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=

Abortion is on the political agenda once more, as is euthanasia, single parenthood, divorce and, of course, homosexuality. It’s rather like reliving the sixties. All we’re short of is a revival of flower power.

Leading hippie this time round is Tony Blair, who heads a government that apparently wants to create a compassionate, progressive society, free from the fetters of that strangling “tradition” that has for so long stifled the lives of so many people.

Even the opposition leadership perceives that this approach could be a winner and has tried to steal a bit of the glory. Mr Hague and Mr Portillo assured us at the Tory conference that their party is now “inclusive” and “tolerant”. According to the new Tory leader, it would be good will to all men and women (straight and gay, married and unmarried) from now on.

They might as well have been talking into thin air as far as their troops were concerned. The legendary blue-rinse brigade sat stony-faced at all this talk of kindness. They hadn’t hauled all the way to Blackpool to hear such lily-livered, pinko sentimentality. Hanging, flogging, castration and bigger, harsher jails — that was what they had come to hear about.

The Independent’s Polly Toynbee went among the Conservative activists during the conference to test their reaction to the change of heart of the leadership. Her observations reinforced the opinion that the soft and cuddly approach of Mr Hague doesn’t find favour with the grass roots.

“Have all those votes for beastliness just evaporated in a new, compassionate, caring, giving Britain?” Ms Toynbee wrote. “Are Blair and Diana-ism really triumphant for ever? Almost certainly not. Or not yet. Most people still read the same beastly newspapers packed full of the same beastly xenophobic views and prejudices. The Mail, Sun and Telegraph have not turned kind and generous overnight. Nor, presumably, have their readers. The beleaguered, ageing rump of the party may look a sorry sight now, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t got their finger on the pulse of the nation’s old mean streak. They are not history, or not quite yet.”

And it is the “traditional” Tories, with their “traditional” family values, that could still pose a serious threat to the progress of gay rights. Even many old-time Labourites are social conservatives. Ask Joe Ashton, MP, who is leading the rebellion within the Labour Party against lowering the age of consent.

He took a Panorama documentary team, who were covering the age of consent debate, to a working men’s club in his Nottinghamshire constituency. There they would hear what “real people” (i.e. those who don’t live in London) had to say. What they had to say were things like “Ninety per cent of them gays want burning. And I mean that, they want burning.”

A poll on Teletext asked viewers: “How should your MP vote on the subject of lowering the age of consent for homosexuals?” Of 2,096 votes, 45 per cent were for the change, but 55 per cent were against. A NOP telephone survey for the aforementioned Panorama programme showed only 35 per cent were in favour with 53 per cent against and the rest unsure.

And it isn’t just the lumpen proletariat who are opposing our progress. The Sunday Telegraph revealed that “William Hague will be backed by no more than a quarter of his shadow cabinet when he votes in favour of lowering the age of consent for homosexuals.” The paper had conducted a survey which showed that “only three of the 18-strong team would vote for a reduced age of consent”.

And when the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd Richard Harries, revealed that he now believes the age of consent for gays should be lowered to 16, The Sun reacted with a large, reversed-out headline saying that he was “Morally Evil”. According to The Daily Mail, the Archbishop of Canterbury was quick to “slap down” the bishop. A spokesman for Lambeth Palace was reported as saying: “The Archbishop has made it clear that he would not support a lowering of the age of consent for homosexual practice and would be worried by the signal that it would send out that homosexual practice is on a par with and equal to heterosexual relationships.”

Yes, the forces of reaction are gathering as never before. They are queuing up to tell Messrs Blair and Hague that their support for homosexual rights will destroy the country. Or even, as George Brown in The Daily Telegraph would have it, “the whole of Western civilisation”.

Mr Hague then took a kicking from the ex-Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits. According to The Express, he said: “I’m saddened that a party that stood like a rock for certain values, family values, should now surrender those for political gains.” He wanted to know also why Tony Blair was bothering with gay rights when “only four per cent” of the population is homosexual. (Can we assume that Lord Jakobovits would not disapprove if restrictions were placed on the practice of Judaism in this country, given that only one per cent of the population is Jewish?)

Then Cardinal Winning, leader of the Scottish Roman Catholics, laid into Tony Blair by saying (on Radio 2 and in The Daily Mail): “Lowering the age of homosexual consent, opening up the idea of gays in the armed forces, giving unmarried and homosexual partners immigration rights does nothing to strengthen the family unit.”

These are influential voices and are only the tip of the iceberg. Those who think the battle is all over bar the shouting may be in for a shock. Or, as Polly Toynbee put it: “The Tory tiger still has teeth. I came [to the Tory conference] to gloat, but I came away chastened, remembering how deep and strong Tory values are, even when the Tory Party is weak. The battle to change Britain has only just begun.”

And meantime, beavering away in the background are right-wing religious pressure groups like Family and Youth Concern (FYC). This group provides much of the information on which papers like The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph base their anti-gay stories. Its spokesperson, Valerie Riches, has taken on the mantle of right-wing rent-a-gob for these papers, after the passing of so many of the Tory backbenchers who used to fulfil that function. FYC’s autumn newsletter (which has been distributed to all MPs and many sympathetic journalists) contains an article by Dr Trevor Stammers, a trustee of the “Family Education Trust” (yet another religio-political propaganda outfit) and “a tutor in general practice at St George’s Hospital Medical School”. He says that “homosexual acts pose much greater risks to health than straight sex.” He then advises us that “about two thirds of male homosexuals have the virus for anal warts.”

Now how does he know this? Given that nobody is actually certain how many homosexuals there are in this country (the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles says one per cent, while Lord Jakobovits says four per cent and the Kinsey Report between five and ten per cent) how can anyone possibly know what percentage of them has the virus for anal warts?

Similarly, Dr Stammers says that 40 per cent of gay men have had “a major depression” compared with three per cent of other men. Apparently 51 per cent of gay men use drugs compared with only seven per cent of men generally. How are these figures arrived at? Or how are they invented?

Although this rather crude propaganda is easily discredited by those with a mind to do it, there can be no doubt that it does have an impact on the people who read it uncritically. Take Sunday Telegraph columnist Minette Marrin, for instance. She falls for Dr Stammers’ bait, hook, line and sinker. In the October 26th edition she quotes all the “statistics” from the FYC newsletter — even the preposterous ones that say that “overall life expectancy of a practising male homosexual is about 30 years less than that of heterosexual men” and “80 per cent of the victims of paedophilia are boys molested by adult males” — without question.

Family and Youth Concern’s “research” — much of which emanates from right-wing religious groups in the USA — provides ready-made ammunition for people like Anne Atkins, the piously dire “agony aunt” of The Daily Telegraph and the over-agitated Tory MP Julian Brazier.

Oh yes, indeed, battles may have been won, but the war for gay equality is far from over.

***

A reader has sent in a clipping from his local free sheet in East London, called “The Yellow Advertiser”. It is a column by Edward Case, which makes the familiar argument against lowering the age of consent. “If Parliament were to pass such legislation, it would be acceptable for a boy still at school to be sodomised yet that same boy would not be allowed to drink in a pub… Teenagers go through a stage of experimentation… Imagine the trauma of someone who was not sure of themselves. It’s common for adolescents to question where they fit in. To push someone, maybe needlessly, into a situation which. could mentally scar them for life, would be catastrophic…” etc. etc.

My correspondent says that if he wanted to read this kind of garbage he would buy The Daily Mail — he certainly doesn’t want it shoved, unsolicited, through his door. “While free papers stick to adverts about double-glazing and car boot sales, they are harmless enough,” he says.

I would have agreed with that, except for the fact that another reader, this time in Cornwall, sent in a full page advertisement which he had clipped from The Cornishman.

The ad was ostensibly for Trago Mills Shopping Centres, but on closer examination it contained not only the price lists for convector heaters and Wilton broadloom, but also an amazing diatribe from someone who is obviously influential in the store’s hierarchy. “The greatest insult to the English language was when ‘gay’, a beautiful word describing our joy and happiness, was adopted by homosexuals and lesbians…” he wrote. “When immature youngsters and innocent children become their prey, there is only one effective answer — castration!”

He continues in the best tradition of the bar room bigot for a quarter of a page, railing not only against Mr Blair and his liberalism but also against the plan to “surrender our precious little country to Hitler’s successors” (or get further involved in Europe, to you and me). There are blasts not only at “revolting perverts” but also foreigners, who are such a threat to our beloved, beset little island of love.

To see such ranting in an advert for a shopping centre comes as something of a shock. Fortunately, as well as complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority (which someone has done), we can vote with our feet on this one.

Trago Mills Regional Shopping Centres are hereby boycotted by this column. I’ll never buy another Swish Curtain Pole from that store until the author of that stupid and impertinent tirade has been crushed to death in the shop’s revolving door. Nothing less would change my mind.

