growing within Western Anglican circles that churches in the Southern hemisphere were not having a proportionate say in the development of the Anglican Communion. And so, a meeting, specifically for churches from the Third World, entitled the “South-to-South Conference of Anglicans”, was held in Kenya in 1994.

It was successful, and a further encounter was proposed for Kuala Lumpur in 1997. This was planned in North Carolina in 1995, at a conference called G-CODE 2000.

Ian T Douglas takes up the story: “Traditionalist Episcopalians in the US who helped fund and organise G-CODE 2000 began to appreciate the possibility of recruiting Third World church leaders to their position [on moral and sexual issues]. Specifically, William Atwood, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Dallas, a member of the G-CODE 2000 planning group and a donor to the conference, saw the gathering as a catalyst for his Ekklesia Society.

“Ekklesia was designed as an international network of Anglicans committed to ‘counteracting the negative impact of revisionist teaching which seeks to undermine the historic faith of the Bible and the’ Creeds’, and affiliated to the conservative American Anglican Council (AAC).”

The leadership of the emerging AAC was also involved, as was the Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. And after the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, it emerged that the Episcopal Church had supported the gathering to the tune of $10,000.

The planners saw the choice of the Kuala Lumpur encounter’s theme, “The Place of Scripture in the Life and Mission of the Church in the 21st Century”, as the perfect means of chastising those in the West who take a pro-gay and lesbian stance. And it was thus no surprise that the ‘Second Trumpet from the South’, the report from the Kuala Lumpur meeting, should contain a statement in line with traditional standards of human sexuality.

The report, however, included little overt criticism of the West’s supposed “errant position” on homosexuality. It was mostly about the “crippling effects of international debt” and called on Western churches to put pressure on the international banking system to relieve it. The word ‘homosexuality’ occurs only once, but US evangelical spin doctors quickly set about making this the most prominent feature, turning it into “The Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality”.

“Armed with the new abbreviated statement,” writes Ian T. Douglas, “traditionalists in the US were quick to use the voices of sisters and brothers in the South to advance their own aims. Conservative media soon misrepresented Kuala Lumpur as an authoritative, unanimous statement from all of the bishops in the Third World chastising the church in the US for ordination of gay and lesbian people and the blessing of same-sex unions.

“Because so many people in the Episcopalian Church, USA, are ill-informed and uneducated as to the realities [of Anglican politics]… such misinformation about the Second Anglican Encounter in the South was not challenged as to its truthfulness or its completeness. The fact that at least one participant at Kuala Lumpur— an archbishop, no less — spoke forcefully against the report’s statement on human sexuality was never mentioned in the press.”

As Mr Douglas puts it: “The sins of the new colonialism are not so much in the funding of the Second Encounter in the South, but rather in the West’s misuse of one article from the encounter report to fuel debates over sexuality in our own context.”

Soon after this, the Ekklesia Society organised another conference, in Dallas. Privately, the conservatives drafted a statement confirming what had been said in Kuala Lumpur on human sexuality. Ian T Douglas says: “What these drafters had not bargained for was that the Third World bishops, who were enjoying a free trip to the USA at the expense of the Ekklesia Society, had more pressing concerns than the West’s hang-up on sex, namely the sinfulness of Western capitalism… In a classic case of money for sex, the bishops from the Southern hemisphere traded their concern about international debt relief for the Americans’ statement regarding traditional ‘biblical’ norms of sexuality.

“What ensued was ‘The Dallas Statement’ linking the traditionalist agenda on human sexuality with the call for debt relief in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific. What many fail to realise, however, is that many of the African bishops who signed the ‘Dallas Statement’ embracing ‘biblical’ standards on human sexuality had been the key advocates at [the previous] 1988 Lambeth conference for a more accepting position on polygamy!”

As the Lambeth Conference approached, a group of US Episcopalian priests known as “First Promise” signatories, along with others in the American Anglican Council, gave $50,000 so that the bishops in the provinces of Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, the Sudan and Tanzania could meet ahead of the Conference and plan tactics. They certainly got value for money. When the sexuality debate arrived, the African bishops spoke out in immoderate, one could almost say hateful, terms about homosexuals.

The Sunday Times then revealed that the AAC had been present at the Lambeth Conference, beavering away behind the scenes to ensure that they got the result they wanted — a vote reaffirming biblical opposition to homosexuality. Led by James Stanton, bishop of Dallas, the AAC gave pagers and mobile phones to bishops who were sympathetic to their cause. They could then call the AAC’s central HQ, which was based in a Franciscan Study Centre not far from the conference centre. There, 30 carefully trained volunteers provided points of instant rebuttal for use in the debate.

The Sunday Times said: “During the preparation of the resolutions, the American lobbyists were supplying bishops with arguments and powerful explanatory material to aid their case. In one preliminary discussion, a liberal bishop argued that homosexual orientation was something people were born with. As such, it must have been intended by God and was not, therefore, unnatural. Immediately, AAC researchers produced ‘medical evidence’ to show that people’s sexual orientation could be changed.”

Other right-wing American groups supplied traditionalist bishops with controversial pamphlets, one of which described homosexual sex acts in what was termed “pornographic detail, designed to make the flesh creep”.

Even The Church Times conceded in an editorial that: “For once, the conspiracy theorists are right. A close relationship had been forged before the Conference between bishops in Africa, Asia and Latin America and conservative bishops in the US… As for the further charge that the Americans had bought the Southern vote, there appeared to be a grain of truth in this, too. Though no cash changed hands at the Conference, as far as could be seen, the southern American states have offered to replace any money lent by the official Anglican bodies… There is a sense, then, that this Lambeth Conference was dominated by the internal politics of the American Church.”

We should not underestimate the far-reaching tentacles of US fundamentalists. Their influence is not restricted to the US. It is here and it is hidden, but there is now enough evidence of their activities to show that such thinking is not mere paranoia, and that there is genuine cause for concern.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Horrendous news! The Daily Mail, possibly the world’s vilest newspaper, now has Britain’s second-largest circulation, having overtaken The Mirror. Only The Sun now sells more.

In The Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead decided that the readership of The Daily Mail is mainly made up of Middle Englanders. She wrote: “Middle England has many sound virtues, but in my experience, tolerance is rarely amongst them. That is why it reads The Daily Mail.”

She goes on to say that Middle England will only accept those who play by its own rules. So “it’s OK to be gay, so long as you are in a stable relationship and do not pierce your penis. It’s OK to be black so long as you speak proper English and like Stevie Wonder. It’s OK to care about the environment as long as you buy your toiletries from the Body Shop, rather than live in a tree.”

She says that Middle Englanders have “imagination failure”. They are incapable of understanding why anyone would not want what they want.

Proof of this “imagination failure” in Middle Englanders came in The Daily Mail’s reporting of the story of a young Romanian man who has been given asylum in this country because of the persecution he would face if he returned to his native land. It demonstrated not only a lack of empathy, but a complete inability to show any human warmth or sympathy for people outside the magic, middle-class circle.

The man in question was 28-year-old Sorin Mihai, who was granted asylum by the Home Office because it believed that to deport him back to his own country would lead to him being persecuted because of his sexuality.

The Daily Mail didn’t like that at all. It has been agitating about Britain being “over- run” by foreigners for some time now, much as it did in the 1950s. In the first report on the subject, the paper enlisted MP Julian Brazier, chairman of the Conservative Family Campaign, to say: “We can offer people safe haven for being in a persecuted ethnic group or for political beliefs. I don’t think they should be offered asylum because they want to be practising homosexuals.”

Mr Mihai left Romania in 1994, at a time when same-sex relationships were totally against the law there. He says he received death threats, hate mail, and was spat at by his neighbours and arrested and assaulted by police. His family has disowned him.

A Home Office spokesperson refused to comment on individual cases, but told The Daily Mail: “A homosexual claiming persecution would have to come from a country where persecution is systematic or almost government-sponsored.”

Well, that’s Romania to a T.

Under intense pressure from the west, Romania recently changed its Draconian law, which gave almost automatic five-year prison sentences to gay people caught having sex. Now, with an age of consent of 18, gay sex is “legal” so long as it isn’t in public and doesn’t cause a “public scandal”.