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=

“Is time running out for Peter Mandelson?” This was the strangely prophetic headline over last month’s Mediawatch. Almost as soon as the magazine hit the streets, Mandelson lost his cabinet post although in the end it wasn’t his homosexuality that brought him down but his Hyacinth Bucket-ish social pretensions.

Mr Mandelson’s snobbish desire to boast influential friends and have designer house-fittings for his ever-so-posh Notting Hill abode sat uneasily with his job as MP for Hartlepool, one of the poorest towns in all of Europe. Although Mandy himself appears to have become convinced that his homosexuality was being used against him, at least by The Sun.

The New Statesman’s political editor, Steve Richards, recalled a conversation he had with Mandelson in which he asked the former Secretary for Trade and Industry why he had not expressed more frequently his enthusiasm for the single European currency. Mandy replied: “Every time I do that there’s an attack on Gay Mandelson in The Sun. There’s a correlation between the two, you know.” (For those lucky enough not to be readers, The Sun is fanatically anti-European and ruthlessly rubbishes anyone who doesn’t share its Europhobia.)

Is Mandy being paranoid or has The Sun really been having a go at his gayness because he is pro-European? According to Sarah Shannon in The London Evening Standard: “A glance back over recent months reveals some truth in Mandelson’s assertion. Take his speech to business leaders at the CBI conference at the beginning of November. Mandelson made it clear to his audience that he had his eye on monetary union soon after the next election. Six days later Trevor Kavanagh, [The Sun’s political editor] wrote his infamous piece entitled: ‘How many skeletons are still in the closet? Riddle of Britain’s Gay Mafia.’”

Also, on October 19th, Mandelson was reported to have ridiculed the suggested ban on taxpayers’ money being used to campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum on EMU. Days after there was another rush of gay Mandelson stories in The Sun. Ms Shannon discovered that The Sun has run 30 stories that feature the words ‘Mandelson’ and ‘gay’.

Most of it was his own fault, of course, and Trevor Kavanagh turned the tables on Mandelson by ingenuously suggesting that it isn’t he who is homophobic, but Mandelson who is Sun-phobic.

But, of course, press interest in Mandelson is no confined exclusively to The Sun. The Daily Mirror serialised the forthcoming biography of Mr Mandelson, the one that exposed that notorious loan. The book revealed that Peter had been part of a youth group in the 60s in which a paedophile had been at work. The suggestion was that this man had perhaps included Peter among his victims, although there was no confirmation of this.

One chapter dealt with Mandy’s sexuality, but contained nothing that would be news to regular readers of this column. However, it did contain some interesting comments from his friends. A “gay journalist in Westminster” is quoted as saying “[Mandelson’s] gayness drives his personality. He tries to exploit his sexuality where he can, where he hopes it can curry favour.” Let’s hope Trevor Kavanagh doesn’t read that or he’ll be claiming his gay mafia stories have some basis in fact.

The “friend” also says that Peter is paranoid about the newspapers “turning him over” about his sexuality and so is extremely discreet about his male friends. But the supposedly ace media manipulator should surely know better than anyone that there is no escape from the all-seeing eye of Fleet Street.

Take this little tit-bit tucked away in The Times Diary, which linked Peter with the Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey. “Wendy [which is The Times’s pet name for Mandy] was first seen revelling in the company of Spacey, who has migrated from Los Angeles to the more delicate climes of London, at the relaunch of the Old Vic in October, and the two have been close since… Notting Hill chums of Mandelson, alarmed by his gloomy mood, are delighted that he has found light relief in the company of the charming American bachelor.”

Even now, after all that has happened, Mandelson can’t bring himself to say the three little words that would relieve him of this prurient interest in his private life. And neither can former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies, who is still being hounded by the tabloids. The Sunday People revealed that, despite his unfortunate experience on Clapham Common, Mr Davies is still apparently cruising the gay beauty spots. “Shamed former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies was TWICE spotted cruising for gay sex in the run-up to Christmas.”

According to The People, Mr Davies was spotted by officers from the Gwent police at a woodland area called Forest Fawr… and on at least one other occasion at another local gay spot. A police spokesman is quoted as saying: “The first time he was parked up in his car. He was casually dressed and not involved in any kind of sexual activity. But his presence at these locations means that he must certainly be suspected of seeking contact with other homosexual men.”

So there we have it. No need for charges or trials or any of that rubbish, if Gwent police say Mr Davies is guilty of soliciting for immoral purposes, then he must be, and The Sunday People is pleased to hang him on their say-so. But there is something even more sinister and disturbing about this story. What are the police doing passing their observations of a man who is doing nothing illegal to The Sunday People and then decorating them with comments like: “He is obviously a man who has difficulty controlling his desires because he cannot stop visiting these places.” What happened to justice and fairness and people being innocent until proved guilty?

Mr Davies denied the whole thing. He said he frequently went walking in the forestry areas close to his home but that in recent weeks he had been accompanied by his wife.

This incident also says much about police promises to stop time-wasting observations on cruising and cottaging spots. It is quite obvious from this report that they are as enthusiastic about wasting public money hanging around lay-bys as they ever were. And it is clear that even before Mr Davies was outed, the police were collecting the car registration numbers of people using cottages and cruising spots on the M4. Big Brother is alive and well, and if you’re a cottager with a car, he’s watching you.

But it is not only British politicians and social climbers who are suffering from closet fatigue. Over in the US, Michael Huffington, a Texan oil millionaire who made a bid to get elected as a raving right-wing Republican, has come out as gay.

The Guardian told us that Mr Huffington, who married socialite Arianna Stassinopoulos in 1986, just couldn’t keep up the pretence any longer. He was 39 when he married Ms Stassinopoulos and up until that time he had been sleeping with men. He then decided that he would have to give up cock and settle down with a wifey. He took up politics at her behest, because she was determined one day to be First Lady. But her ambitions for him hit the deck when he failed to get elected, and he gave up politics.

In the end he just couldn’t resist his feelings any longer and Michael and Arianna divorced. Michael then gave a sensational coming-out interview to Esquire magazine. This revelation fitted together all the pieces of the jigsaw that had been puzzling the observers of the Huffngton marriage. It explained why he failed to oppose gay rights, even though his party was majoring in anti-gay electioneering, and it also made clear why he left it so late in life to marry.

***

Well, unlike previous royal engagements, that of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones has provoked not so much hysteria as suspicion and cynicism.

One Daily Mirror commentator summed it up when he invited us to “Trade in tea-towels from any past wedding for your very own Edward and Sophie one”. The tabloids would obviously love this to be yet another Romance of the Century, but it just doesn’t ring true.

It may be that the mood of the country has changed and the fiction that “royal” people are somehow different from the rest of us can no longer be sustained. Or it may just be that the couple aren’t prepared to play the game. They describe each other as “best friends”, and when they kiss it is rather as though they have magnets in their lips set at like poles. The body language is all wrong. The words they speak are not words of love.

Carole Malone in The Sunday Mirror explained the long courtship like this: “Had Edward been a toothless hunchback, Sophie would have hung in there. What normal girl wouldn’t when the prizes are palaces, wealth, a title and untold social clout? … She’s got an engagement ring that could blind a man at ten paces. She’s got a £10 million mansion as the marital home. As a royal-in-waiting, her PR business will rocket into orbit. And just think of the free frocks!”

Mary Kenny, on the other hand, in The Express on Sunday, thought that it was right that Edward should get married. In fact, she said, every man should get married — “forcibly if necessary” — and no exceptions (except priests, of course). “I do not entirely omit homosexual men, either, from the marriage stakes,” wrote the great sage. “Many a gay man has been happily married and has been grateful to father children by shutting his eyes and thinking of England. Thus, Prince Edward has performed a considerable service, and a very proper duty, to society by making this commitment to marriage.”

Nutcases aside, perhaps Brian Reade in The Mirror summed up most people’s feelings in a piece of rhyme that no tabloid would ever previously have considered publishing on the day of a big royal event. It began “And so it’s time for all to squirm / At the latest wedding of the Firm / Another union of chinless wonders / To rank with all the other blunders.” The most telling stanza of this great work goes: “And so to Edward the mantle falls, /His marital life to make a balls, / A Prince who’s suffered many sneers, /From luvvy types with ginger beers. /But now he’s killed all bitching moans, / By falling for Sophie, not Griff Rhys-Jones.”

Certainly Matthew Norman in The London Evening Standard thought that the chief purpose of the royal family these days was to keep us entertained, soap opera style, with their sexual shenanigans. “Edward has three years, perhaps four at the outside, to manoeuvre a spectacularly mucky divorce,” he wrote.

I think that might be possible.

***

The Sun may have promised to pack in the outing, but The Daily Mail has made no such commitment. And so, on January 2nd, we were regaled with a feature headed “Why Sam no longer loves men”.

It concerned Sam Fox, the former “Page Three Stunna” who, it seems, has given up being a plaything for men and decided to become a woman’s woman. Most of the information in the feature seems to have come from her father, from whom she is estranged.

“Papers have been approaching me for years about Sam’s sexuality,” he says. “But I have always remained silent until now… I just wish she could have talked to me about it. It is simply not a problem for me and I want her to know that.”

It may not be a problem for him, but for the millions of Sun-buyers who purchase the paper simply for the wank-potential of page three, it could be traumatic.

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=

After that fateful summer night in Paris, it was generally assumed that the press would shoulder some of the responsibility for the death of Princess Diana. After all, it was their photographers she had been trying to outrun when her car crashed under the Pont d’Alma.

Earl Spencer certainly tried to make the papers see the error of their ways in his now-famous funeral oration, when he said the press had his sister’s blood on its hands. (He later paid dearly for that criticism when his own private life was unflatteringly portrayed during his divorce action—the British tabloids are nothing if not vengeful).

The country was horrified and disgusted at the press and its ruthlessness. Inevitably, the familiar calls rose up for legal curbs to be introduced. It was obvious, said critics, that the press could not govern itself, therefore Parliament should do the job. Politicians agreed and tried to rise to the mood of the country but, as ever, they were cowed by the power they perceive Fleet Street to have over them come election time.

Enter at this point the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), intent on solving the dilemma for politicians and press alike. Despite its noble words about existing to protect individuals from intrusion by newspapers, the PCC is actually a body set up by newspapers to protect themselves from threats of legislation — and against the anger of their readers.

How often have we seen the following cycle of events unfold? Despite promises, the press disgraces itself with cruel and intrusive activities that appal the whole country. This is followed by angry noises from the Government, which promises to frame legislation. There is much uproar in the papers about the threat to free speech, democracy etc. that such legislation would impose.

The PCC then steps in and says that there will be no need for legislation because it has set up a committee which will “toughen up” its code of practice. It then changes the code in some small particular and the newspapers all make a big ballyhoo of “signing up” to enforce the new, improved rules. The threat of legislation recedes and the press carries on as before.

The last time this little ritual was acted out, David Mellor was the chappy in charge. He coined the memorable phrase “The press is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.” Within months of uttering those words, Mr Mellor was on the front page of the News of the World accused of shagging a Miss Antonia de Sanchez while wearing a Chelsea football strip. His political career is now over.

Now, once again, the Last Chance Saloon is open for business, and the PCC has “toughened up” its act once more. Its “new” code of practice is effective from January 1st and all the editors have — yet again — signed up to say that they will uphold the code to the letter (just like they did last time).

Lord Wakeham, the chairman of the PCC, says that the code is the “toughest in Europe”. You would imagine from these words that the consequences of violating the code would be swingeing. So, what exactly happens when a newspaper blatantly disregards this voluntary agreement?

Well, first of all, the person or group who feels they have been ill-used by newspapers makes a complaint to the PCC. The PCC then takes a few weeks to decide whether there is a case to answer. If there is, a long exchange of correspondence between the complainant and the newspaper editor follows. Then the complaints panel (which is, incidentally, composed of newspaper editors) decides whether the complaint should be upheld or rejected. By the time this procedure is completed, the issue is all but forgotten, the complainant is totally exhausted and the press continues its irresponsible gallop, as before.

Even if the complaint is upheld, the newspaper simply prints a small paragraph at the bottom of page 32 summarising the adjudication. And that’s that. Big deal. Unless, of course, the paper can find any juicy gossip about the complainant, in which case it will be splashed all over the front page.

Well, given that even the most famous woman in the world, namely Princess Diana, could get no change from the PCC, what chance has Joe Public got? I’ve tried often enough in the past to get the PCC to enforce the Discrimination clause in its code of practice, but without success. The clause goes like this: “The Press must avoid publishing details of a person’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability unless these are directly relevant to the story.”

So will the new, tough and uncompromising code of conduct be more rigorously enforced? I decided to test it at the first opportunity.

I didn’t have to wait long for a suitable case to complain about. On December 31st, The Sun ran a story headlined “Gay nurse ‘in 100 murders’.” The item concerned Orville Majors, a male nurse in America, who is alleged to have done away with up to 100 patients in his care.

Now, what exactly did Mr Majors’ sexual orientation have to do with all this? Did he murder these people because he is gay? None of the other papers thought so. Indeed, every other newspaper in the country ran the story, but not one of them mentioned Mr Majors’ alleged homosexuality. They didn’t think it relevant — so why did The Sun?

A prima facie breach of the PCC’s code of conduct, you would think. So, off went the complaint and I am now waiting to hear whether it will be accepted for adjudication. After all, the editor of The Sun has signed up to the “tough new code” and has gone into print saying that he intends to ensure that his paper upholds it to the letter. Just as he did last time it was “beefed up”.

I wonder if William Hill the bookmakers would give me odds against this complaint getting any further than the PCC’s office junior? After all, on the form book it should be rejected out of hand. I have made at least five other complaints under the same clause, all of them equally clear-cut, and each of them falling at the first fence.

I’ll keep you informed of the progress of this one.

***

The horrendous story of Mark Trotter, the Hackney social worker who abused the children in his care and later died from an Aids-related illness, was once more brought into the public arena after the publication of a report into the scandal. No-one doubts that Mr Trotter should have been disciplined, suspended and kept away from children —enough evidence had accumulated to suggest that he had paedophile tendencies. But because the council hadan equal opportunities policy which protected gay people, Trotter was able to manipulate the rules and intimidate people with charges of “homophobia” if they suggested he wasn’t the right man for the job in a children’s home.

The Sun headlined its report “Scandal of the vile, gay Aids riddled pervert that a loony council allowed to care for KIDS”.

Naturally, The Sun blames “the politically correct madness that pervades town halls”. But this so-called political correctness started out as an attempt to bring justice and fairness to traditionally disadvantaged minorities. Regrettably, when they are not tempered with common sense, equal opportunities policies can become weapons of intimidation, easily exploited by people like Trotter.

Hopefully, local authorities, trade unions and personnel departments have learned their lesson from this case. They must continue to ensure that gay people, black people and disabled people who behave properly are protected from discrimination. But they must challenge the political ethos that has allowed equal opportunities to give carte-blanche to abusers and exploiters from those minorities. They must not be afraid to challenge wrong-doing for fear of being called homophobic or racist or whatever.

It is not equal opportunities that are to blame for this incident, it is inadequate and cowardly council officials who cannot operate them properly.

***

The Daily Mail carried an interview on December 20th with the Revd David Holloway, vicar of Jesmond, on Tyneside. Mr Holloway will be familiar to readers as the resident religious zealot on such shows as Kilroy and The Time, The Place.

Mr Holloway was in the news again last month because he was once more rebelling against what he calls the Church of England’s “mealy-mouthed liberalism” on the topic of gay sex. Now Mr Holloway’s poison has spread to neighbouring parishes.

On an anti-homosexual ticket, these fundamentalists are staging an impressive revival of what they call “traditional values” — which means a more authoritarian approach to sex. Holloway says that if other parishes followed the lead of Jesmond, and took a “moral stance”, they, too, could have congregations running into thousands, just like his. It seems that there’s nothing quite like a bit of spite and hatred to rouse the fervour of upright, traditional Christians. Throw in a bit of scape-goating and watch them flock in.

Up on Tyneside, Mr Holloway’s brigade was arranging for a novice priest to be ordained. Nothing special about that, you might think. But Mr Holloway has declared that his parish does not recognise the authority of its appointed Bishop — who is soon to be installed in Newcastle — and the retired Bishop of Uganda was invited to conduct the ceremony instead. The CoE was forced into the undignified position of having to obtain an injunction in the High Court to stop this blatant defiance.

The reason the Geordie evangelicals didn’t want the official bishop — the Rt Revd Martin Wharton — to perform the ceremony, and why the parish does not recognise his authority, was because he had said on radio that “loving permanent homosexual relationships are not sinful.”

In the meantime, Bishop Wharton — the poor, liberal football in the middle of Mr Holloway’s political machinations — awaits his transfer to the Holy Roller Land on the banks of the Tyne. At present, he resides in leafy Kingston-upon-Thames, where fire and brimstone are a little less hot than they are in Jesmond.

The Daily Telegraph tried to interview Mr Wharton about the controversy, but couldn’t get much out of him. He has been so traumatised by the reaction to his pro-gay views that now “he tends to repeat one anodyne statement over and over, punctuated by long pauses, nervous that any elaboration will get him into hot water.”

The Daily Telegraph says that the Bishop is now “too frightened to speak his mind on gays.” And that just about sums it up. The evangelical wing of the CoE operates by terror and intimidation. Mr Holloway and his mob (and I use the word advisedly) may well get their way in the end, they may force the CoE further to the right, but their aims will be achieved by bullying and coercion.

The time is coming for liberal Anglicans to declare themselves as such, and proudly. They should stop being “mealy-mouthed” and put Holloway firmly in his place.   ii

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=

The pendulum swings backwards and forwards — or should I say from left to right — and at the moment it seems to be swinging rather fast.