The term “public scandal” can mean, of course, whatever the authorities want it to mean. If neighbours don’t like you, or if somebody wants revenge on you, they report you to the police, and “a public scandal” ensues. Then you can be sent to prison for five years.

In its report, Breaking the. Silence, Amnesty International said that torture and ill-treatment of gay people were common in Romania until quite recently. They report one victim of the regime, named loan, as saying: “I was sentenced to five years because of my homosexuality. It is terrible in jail. We were treated as if we were the most serious criminals. Everyone was treated better than homosexuals. When I was arrested, the police beat me and tortured me. In jail the torture continued, physically and emotionally. It was terrible. Even the neighbours inform the police. The police know everything about everyone.”

In another case, Doru Marian Beldie was arrested in Bucharest for a homosexual offence and was beaten by the police with truncheons on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet for several hours to make him sign a confession. He was sentenced to four and a half years.

The Daily Mail appears indifferent to this, and took up the story again on September 14th. The paper claimed that the capital city of Romania, Bucharest, has a “thriving gay scene”. It quotes Bogdan Honciuc of Accept, the gay rights group in Bucharest, as saying: “I am not saying that Romania is gay heaven but it is not gay hell either. Sorin can come home and relax… he is exaggerating a great deal if he says that he would be arrested. To say his life is in danger is not true. We can live here.”

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail’s reporter took a drive around what he called Bucharest’s “gay quarter”. There are two bars within 200 yards of each other — the Sherlock Holmes and the BU, which is a converted public lavatory. Also, there is cruising in the Opera Park nearby. This is The Mail’s idea of “a thriving gay scene”.

Mark Watson, Stonewall’s spokesman on immigration, confirms that there has been a slight improvement in Romania, but it is far from satisfactory, and pressure continues to be applied from the rest of Europe.

With typical spite, the paper seemed determined to have Sorin’s asylum rescinded and to have him sent back. It managed to get a Home Office spokesperson to say: “If evidence was produced to show deception had been used, then a case might be looked at again.”

So, with this case, The Daily Mail demonstrates what Middle England is: petty-minded, tight-arsed and (like Sorin’s squealing Romanian neighbours) routinely spiteful and malicious. Nothing gives The Mail a warmer glow than grassing up those it doesn’t like.

Matthew Norman, in The London Evening Standard, sent the whole thing up when he wrote “The granting of asylum to Sorin Mihai is shocking common sense and humanity from the Home Office… has this Government no respect for our country’s most cherished traditions at all?”

And before The Daily Mail pursues its hate campaign against refugees, it should take note of the case of Mariana Cetiner, who was given a three-year prison sentence in 1995 for alleged lesbian activity. While in prison she was ill-treated and beaten. She was released on an amnesty after serving 751 days of her sentence, and is now reported to have been granted asylum in Germany. There, the leading objectors to refugees and asylum-seekers are the neo-Nazis.

Maybe The Daily Mail should note the company it is keeping.

***

It would be unthinkable these days for any Prime Minister to be unmarried, and yet Edward Heath has managed to get through a long political career without much probing into the question: “How come you haven’t got a wife, Ted?”

Recent appearances in public do not give the impression that Mr Heath is any longer a passionate man. He sits there like a Madame Tussaud copy of himself, his face fixed and expressionless, his demeanour uncommunicative.

And yet there is one great rage in his life that we all know about — his seething hatred of Mrs Thatcher. His loathing for the now-shrivelled handbag-swinger is operatic in scale, and shows no sign of dwindling. So the great mandarin does have some feeling under that inscrutable exterior, even if it is malevolent.

His aversion to Mrs Thatcher is understandable, and shared by about 95 per cent of the population, but does it tell us anything about his feelings for women in general? The publication of his autobiography, and a television programme made to coincide with it, at last gave the newspapers legitimate cause to speculate.

The Times revealed that “A plot by Tory elders to bump Sir Edward Heath into ‘an arranged marriage’ with the celebrated concert pianist Dame Maura Lympany, while he was in office, is unmasked today.”