The subject is ‘The Family’, and whenever it is raised in the public prints, it now seems to include references to homosexual relationships. This is a measure of our success in getting the topic on to the agenda; the “pretend family unit” is now an inevitable part of the family equation.

This does not suit everyone, of course. William Hague is one such. According to The Daily Telegraph, Mr Hague “does not believe that the law should give cohabiting couples the same rights as those who are married”.

According to The Telegraph, Mr Hague is “trying to put the traditional family at the centre of Conservative values”. But the paper made clear that our Willy has not reneged on his promise of tolerance for those who will not — or cannot — live in a “traditional” family unit. He was anxious to make clear that he “was not abandoning earlier comments about the importance of tolerance towards other ways of life such as couples living together and homosexuality”. Apparently Willy believes that “tolerance is not contradicted by a desire to play up the importance of the traditional family”.

The Times agreed. In an editorial about Mr Hague’s pronouncements, the paper said that the old Tories lost power because they were over-fond of bigoted moral crusades. The paper says that Mr Hague is attempting to rid his party of “its least attractive traits: an attachment to the priggish and sometimes prejudiced morality of the fifties and before”.

“People born after the War,” it says, “and particularly those brought up during and after the Sixties, share a certain set of attitudes about women, homosexuality and marriage. Some of their parents now do too, as a result of seeing their children live their lives according to these post-Sixties values. Liberally-inclined voters will become an ever-increasing element of the electorate. Any party that tried to shut its eyes to this demographic trend would be condemning itself to electoral oblivion.”

I do hope that’s a message Tony Blair has taken on board. He seems afraid to keep the promises he made to the gay community before the election. But listen, Mr Blair, if even The Times says it’s OK to deliver justice to homosexuals then there’s nothing to worry about. The voters put you there to make things better. So stop equivocating and give us equality.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, of course, is not at all pleased with all this talk of equality. He believes the politicians are handling this whole family values business appallingly. He called on Tony Blair to “strengthen the family” — which, in his terms means heaping disadvantage on those who aren’t living by the supposed “Christian ideal” of man and wife. The Archbishop was complaining to the Prime Minister that, by living openly together, Robin Cook and his mistress were not setting a good example. It was, he said, undermining the church’s efforts to put marriage back at the heart of society.

But then Dr Carey himself was in turn chastised — by Janet Daley in The Daily Telegraph. Why has he left his protestations so late, she wants to know. “Where have they been, these august spiritual authorities, for the last decade? Until now it has been left to a handful of newspaper pundits, bravely non-conforming academics and unfashionable politicians” to make the case that marriage was superior to the other “rich diversity of relationships and ‘family types’ on offer in the modern supermarket of social life”.

Janet Daley thinks it’s a good thing that the Church has abandoned the idea that cohabiting couples are on an equal moral footing with married ones (as expressed in its report Something to Celebrate, which asserted two years ago that “living in sin is no sin”). Daley says: “Suddenly politicians and churchmen are jamming up behind one another to speak fearlessly in favour of marriage. It has to be a good sign.”

A good sign for whom? For the moral authoritarians, perhaps. Prelates can preach until they fall off their pulpits and politicians can talk till they’re blue in the face, but ultimately, nobody takes any notice of them. People will still annoyingly have minds of their own, they will continue to make their own choices about how they live.

Minette Marrin, a columnist in The Sunday Telegraph was willing to admit it as much. Her piece was headed “Why politicians can’t help the family”.

She said: “The interesting question is what any politician actually intends to do about supporting the family. Blair has always made eloquent noises about it, but has actually proved to be anti-family. He may have campaigned against single mothers, but if his purpose is truly to defend the traditional family it is absurd to include under its umbrella, unmarried couples, never-married single parents and gay lovers, as Blair has done (although without much conviction).”

Unfortunately, Ms Marrin’s personal pendulum is stuck permanently on the Right. She is susceptible to propaganda from reactionary “pro-family” pressure groups, which is why she is able to say quite categorically: “We ought to be allowed to say what is obviously true, that these less conventional households are much less likely to offer a child a good upbringing than a traditional household run by a heterosexual couple. To put it more strongly, these unconventional households are now known to be generally much riskier for children. Therefore, they ought not to get the same support —legally, fiscally, socially — as conventional families, because they do not offer the same public benefits —sometimes quite the reverse.”

But on what evidence does she base her certainty that unconventional families are harmful to children? Presumably her “facts” come from the same source as the statistic she quoted in October, that gay men have an average life expectancy of 30 years less than heterosexual men. Ms Marrin should be careful. Anne Atkins quoted the same nonsense in The Sun and got blasted by the Press Complaints Commission for her trouble. So come on, Minette, where’s the proof for your assertions?

Despite all this right-wing reaction and huffing and puffing from religious control freaks, there are signs that the pressure for more equitable treatment for the unmarried is building. The Guardian reported that the Equal Opportunities Commission is calling for “a radical overhaul of sex discrimination law, with stronger powers to force employers to eliminate sex bias”. If the proposals from the EOC were to be accepted, they would outlaw discrimination against homosexuals for the first time. Let’s hope Mr Blunkett (who will ultimately consider the proposals) is brave about it.

Then there’s the Law Commission which, according to The Sunday Times, has undertaken a three-year study into the property rights of unmarried couples. Writing about the study, Ferdinand Mount says that one of its suggestions is that cohabiting couples should be allowed to “register” their union. He says: “When the registered twosome broke up, they would be allowed to seek court approval for a fair distribution of assets.”

But Mr Mount is not impressed with this idea. He says: “Are we not in danger of going round in circles here? The uncommitted commitment sounds like a marriage that dare not speak its name, a kind of ‘marriage lite’.”

He may have a point for heterosexuals. If they’re going to sign up as a legally binding partnership, why not just do it at the registry office, thereby solving all the problems? Homosexual couples on the other hand do not have that option. There’s no civil or religious equivalent for us.

The Law Commission, however, is anxious for it to be known that it has not forgotten the gay dimension to all this. A registered partnership might solve a lot of problems for us — pensions (see Keith Wood’s article on pages 32-34) and property rights would cease be the minefield of injustice that they are at present.

While we wait for the verdict on those Law Commission proposals (and it could be years before anything happens — if ever) we have to continue fighting issues individually, chipping away at the seemingly endless unfairness inherent in our system.

One such individual battle was recently won by 70-year-old William Webber of Dumfries. According to a report in The Observer, Mr Webber’s long-time gay partner (who actually owned the house where they lived) needed to move into a nursing home, and the council were threatening to use the value of the house to pay the fees. This would have left Mr Webber homeless. If the couple had been heterosexual and married, there would have been no such threat.

Now, after a year-long investigation, Dumfries and Galloway Council agreed that gays in long-term relationships will get near-parity with mixed-sex couples. “Gays will be treated the same if they can provide ‘evidence of the same-sex relationship or companionship for a period of 10 years’. It will look at shorter relationships case by case.”

The Observer says that the council’s decision “could set the tone for other authorities”. Mr Webber, whose brave stand may benefit thousands of couples in the future, hopes that the 10-year rule “will gradually be chipped away”.

***

Fleet Street loves to have a whipping boy and at present it is Peter Mandelson. It is difficult to imagine a politician more unpopular with journalists. They love to humiliate him.

What puzzles me is that, with this level of unpopularity, the journos have managed to leave Mandy’s sexuality out of it for so long. But perhaps that moratorium is about to end.

Punch magazine (supposedly satirical, but difficult to work out what it is in reality) recently carried a ten-page examination of all aspects of Peter Mandelson. In the interests of completeness, it couldn’t leave out references to his sexual orientation, and it commissioned Peter Tatchell to write about it.

Mr Tatchell reminds readers that Mandy has been subjected to more outings than a school bus. The Daily Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, The News of the World and Brian Gould in his book Goodbye to All That, have all revealed Peter Mandelson’s non-secret.

Peter Tatchell adds his own fuel to the fire by telling how “Mandelson had a rendezvous with a friend of mine, a member of the gay rights group OutRage! during a trip to Moscow a few years back”. He says it was not a “honey-trap” outing plot, but a serious attraction between the two men.

Anyway, such is the contempt in which Mandelson is held that it is only a matter of time before the ruthless tabloid hacks go for his sexuality in a big way. I do hope he doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet.

The niggling has started, with Richard Littlejohn in The Daily Mail unkindly suggesting that Mandy looked less like a miner and more like a member of the Village People on a recent visit to a coal mine.

Mandy’s asking for it, of course, by not being more open. And, according to Peter Tatchell, he’ll deserve it, because he is “personally responsible for de-gaying Labour Party policy” by ditching key commitments “including the promise to outlaw discrimination against gays in housing and employment”.

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=

The press debate on Aids was given fresh impetus last month by the launch of the Government’s new education initiative. Aimed primarily at heterosexuals, the campaign was immediately condemned all round for targeting the wrong audience. 

Dr James Le Fanu of the Sunday Telegraphsaid (21 Feb) that the Health Education Authority had originally wanted to address the message to gay men but when the advertising agency came up with “an ingenious idea that had matchstick men doing bizarre things in odd positions” it was “rejected as ‘insulting’ by representatives of the homosexual community.” This led, he said, to “inverse discrimination” — that is ‘insulting’ straights by suggesting they were equally at-risk. He quotes the British Medical Journal as saying: “There is no evidence that HIV infection is being spread by casual vaginal intercourse,” and concludes that the money being spent on the present campaign is being wasted. 

The other papers were quick to take up this point. The Sunsaid (3 Mar): “Why do these ads show only boy and girl couples? Showing love’s young dream makes pretty pictures. The truth is uglier. There have been 44 cases in Britain involving heterosexuals. But a massive 1079 homosexuals have been affected.” The People(21 Feb) opined: “The money would be better spent if concentrated on those most at risk.” Whilst the Daily Express said: “Anal intercourse —overwhelmingly confined to homosexuals — is without doubt the primary means of spreading the Aids virus. Propaganda that does not focus on that is a con.” Writing also in the Daily Mail (19 Feb), Michael Fumento an “Aids analyst” said that the threat from vaginal intercourse was “one-in-a-million”. He said that there were many reasons why we weren’t being told this. He quoted a “San Francisco health official” as “defending the practice of suggesting that heterosexuals were at risk because it made them ‘socially conscious’ of the problems of homosexuals.” 

“Another reason,” wrote Mr Fumento, “is to do with research money. A lot of gay people are convinced that funds would be slow in coming if Aids wasn’t perceived as a general threat.” He didn’t stop there, either. “Are the pharmaceutical giants (who receive vast sums of money from governments to search for a cure) and some contraceptive companies exploiting the plague fear for financial reasons?” 

Then along came sex researchers Masters and Johnson to throw a spanner in the works. Promoting their new book about Aids, M&J claimed in the Mail on Sunday(6 Mar) that “there has been a world-wide cover-up on the immense peril of the Aids epidemic and millions of lives are now needlessly in danger.” Their conspiracy theory, based on their own rather limited research, said that the estimates of the numbers “infected with Aids” are “up to 50 per cent too low.” That the “disease has already broken out alarmingly into the ordinary population and is now spreading at an alarming rate by normal sexual intercourse.” They also claimed that people had not changed their sexual behaviour to any extent in the light of Aids — not even gays. They resurrected the ideas that Aids can be spread by day-to-day social contact — even from lavatory seats. All these ‘facts’ said M&J were being denied in order to avoid “mass panic”. However, on 9 March the Independent was quoting Dr Jonathan Mann, director of the World Health Organisation Aids group saying: “Masters and Johnson know a lot about sex, but I don’t know how much they know about Aids”. Dr Mann warned against irrational fear of Aids and emphasised that it cannot be caught in the ways suggested by Masters and Johnson. 

Later that week the Daily Mail was saying that Masters and Johnson had withdrawn their claims about Aids spreading amongst heterosexuals, although they stuck by everything else they had said. Our old friend George Gale couldn’t let the opportunity pass, of course, and in The Daily Mail he wrote: “The silence of the authorities allows Aids to spread unchecked among homosexuals. And, with terrible irony, homosexual lobbyists, acting to protect their community from public hostility, do most to assist the killing disease flourishing in their midst.” 

The next issue of the Mail on Sunday(13 Mar) tackled that line of thinking in an editorial: “There is a school of thought that believes there is something called ‘the homosexual lobby’ rather in the way in pre-war days the troubles of the world were blamed on a Jewish conspiracy. The ‘lobby’ was first discovered by far-out American Rightwingers who regarded Ronald Reagan as being dangerously radical. Angus Macpherson who wrote our report last week, recalls not so long ago attending a Daughters of the American Revolution meeting where the mention of Aids brought a storm of applause. The disease would do for homosexuals what the gas chambers did for Jews!” And the paper went on to insist that they were right to report the Masters and Johnson study, and defended all they’d said. 

Meanwhile, the Independent (4 Mar) reported: “There has been a sharp decrease in the incidence of hepatitis B. The disease is transmitted in the same way as Aids, suggesting that the Aids campaign is proving successful.”

So, what are we to make of this rag-bag of confusion, contradiction and paranoia? Where can we get information about Aids that is not being manipulated by financial or political vested interests? I think the truth of the matter is that it is too soon for anyone to know precisely how the Aids crisis will develop, and it foolish and irresponsible for anyone to claim they are making anything more than an educated guess. Meanwhile, we have to take care that those who are interested in making money or political capital from this tragedy do not mislead us with statistics and theories that add nothing to the debate but plenty to their bank balance.

* * *

CAN I believe my eyes? The Sunactually reporting events of interest to gay people in a way that wouldn’t offend anyone but the most hardened homophobe? On 25 Feb the Suncarried what appeared to be an interview with Michael Cashman, actor and activist. Mr Cashman was allowed to slag off Clause 28 without contradiction. 

All good, stirring stuff. But it probably felt a mite familiar to people in London who also buy City Limitsmagazine, because the interview had been lifted from their pages by the Sunwithout credit. 

The following day the Sunwas congratulating itself by quoting Michael Cashman as saying the report had been “balanced and responsible”. Then on 8th March the Suncarried a story, which it had lifted from the previous day’s Daily Mirror. It concerned Status Quo guitarist Francis Rossi revealing how his 20-year-old son’s Coming Out had vastly improved their relationship. 

Mr Rossi sounds like a sensible chap, dealing with his son’s gayness well (“It took immense courage for him to tell me and I admired him for it. Coming out of the closet suddenly made him more mature. We can talk to each other man to man… we are great mates.”) 

Underneath this story was a helpful little chart entitled “10 Ways to Tell Your Dad You’re Gay” provided by “a counsellor with long experience” and looking remarkably like a precis of my book How to be a Happy Homosexual. Not that I mind so long as the message is getting across, although a small credit would have been appreciated. 

However, not all the Sun’s correspondents thought Mr Rossi was right to tell his story. Fiona Macdonald Hull (11 Mar) said that whilst “no parent would disagree with Rossi” (er… urn) she wasn’t too sure about the lightness of his telling the world about his son’s Coming Out. “If I were his child, I think I would expect a decent father to treat the details of my private life with the confidentiality they deserve.” 

According to the News of the World(13 May) Simon Rossi, the young man in question, agreed. He was “furious” at his father and feared that the revelation might destroy his career. He also expressed a quite reasonable fear that ex-lovers would “come out of the woodwork” and make further trouble. No doubt the News of the Worldis prising them out of the cracks at this very moment.

••• 

SPOOF letter-writer Henry Root is not dead, but still catching the unwary in his net. William Donaldson, the prankster who, posing as H. Root, writes to the famous encouraging them to say things they’ll regret, has been in correspondence with Graham Webster-Gardiner, chairman of the crackpot Conservative Family Campaign. The London Standard(19th Feb) revealed that after Henry Root had suggested to Webster-Gardiner that the CFC’s idea of “tagging and isolating homosexuals” was a good one, Mr W-G had replied: “I’m pleased that you agree with us about homosexuality… There is no doubt that God quite clearly pronounced judgement on those who acted unrighteously and this is clearly happening to those who abused themselves with drugs or used their bodies in abnormal and unnatural ways as the homosexuals do.” 

Despite the fact that its leadership seems to be showing signs of mental instability, The Conservative Family Campaign is, it seems, quite highly thought of in Downing Street. 

The old adage about the patients taking over the asylum has never seemed more applicable to the Government than it is today. 

*** 

HOW times have changed — and yet how they’ve stayed the same. The stodgy old Daily Telegraphactually carried an obituary for Divine (9 Mar), which I’m sure must have puzzled and outraged many of its elderly readers (particularly the one who seems to write in at fortnightly intervals accusing homosexuals of ‘purloining that delightful little word gay’). 

However, having failed to mention Mr Milstead’s sexual orientation in the obituary, the Telegraphsignalled the fact to its bewildered readers with the traditional euphemism “He was unmarried.” After years and years of sending establishment closets to their graves without making any direct reference to their gayness, the Telegraphjust can’t kick the habit — even with someone whose celebrity sprang almost entirely from his homosexuality. If there’s a Heaven in heaven, I’m sure Divine will be seeing the joke.

***

The Daily Telegraph(11 Mar) tells us that the Rev Tony Higton, speaking at a “mass meeting” of the Jesus-in-jackboots fraternity at Central Hall, Westminster, said that he “sensed demonic influence at work in the Synod.” This is not the first time Mr Higton has said, when people have the temerity to disagree with him, that Satan is responsible. 

As was demonstrated with James Anderton, nothing turns off the British public faster than a raving fanatic. We should, therefore, encourage Mr Higton to pursue this kind of lunatic ranting and see him disappear into the obscurity that such headbangers deserve.