Apparently, the ludicrously-named Sir Tufton Beamish, who was a member of the powerful 1922 Committee of Tories, was “worried about Sir Edward’s bachelor status”. He approached Maura Lympany and said to her: “Maura, Ted must get married. Will you marry him?” She replied that if Mr Heath asked her personally, she would give the proposal serious consideration. Somehow, Ted didn’t quite get round to popping the question, and so Maura was spared the need to make the ultimate sacrifice.

In his recently published memoirs, The Course of My Life (the chapter about Mrs Thatcher is not entitled The Curse of My Life, by the way), he also intimated that he had missed the chance to marry his childhood sweetheart, Kay Raven. In the book, Mr Heath says, mysteriously, that he “knew her in so many different ways”. When she married someone else, he says, he was disappointed. “Maybe I took too much for granted,” he writes. What can it all mean?

In The Evening Standard, Andrew Billen tried to get a little further with the enigma and asked Heath whether he still gets annoyed when people ask why he never married. “I can’t stop them,” he replied, “but the TV programme was very silly. There were so many other things that we could have put into that programme. I spent 15 hours with them altogether. They became obsessed with it. I think there are a lot of things they simply don’t understand, so they can’t ask about.”

One of the things I don’t understand is that quote. What the hell does it mean? But it seems to have satisfied Andrew Billen, who wrote: “The question as to whether, despite his celibacy, Heath inclined to homosexuality, is put to rest in his memoirs by a pointed reference to a school trip to the Paris opera, during which he was distracted by ‘a delightful, fair-haired young lady’ whose shoulder straps ‘repeatedly slipped down in a most revealing fashion’.”

Meanwhile in his indiscreet diaries, serialised in The Sunday Times, we are told that the late Sir Woodrow Wyatt (who mixed only in the most exalted circles) was once at dinner with the Queen Mother when the topic turned to an artist they both knew who was unmarried and probably homosexual. “Do you think that’s true?” asks the old dear, “Lots of people say that about people who don’t get married but it isn’t always true.”

“No,” says Woodrow, “it isn’t true of Ted Heath.”

Unfortunately, he doesn’t expand on this remark, which is a shame but later on he does acknowledge that Mr Heath “doesn’t like women”. (Mr Wyatt also relates that Harold Macmillan, another Tory Prime Minister, was expelled from Eton for buggery, but that is by the by.)

Many readers will be saying: what does it matter whether Ted Heath is gay, straight or indifferent? Whose business is it, except Mr Heath’s?

Actually, it’s relevant to all of us. The reason that unmarried people are effectively debarred from the office of Prime Minister is because the political establishment does not want to risk the country being run by a homosexual. Unless we are prepared to lie, we can never attain the highest office in the land. Mr Heath, if he is gay, does us no service by keeping quiet about it.

It needs to be recorded that a gay person can hold the office of Prime Minister, and can hold it successfully.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

It began quietly enough with The Daily Mail carrying a non-judgmental — even friendly — Hello!-style interview with the Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, and his lover, Dorian Jabri. “Being gay is simply one aspect of my life,” said Mr Smith.

This would have been remarkable enough in its own right, given the vicious anti-gay rhetoric with which the Mail usually fills its news columns, but, even as we were reading it, Ron Davies, the Welsh Secretary, was at Downing Street having his now-infamous meeting with the Prime Minister, tendering his resignation over his “serious lapse of judgment”.

Nice Mr Smith and his non-threatening partner were suddenly elbowed aside in favour of dirty Mr Davies and his visit to Gobbler’s Gulch, the fellator’s paradise on Clapham Common.

What followed was not only a grotesquely humiliating ten days for Mr Davies, but what Matthew Norman of the London Evening Standard called “one of the more spectacular news-management cock-ups of recent years”.

But Mr Davies and the Government have no one to blame but themselves for the scale of the explosion. Evasions and waffling simply spurred the tabloid press into a frenzy.

New Labour’s legendary media manipulation skills suddenly deserted them. “We don’t know any more than you do,” said Alistair Campbell to mystified journalists at the press briefing. This, too, turned out to be untrue, and Mr Blair paid the price by having the story extended for three more days and being subjected to accusations of lying. “Downing Street admitted yesterday that it did know about the background to the incident on Clapham Common before Ron Davies arrived at Number 10 to offer his resignation,” reported The Independent (and every other newspaper)

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. And oh what pleasure and profit the tabloids gain from unweaving that web.