***

Quotes of the month: “Has Mr Gummer no homosexual friends? As a former Chairman of the Conservative Party, how does he treat those of his colleagues in the party who are homosexual?” David Steel on John Selwyn Gummer’s attack on Church of England Bishops for not being ‘tough’ enough on gay clergy – Sunday Express(Mar) 

“The old traditionalist right and the new, loony left have conspired between them to give birth to Clause 28. It is a throwback to a more intolerant age. It has no place in the new Britain.” – editorial in the Sunday Times(13 Mar). 

***

THE  gay mass lobby of the House of Lords conducted in connection with Clause 28 produced possibly the biggest ever single-issue postbag for peers. And yet Lord Ardwick, writing in the London Standard(24 Feb) said: “For weeks we have been receiving a dozen letters a day from sad, frightened or angry homosexuals. They have overdone it, I’m afraid. The sheer weight and suspected orchestration of the lobby has irritated its opponents.” 

And yet if we’d all remained silent and done nothing, no doubt his Lordship would have said: “There is no significant opposition to this legislation, so it passes without comment.” 

Clever, isn’t it, how the argument can be rigged so that whatever we do, and however we do it, we’re sure to be doing it wrongly.

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=

Here’s a name for your notebook: The Rutherford Institute. Although it may not be familiar at the moment, it’s likely that it will become so in the future.

Nick Cohen drew attention to it in an article in The Observer last month. He described it as the “legal arm of far-right American evangelists” which has opened for business in London. Mr Cohen wrote: “At first sight the institute does not appear too sinister. Most of their time is spent defending shopworkers who were assured that they would not be forced to work on the Sabbath when the supermarkets launched their unlawful campaign to force through Sunday trading.”

John Wayne Whitehead, an attorney and “concerned Christian”, who runs the Institute’s head office in Charlottesville, Virginia, says that the organisation’s aim is to “promote religious freedom”.

Nick Cohen comments: “I’m all for religious freedom, as long as no-one tries to exercise it within a hundred miles of me… but the law the Rutherford Institute wants to uphold is God’s not man’s — a preference shared by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.” Cohen then unearthed something that John Wayne Whitehead wrote in 1982: “We must influence all areas of life including law and politics. The courts must place themselves under the authority of God’s law.”

And this is where the Rutherford Institute turns its attention to homosexuals. After abortion, says Nick Cohen, “homosexuals are the second target. The moral majority’s tactic is not to attack them for merely being gay — it knows unadorned hatred does not play well, even in America — but to advance the slightly more sophisticated charges that gays ‘promote’ homosexuality and demand special ‘privileges’.”

The first attack came in Oxfordshire, where one of the Rutherford Institute’s lawyers — a Mr Paul Diamond — has tried to invoke Section 28 for the first time in that law’s iniquitous history. He says that the local probation service sent some of its gay members to a “gay conference” which offered “counselling” aimed at indoctrinating them and turning them even further away from heterosexuality. The service’s Christian Fellowship then demanded equal time off for prayer meetings and “counselling” for those who want to be “born again”.

Paul Diamond has already provided legal advice to Lady Young in her successful campaign to amend the Human Rights Bill in the House of Lords (see report in last month’s Gay Times). What he fails to mention in his attack on the Oxfordshire probation service is that the so-called gay conference was actually a training course for homosexual officers to learn how to deal with attacks from the public — and from their homophobic colleagues.

The Rutherford Institute is a substantial organisation, and cannot be dismissed as a tinpot band of fanatics, as can so many of our home-grown “family groups”.

As the Institute’s leading light, John Wayne Whitehead says: “We can leave nothing untouched by the Bible. Like it or not the Church is at war.”

Yes, indeed, the church is at war — and it is becoming increasingly obvious against whom the war is being waged. Until quite recently, most of the anti-gay rhetoric in our newspapers emerged from the Tory Party, but now William Hague refuses to endorse the crude anti-gay slander that was so popular with his predecessors. The press has to look elsewhere for its source of supply, and religious bodies seem more than happy to make up the shortfall.

Indeed, The Mail, Express and especially The Daily Telegraph sometimes seem like little more than supplements to The Evangelical Times.

On March 3rd, The Telegraph reported that “a biological difference between lesbians and heterosexual women has been discovered for the first time”. This followed hot on the heels of reports that gay men’s fingerprints were different from those of straight men.

In its editorial column, The Telegraph immediately went into theological mode, and began ruminating on genetic determinism and morality in relation to homosexuality.

“During the Middle Ages,” the paper wrote, “theologians agonised about whether the concept of free will could be reconciled with God’s omnipotence. In Paradise Lost, John Milton wrestled with the question of how an all-powerful deity could allow man to defy Him. Today, genetics raises the same problem: if our personalities are innate and fixed, how can we, be condemned for any wrong-doing?”

The Telegraph, naturally, starts from the standpoint that homosexuality is wrong even if it is a natural phenomenon. (“It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that homosexuality, at least in some cases, is present from birth; but this should have no bearing on the argument about whether homosexual behaviour is right.”) And so, it seems that gay people, unique among humans, must accept that they have been given natural sexual impulses (by God or evolution, depending on your standpoint) but must deny them utterly.

It is at this point that The Telegraph’s argument falls apart — as most theology does, under rational examination. The paper says: “Heterosexual men could point out that evolution has implanted the desire to combine their genes with as many women as possible. Would anyone regard this as an excuse [for promiscuity]?”

But if homosexuality is a natural impulse for homosexuals, as heterosexuality is for heterosexuals, why should it not be expressed within the same constraints as straight sex is supposed to be? It’s a Catch-22 situation for that dwindling band of gay people who are liable to believe in the Bible.

Meanwhile, up in Tyneside, the rebellion continues, as, according to The Mail on Sunday, three parishes have decided to break away from the Church of England “in protest at their new bishop’s support for homosexuals”. Bishop Wharton, for it is he, had the audacity to opine that loving homosexual relationships are not necessarily sinful.

The Reverend David Holloway, bigot-in-chief of these “rebels”, is quoted as saying: “There is an issue of elementary Biblical morality here. We believe our bishops should uphold traditional Christian teaching. Bishop Wharton clearly doesn’t and therefore it’s impossible for us to accept his ministry.”

But, as avowed atheist Roy Hattersley pointed out in his Guardian column, dissent itself is un-biblical, (“For rebellion is the sin of Witchcraft” — Samuel 15.22). It follows that if witchcraft is punishable by death (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” — Exodus 18.22) Mr Holloway and his followers must be immediately burned at the stake —preferably using faggots to do the job efficiently.

Roy Hattersley wearily made the point again about the selectivity of biblical literalists. Why do they only get excited about sins of the flesh, when much else is forbidden in the Bible? Hattersley points out that lending money for interest is strictly forbidden in the Bible and the Koran. This is only one of their blind spots.

Those gay people with religious feelings will find it difficult to come across any major (or minor) faith that will accept them on their own terms. The Catholic Church is certainly not the place to go if you’re sickened by the CoE’s authoritarians. The nearer you get to the Vatican, it seems, the more vehement the homophobia becomes. An article in The Sunday Times magazine told the story of Enrico Sini Luzi, the Pope’s personal Usher, who was murdered in strange circumstances in Rome. The police immediately assumed that he was the victim of a serial killer, operating in the city, who has already brutally murdered at least 20 gay men.

Ten days after Sini Luzi’s murder, a 39-year-old gay Sicilian man, Alfred Ormando, travelled to Rome and burned himself to death on the steps of St Peter’s Basilica. In his suicide note to his parents, he wrote that he wished to be forgiven for having “considered homosexuality normal and for having considered myself equal to heterosexuals… I beg your pardon for having contaminated the air that you breath with my own venomous breath, I beg forgiveness for the crimes of the world against my (homosexual) nature, so precious but so reviled by Christianity.”

Gay activists in Italy are outraged by the unforgivably repressive attitudes of the Vatican towards homosexuals, which drive so many to such desperate acts of self-destruction and murder.

So, given that Christians are increasingly hostile towards us, could gay people find solace in the other “great” world religion; Islam? Certainly not if they live in Afghanistan. There, The Guardian reported (a mite too flippantly for comfort, under the headline “Gay Sodomites Resurrected”) that three men “convicted of sodomy” had survived an attempted execution “in which they were buried alive for 30 minutes”.

The Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had ordered the three to be left for half-an-hour under a stone wall knocked on top of them by a tank. He declared that their lives would be spared if they survived. They did survive — and were taken to hospital. Allah may be merciful, but his followers certainly aren’t.

So what about Judaism? Any joy there? In an interview with probably the most famous gay Jew in Britain, Rabbi Lionel Blue, The Daily Mail presented us with a picture of a reasonably happy homosexual. He lives contentedly in his dotage with his boyfriend in London. It’s only when you read the small print that you realise that Rabbi Blue has had to stretch the Jewish dogmas to breaking point in order to reconcile his homosexual lifestyle with the teachings of his faith.

He has also had to spend 40 years in psychotherapy to reach his present state of mind (you didn’t misread —that’s forty years). Not many of us want to waste that much time wrestling with our “faith” and spoiling what is the only really worthwhile thing in life — love.