But Mr Davies’ personal tragedy suddenly became something more significant for all gay people. It unleashed once more the kind of press hysteria about homosexuality that erupts periodically in this country. This time it was slightly different. The Sun even assured us, in an extraordinary editorial, that the days of gay-bashing were over as far as it was concerned and that so long as you behaved yourself, it was OK to be gay.

Only an idiot would believe such an assurance from The Sun. On the same day that it declared a truce on gay-baiting, it carried a grossly homophobic rant from Richard Littlejohn.

But this was only the start. Just as the hysteria was beginning to abate, Mr Davies went to the House of Commons to give a personal statement aimed at halting the speculation about his private life. “We are what we are,” he said, paraphrasing the famous gay anthem (in the same way that Chris Smith oncedidin the House of Commons.)

But having failed to say what it is he is, he left everyone even more baffled. Worse still, he made the fatal mistake of blaming the media for his troubles. When will politicians ever learn?

Every aspect of Mr Davies private life has now been picked over in great detail, even the parts he thought no-one had seen (his many cottaging partners were paraded to tell their tales of fellatio on the M4 in The News of the World.) His first wife gave a full, frank and unnecessarily detailed account of her ex-husband’s many failings. We are also now aware that Mr Davies is well hung. It all made very sad reading.

But the press wasunrepentant. Don’t blame us for your pain, the said, we didn’t make you suck off those three men and then go looking for another one, who turned out to be a mugger and blackmailer.

The moral of this tale is: if you try to blame the media for your downfall, even if it is their fault (and in Mr Davie’s case, it wasn’t), they’ll rub your face in it.

There are sub-plots to this drama, perhaps the most entertaining being the resurrection of the outing issue. Just for the duration of Peter Tatchell’s absence in America,The Times columnist and former MP Matthew Parris, was presented as the chief promoter of outing after he asserted on Newsnight that the Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson is gay. No-one would have taken any notice if Jeremy Paxman hadn’t had a fit of the vapours over it.

Shrugging off suggestions that he was “sad and bitter”, Parris revelled in his new-found notoriety, writing self-justifying articles here, there and everywhere, insisting that there had been no malicious intention in his actions, he just assumed that everybody knew about Mandelson and that it wasn’t a secret.

There then followed another media spree, as the same mistake that Ron Davies had made was repeated by the high-ups at the BBC. Whereas Ron Davies had tried to stop revelations about his private life by obfuscating, the BBC tried to stop the Mandelson rumour by banning all mention of it.

In both instances, the result was to inflate interest to epic proportions. The ban lead to Alice in Wonderland style convolutions, such as the BBC newspaper review having to tell listeners that the papers were reporting the BBC ban on mentioning Peter Mandelson’s homosexuality – even though they were forbidden to do so on air. The panel on the BBC’s satirical programme Have I Got News for You talked of nothing else.

The press commentators then had a field day moralising once more on the rights and wrongs of outing. Stephen Glover in The Daily Mail began his ruminations by saying what just about everybody else said: “It’s none of my business”, but then went on at length about why Mandelson is so reluctant to come out. “One might say that there are Labour voters in Hartlepool [Note: Peter Mandelson’s constituency] and in the nation at large, who would rather Mr Mandelson were not a homosexual. I suspect that there are quite a lot of such people, and believe that Mr Mandelson suspects so too. Why does he not admit his homosexuality? Because he believes it might do him political harm. He understands that many people don’t accept a moral equivalence between heterosexuality and homosexuality. If he were a heterosexual, he would not refuse to talk about it.”

Mr Mandelson’s local paper The Hartlepool Mail, gave lie to that theory by conducting a poll which showed that 94 per cent of his constituents were indifferent to his sexual orientation. (The same thing happened in Ron Davies’s constituency. According to The Sunday Times, “Over 1000 letters of support have flooded into his constituency office… Last week a petition was organised calling for the disgraced Cabinet Minister to remain as an MP. In 90 minutes on a wet and windy Thursday morning in Caerphilly, more than 500 people queued in the main shopping precinct to sign the form.”)