Then The Independent reported that Phyllis Bowman, the deeply religious executive director of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), had won the right in Europe for anyone to spend as much money as they like on leafleting and broadcasting in the immediate period before an election, in order “to promote a favoured candidate or denigrate a rival”. Until now the maximum amount permitted to be spent was £5.

This, says The Independent, opens up the way for American-style election battles over the views of individual candidates on “single issues such as abortion, hunting and gay rights”.

Put this together with the considerable resources and determination of the Rutherford Institute, and religion’s war against gays could become extremely nasty at the next election.

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=

We haven’t seen such a media frenzy over homosexuality since Michael Barrymore faltered from the closet. But George Michael’s cottaging “shame”, “humiliation”, “degradation” etc. was, from the tabloid’s point of view, much more satisfactory.

A pop star waggling his willy at a pretty policeman in a public toilet? It was manna from heaven for pun-crazed sub-editors who came up with headlines such as “Zip me up before you go go” (The Sun), and “Wham, barn, flash in the pan” (The Daily Star). The two downmarket tabloids revelled in this stupid, childish sniggering throughout the whole episode. “He’s trying to give up fags” was The Sun’s retort, when it was revealed that George had a nicotine patch on his bottom when he flashed it at Marcello Rodriguez (the hunky “built like an athlete” policeman who arrested him). The Star said Michael “Got a big hand” when he finally emerged from his hideaway.

Of course, we’ve witnessed this kind of hysterical response before, when famous people’s sexuality has become an issue. From Oscar Wilde onward we’ve seen the same mixture of finger-wagging censure and cod sympathy from the media pundits. This time round you could take your choice from an almost endless parade of commentators. Richard Littlejohn thought George “can have sex with whom he likes, when he likes. But not where he likes.” Lesley White in The Sunday Times shook her head and wrote, “Having refused to play the game [of coming out], the star is now paying the price of a pick-and-mix tolerance, which cheers Ellen DeGeneres and movies like Philadelphia, but leaps on those ‘exposed’ as gay with all the schadenfreude our equal rights legislation makes a forbidden pleasure.”

So,would George have fared better if he’d been honest all along and not gone on about his “ambiguous” sexuality?

Would the papers have been less brutal? I think not. And neither does Matthew Parris, who wrote in The Sun: “What flaming hypocrisy all this fake astonishment and pumped-up commentary is.” But surely hypocrisy is the stock-in-trade of the tabloids? You can’t criticise them for fulfilling their raison d’être.

Mr Parris might still be astonished at the small papers’ capacity for being repeatedly shocked about homosexuality, as though each outed celebrity had personally invented it and it had never been heard of before. Groundhog Day haunts the papers on this one. We are doomed to see the same pattern repeated over and over again.

How many times have we had to hear columnists trying to fathom the reasons for gay men cottaging, and how many times will we have to hear it again? How many more times can they get away with the huge acres of newsprint devoted to why famous men act as though they were ordinary mortals? Why did Hugh Grant pay a hooker when he could have women falling at his feet? Why did George Michael hang about a toilet for sex when, apparently, half the world would gladly give him a hand to orgasm in more salubrious situations?

Another part of the pattern is the huge amount of confused, contradictory and misinformed bollocks that gets written about homosexuality during an event such as this. In The Mirror, Adrian Shaw said that “in America they call it cruising, after the Al Pacino film of the same name” while rent-a-gob agony aunt, Anne Atkins, said in The Sunday People that Michael’s arrest had been “hijacked” by gay rights campaigners. “To them the only sin in the world is staying in the closet,” she wrote. “If only [famous gays] would come out none of this would happen. What nonsense. If George Michael had kept his private life genuinely private none of this would have happened.”

Not only bollocks, but self-evident bollocks. Mr Michael did try to keep his private life private. And it still happened.

The People also claimed that “A gay Brazilian who eventually died of Aids was the man who persuaded George Michael he was homosexual.” (Mr Michael presumably had no idea that he was gay before he met his Brazilian brainwasher.)

Then came the notorious News of the World pictures of “George on the Prowl”. These showed our superstar hanging about the same park toilets a few months before his arrest. He is shown “furtively luring” another man into the conveniences before the two of them emerge three minutes later. In case you think this proves that George Michael suffers from premature ejaculation, The News of the World had tracked down the other man, Johnny Brown, who has convictions for cottaging, and got him to tell the tale. According to Mr Brown, he followed George into the lav and saw him exposing himself in a cubicle. Mr Brown refused George’s invitation to join him, assessing the situation as too risky.

But George can take some comfort from history. All the same hysteria and hyperbole accompanied Michael Banymore’s exit from the closet two years ago, and in the end it has done him no harm at all. Indeed, it may have been the saving of him.

If the pattern continues in the usual way, George Michael will not only eventually be forgiven his “slip up”, he will be hailed as a hero who survived tabloid torment. If he continues to produce music that the public likes, his career will flourish. The only annoyance he will have to put up with is having the description “the troubled gay pop-star” precede his name every time it appears in print.

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=

Whenever Peter Tatchell manages to stage an OutRage! stunt that hits the headlines, people immediately take up their polarised positions. Do his confrontational tactics retard progress or advance it? Does he get issues discussed, or does he just provide a diversion that allows them to be avoided?

Well, now that the dust has settled on the Good Friday pulpit storming, we can look to the reactions for some answers.[Note: Peter Tatchell climbed into the pulpit at Canterbury Cathedral during the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey’sEaster sermon,to protest at the Church’slack of support for gay rights. He was arrestedand charged under the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860.]

It goes without saying that the papers —broadsheet and tabloid alike —remain hostile to Peter’s tactics. Their verdict is clear — Tatchell is a publicity-seeking bully who “outs” people against their will. Or, as Norman Tebbit put it in his column in The Mail on Sunday, “When that repulsive exhibitionist, Mr Peter Tatchell, forced his way into the pulpit during the Easter sermon of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, was I the only one who prayed that just for a moment the Archbishop might forget himself and punch the ghastly creature on the nose? What a wonderful moment it would have been.”

This violent antipathy towards Mr Tatchell was echoed by Richard Littlejohn in The Sun, who wrote: “Peter Tatchell should have been dragged from Canterbury Cathedral and clubbed like a baby seal… I don’t know why television producers give him house room or newspapers publish his views. I’m conscious that, by writing about him myself, I’m adding to the publicity he craves… Tatchell, like all bullies, is a coward. He may think he was being terribly brave storming the pulpit… but jostling Dr Carey is the political equivalent of kicking cripples.”

Mr Littlejohn then suggests that Peter should try handing out leaflets at football grounds or at an IRA jamboree. “If he wanted to be really brave, he could always storm the Regent’s Park Mosque and denounce Islamic teaching on homosexuality.”

Now let’s look at these comments more closely. Both of them were written by men who are not known for their gentle behaviour. Norman Tebbit was famed for his thuggish political activities during the Thatcher era, and was even lauded for them. But that’s the sort of society he moves in: kick them, punch them, hate them, especially if you have power over them.

Tebbit’s loathing of homosexuality is well-known, as is Richard Littlejohn’s. The piece I have quoted was subsidiary to another attack in the same column — this time on George Michael. And yet, Mr Littlejohn claims that he is not homophobic. In an interview with The Guardian, he claimed that he couldn’t understand how people had come to the conclusion that he was “antagonistic” to gays. He dismissed the interviewer’s question about his incitement to murder Peter Tatchell as “over-analysis”. He said: “The whole point of that piece was not to say, literally, that Tatchell should be clubbed. It was about him being a coward and choosing a soft target.”

As The Guardian writer points out: “I wonder how many Sun readers would see it like that?”

The reason Richard Littlejohn writes as he does, without thought for the pain he causes or the damage he does, is that he is well paid for it. And that is the beginning and the end of the explanation. In fact, he is the highest-paid journalist in the country, and he makes a handsome living from harsh opinions. After all, which of his victims has the opportunity to hit back? Are the columns of The Sun open to them to reply to his violent incitements? Of course, not. What does Mr Littlejohn care? He’s safe behind News International’s razor wire. (And, just for the record, Peter Tatchell has challenged Muslim fanatics — at a rally for fundamentalists organised last year. But don’t let the facts get in the way of your spleen, Mr Littlejohn).

Peter Tatchell doesn’t only have to contend with hostility from straight bully boys, there are our traditional liberal supporters, too, as well as other gay people who disapprove. In The Guardian (rapidly becoming a large-size Daily Mail) Ros Coward thought that OutRage!’s stunt was “crass and insensitive” and advised that “if the gay rights movement doesn’t want a reaction to set in, they should distance themselves from the likes of Tatchell once and for all.” (In other words, we bring oppression on ourselves. This opinion is shared by The Daily Mail’s own Glenda Slag figure, Linda Lotta Pee).

Meanwhile, John Lyttle in The Independent said: “I fail to grasp why Peter Tatchell gives a toss about the Church of England and its edicts. The Church of England is about as popular – and influential – as volleyball. Who cares? It’s worse than counter-productive: it allows a dinosaur a new lease of life.”