George Walden in the London Evening Standard argued that Mandelson was under attack on all fronts – from the “Stalinists” in the gay community who want everybody out, whatever the cost, and both right and left of the straight community.

I said in Mediawatch in March that it was “only a matter of time before the tabloid hacks go for Mandelson’s sexuality in a big way.” Courtesy of Mr Parris, that time has come, and there can be few people in the country who are not now aware of Pete Mandelson’s sexual orientation, so why doesn’t he do himself — and the rest of us — a favour and stop this undignified spectacle once and for all?

Until he does, his tabloid tormentors will ensure that this story follows him around like a smelly fart. If he has any boyfriends, past or present, Peter can expect to read all about them one day on the front page of the newly “sympathetic” Sun.

This advice is not given in the spirit of “gay Stalinism”, it is sheer pragmatism. The muck-raking (or truth-telling) has started already in a minor kind of way in The Sunday Express, which carried an article headed “Brazilian student who is Mandelson’s close friend” — an innuendo-packed classic which suggested that Mandelson had some kind of “intimate” friendship with a young male student. A spokesman for Mr Mandelson apparently confirmed that the two were not “an item”, but the suggestion was clear — at some point they had been an item.

Mandy Mandelson is reportedly furious about all this. He has been sending his vituperative, threatening letters to all and sundry, according to Alan Watkins in The Independent on Sunday, and Watkins even claimed that Mandelson had demanded the BBC ban, which was ostensibly issued by Ann Sloman.

“At first it was thought that Ms Sloman acted entirely on her own initiative,” says Alan Watkins. “Now it is being claimed that her instruction flowed from a telephone call from Mr Mandelson to Sir Christopher Bland, the BBC chairman.” Why should Peter Mandelson have such power and influence? How did an MP for a small, northern, industrial community get the clout to demand —and get — a BBC black-out on comment on his personal life?

Mandelson continues to keep his silence in public, insisting that his private life is his own business and nobody else’s. Behind the scenes, he berates his influential friends into conspiring with him to keep his closet door locked.

But is he justified in this stance?

I think not, and for two reasons. The first was nicely expressed by the new Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Revd James Jones, in an article in The News of the World. “Some people in public life think…what they do in private is none of anybody else’s business. But when people stand for election for public office, they are asking the voters to put their trust in them. Therefore, the character and trustworthiness of the person is a legitimate issue of public interest.”

This is the first (and probably the last) time I will ever agree with anything this nauseating right-wing clergyman says, but he’s spot-on in this instance. If Ron Davies, Peter Mandelson and, later, Nick Brown hadn’t been in the closet in the first place, these humiliations wouldn’t have happened to them or their party. All of them (and every other closet case in Parliament) have based their career on passing for straight, in other words on being dishonest with the people who elected them.

We are entitled to our privacy, they cry. Of course they are — but what exactly constitutes privacy in these cases? Does Tony Blair keep his sexuality “private”? Does he shag Cherie in a darkened room and then lock her away in the attic, hoping that she will never get out to sell her story to The News of the World? Did William Hague attempt to marry Ffion in private, away from the cruel gaze of Fleet Street? Did I just imagine reading about what a great time they’d had on their honeymoon? Is such stuff regarded as “private” for straight politicians? And, if Mr Blair doesn’t want us to know about the sexuality of his political colleagues, would he please stop walking around hand in hand with his wife and showing off his children, which must have been conceived in some sexual way — unless there was divine intervention.

Such ideas are ridiculous. But this is what Peter Mandelson and co are claiming should be private for them. Just the mere fact of their having a sexual impulse of any description is suddenly off-limits. Nobody is asking Robin Cook whether he likes to do it doggy-fashion with Gaynor, or whether she gives head. That, in my book, is private. Anybody should be able to close their bedroom door and be sure that, so long as what they are doing is legal, no paparazzi are peeping through the keyhole. But the mere fact of a person’s sexual orientation is not a scandal. It isn’t for heterosexuals, anyway, and it shouldn’t be for homosexuals. Indeed, for Chris Smith and Dorian Jabri, it isn’t. They are gay, they are happy with us knowing they are gay, and we are happy to leave it there. Nobody, not even The News of the World, follows them into their boudoir to check out precisely what it is they do in there.

This leads me to my second objection. By keeping their sexuality under wraps (and I’m talking about the fact of their sexual orientation, not the details of their sex life), Mandelson and other closet cases in public life are giving out the clear message that they are ashamed of what they are, that homosexuality is something to be kept secret (not private, secret), something unsavoury and disgusting. What kind of message is that for the rest of us, and for those “ordinary people” struggling with their own personal coming-out dilemmas? Peter Mandelson may say that he owes nothing to any other gay person. This is not true, and I know he knows it.

So, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t mind that people know about Ron Davies’s sexual orientation, or Peter Mandelson’s or Nick Brown’s, although I do despise the brutality and hypocritical self-righteousness of the tabloid outers. I’m just sorry that we had to be given so much sordid detail about Mr Davies’s activities.

Peter Mandelson can save himself from similar “exposure” by simply having the guts to say those three simple words: “Yes, I’m gay”. There’s no invasion of privacy there.

Although Matthew Parris was branded witch-finder general for his Newsnight performance, it is still the newspapers who are the chief outers. Tom Cruise and his wife Nicole Kidman won a huge libel pay-out from The Express after it stated that they were both gay and that their marriage was just a sham to protect their careers. Rosie Boycott, who was appointed editor after the articles appeared, then wrote: “As new editor of the Express titles (daily and Sunday), I would like to reassure you that I would not have published the articles.”

Which sounds OK, until you look at The Sunday Express the following day and see the article about Peter Mandelson and the student, which I’ve already alluded to, and which, according to The Guardian, was obtained by deception. We are entitled to expect more consistency from an editor who flaunts her ethical superiority.

And Nick Brown’s outing was not by Peter Tatchell or Matthew Parris, it was — if you look at the facts in a particular way — by Tony Blair.

The story goes that The News of the World was approached by a past boyfriend of Nick Brown’s anxious to sell them lurid tales of paid-for sex. The News of the World were unable to stand these stories up and so didn’t carry them. After the Davies and Mandelson debacle, the man went again to The News of the World and still the paper couldn’t find any evidence to back up what he said, so they went to Downing Street and told the Prime Minister what had happened.

Mr Blair then persuaded Nick Brown to make a statement admitting he was gay. This then became the story. The News of the World were just reporting the statement, see? They had no intention of outing Mr Brown on the say-so of the boyfriend.

Nick Brown was well-known as a gay man in Westminster (he has even been quoted, indirectly, in political news stories in Gay Times). Once again he asked for, and got, the collusion of his colleagues in keeping it private (i.e. secret). Now he’s paid the price.

Perhaps New Labour should take a leaf out of the New Conservatives’ book. According to The Sunday Express, the Tories are now actively encouraging gays to put themselves forward to local Tory constituency parties as potential parliamentary candidates. The Conservative Chief Executive, Archie Norman, has issued guidelines to local branches saying he wants to encourage more gays, blacks and women to be selected. “We want to choose candidates on their ability, irrespective of whether they are lesbian or gay… People have to be braver about it.” Wise words, indeed.

But both Ron Davies and Nick Brown can take heart from historical precedent. If we look back at previous “gay scandals” in the recent past, we see that, although it seems like the end of the world at the time, it seldom has lasting consequences. Indeed, it can sometimes enhance a career.

George Michael has a big new hit album on his hands since his cottaging conviction. And despite a prolonged and painful outing process, Michael Barrymore has just received the award for most popular entertainer for the fourth successive time. Both have been through similar tabloid beatings. They learned the hard way that there is a difference between privacy and secrecy, and in the end they triumphed by embracing two simple qualities: courage and honesty.

• STOP PRESS: The Sun has announced (November 12th) that it will no longer “reveal the sexuality of any gays — men or women — unless we believe it can be defended on the grounds of overwhelming public interest.” The paper’s editor David Yelland, also revealed that he had sacked gay columnist Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP. Following his dismissal, Mr Parris questioned whether The Sun’s new liberal line would hold next time MPs debate the gay age of consent. “Then MPs’ private lives will be seen as a matter of public interest,” he told The Guardian.