This is bollocks, pure and simple. The Church of England may only have a negligible number of bums on pews, but its influence on our legislature and institutions is all-embracing. Twenty-six Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords, altering legislation when they don’t approve (look at the amendment to the Human Rights Bill, carried with the support of the Bishops on a tide of homophobic rhetoric). The opposition to lowering the age of consent is being led by religious people most Anglican bishops included and they have power and influence far in excess of their support in the country. Institutions such as the Armed Forces, schools and Parliament will not change their attitudes until the Church of England does.

Next came Stonewall’s Simon Fanshawe in The Guardian. He asserts that the softly-softly approach works better than the loudly-loudly one. He says that Stonewall’s age of consent campaign has caught on like a “forest fire” and it was achieved with debate and without confrontation. He then asks Tatchell: “Who do you represent? Who asks you to zap Archbishops?”

Well, I have to ask Simon Fanshawe the same question – who elected you? I don’t remember voting on whether Stonewall could make behind-the-scenes deals with the Government on my behalf without consultation. Stonewall may be effective and professional, but it is not democratic, and if it makes a big mistake on our behalf, how do we get to punish it?

So what about the debate? Did Peter Tatchell’s antics get the issue back on to the agenda? Of course they did.

The Bishop of Oxford wrote to The Times: “Peter Tatchell is unfair to accuse the Archbishop of Canterbury of refusing to meet the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. The Archbishop, through the House of Bishops, has set up a special group, which I chair and which contains three other diocesan bishops, specifically to engage with interested parties and to further the debate on human sexuality. We have twice met a delegation from the LGCM and will be continuing in dialogue with them…”

Such disingenuous double-talk gave an excellent opportunity for Richard Kirker of the LGCM to respond to the Bishop’s “evasions”: “The LGCM has been refused meetings with the Archbishop of Canterbury every year since his enthronement. He routinely meets with a wide range of groups working for change and missions within and outside the Church, not all of whom it could be said he was in agreement with. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if he had more respect for our members he could have found time to meet us by now.”

And so it seems the polite approach has left the Archbishop of Canterbury unmoved and unwilling to talk or, as Dr Carey might put it: “Meet the poofs? No way, Jose!” In the face of this intransigence, what option is left but a direct approach (even if it was at a moment which might be described as “inconvenient” for our pouting primate)? What a shame it wasn’t Richard Kirker who stepped up into the pulpit, Filofax at the ready, advising the Archbishop that he could fit him in just about any time.

But Christians are nothing if not blinkered. A Mr A. D. Keith of Newcastle wrote to The Daily Express that “Tatchell and his cohorts fail to realise that Christians are not militant people and will be horrified by their hard-line tactics.” I wonder if Mr Keith has met Julian Brazier MP, or Dr Adrian Rodgers of Exeter?

He might also be interested in a letter in The Church Times from Tony Crowe, who wrote about the perils of confrontation, and the danger that it can “polarise deeply-held convictions”. Mr Crowe recalls an incident which took place in 1985 at St Luke’s Church in Charlton. “I celebrated Eucharist in thanksgiving for a friendship between two men that had lasted for 25 years. More than 100 attended, including several clergy and the late Bishop Edmund Capper, to show their support for the couple, who were deeply committed to each other. Before the service, the Thirty-Nine Articles were nailed to the church door. During the sermon, a born-again Christian invaded the pulpit and quoted verses from Romans. Intercessions were also interrupted by fundamentalist protesters. St Luke’s was a first-hand experience of homophobia, which united us in solidarity with those who had been oppressed because of their sexuality down the ages. Sensational press reports resulted in attacks on the rectory. My wife’s car was turned over. There were differences with local churches. There is still on-going dialogue with a neighbouring parish.”

Yes, indeed, Christians are certainly not militant, they’re peace-loving and non-violent.

***

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has issued its annual report, and congratulates itself on its efficiency. It reveals that of 2,944 complaints it received, “nine out of ten involving a breach of its Code of Practice were resolved”. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what exactly does “resolved” mean? Does it mean that they dragged the cases out for so long that the complainants just gave up? Or did they just get them a behind-the-scenes apology from the newspapers concerned? (“Now, let’s forget all about it, OK?”)

You may remember that I made a complaint to the PCC some months ago about a story in The Sun concerning a nurse in the USA who had allegedly killed a hundred of his patients. None of the other papers that reported the story mentioned the man’s sexuality, but The Sun headed its report “Gay nurse in 100 murders”. I complained to the PCC that this breached the discrimination clause of the Code of Practice, which forbids mention of a person’s sexuality unless it is “directly relevant” to the story. In a letter to the PCC, The Sun put up its hands and admitted “It may be we have breached the letter of Clause 13 of the Code of Practice”.

All cut and dried then? Not so. The PCC ruled that my complaint was “third party” in origin, and therefore not admissible. Only a complaint from the nurse himself would be entertained.

There is no appeal against this decision, but I still maintain that the way papers like The Sun abuse gay people is a matter of general concern, not just relevant to one individual.

I suppose my case was “resolved”, so I assume I’m counted as one of the 2,944 satisfied customers.

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=

If you count the number of times any individual has been mentioned in Media Watch over the years, I think Paul Johnson would probably top the list.

For years the great moralist has been raging against the sexual immorality of our society. He has written repeatedly, and in immoderate and hateful terms, about his disgust at homosexuality. He has called on God to punish us and those who support us. Indeed, once he called on the Almighty to cause Sir Michael Bishop, Chairman of Channel 4, to die in a plane crash. He said Sir Michael was “waging war against Christianity” by broadcasting “15 solid hours of sex-pervert propaganda known as Dyke TV”. Oh yes, Paul Johnson is definitely King of the Bigots.

The Daily Mail was Mr Johnson’s main platform for these fire and brimstone rants. Week after week, Johnson would berate the nation for its lack of virtue. His “we’re all going to damnation” essays were just the ticket for The Mail’s readership. Johnson was completely at home along with the flying saucers, ghosts and quackery that makes up most of the rest of The Daily Mail’s content.

But now Mr Johnson’s house of absolute moral values has come crashing down around his ears. On May 12th, The Daily Express carried a two-page interview with Gloria Stewart, a lady who has been having an affair with Mr Johnson for the past 11 years. She was enraged by an article he wrote in The Mail about his 40th wedding anniversary. In it, he extolled the virtues of a long and happy married life with his wife Marigold.

Ms Stewart revealed that, not only was her relationship with Mr Johnson a sexual one — it was kinky with it! She told how Johnson “loved to be spanked, and this was a big feature of our relationship”. Oh joy of joys!

“Basically I’m a Ten Commandments Christian,” Johnson told Lynda Lee-Potter in The Mail, back in 1987, although presumably now he is a Nine Commandments Christian (or isn’t that Eight, given the lies he must have told his wife?). Then, in 1992, he told Mick Brown of The Daily Telegraph: “One reason why I think the West has succeeded, as opposed to the Muslim world, is that we have a tradition of monogamous marriage.” In 1993, Johnson wrote in The Spectator that he considered “sexual licence, the easy availability of divorce, the decline of monogamous marriage” to be the great evils of the modern world. “What I cannot bear is humbug,” he wrote in the same piece.

When the Tory Government got itself into bother over the Back to Basics campaign, Mr Johnson had a field day. In 1994, in relation to Tim Yeo, a Government minister who was forced to resign for impregnating a woman who was not his wife, Mr Johnson wrote in The Mail, “Adultery is wrong and should be punished. If the offender occupies a high position, then the punishment should be correspondingly severe… The apparently irresistible rise of promiscuity is a sin crying out to heaven for punishment.”

There are reams and reams of similar stuff in the Paul Johnson memorial archive. While he berated others for their sins, he was privately committing those same sins himself.

Ah, hypocrisy, Johnson is thy name!

But, of course, Mr Johnson has friends in high places in the media. His downfall was not reported in The Mail; it was not mentioned in the Murdoch press, either. But in those newspapers that owe no allegiance to the crony-network to which Mr Johnson belongs, there was little mercy.

Victor Lewis-Smith in The Mirror said Paul Johnson “ought to be horsewhipped on the steps of his club” but then thought better of it. “The trouble is, Mr Johnson would probably pay good money to be horsewhipped, and his club is probably called the Pussy-A-Go-Go.”

Christopher Hitchens in The Observer wrote a vitriolic attack on Johnson, obviously settling an old score. But it made great reading. After rubbishing Johnson’s academic posturings, Hitchens wrote: “On the moral front, he employs the Church’s teachings in the same way that a hopeless drunkard uses a lamppost. Over the course of an 11-year illicit liaison, he must have gone to confession fully intending to repeat the sin as soon as possible. To say this makes him a hypocrite is to say the least of it. What it mainly shows is that the sexual code of the Palestinian Bronze Age, with its sinister fairy tales about reward and punishment, is useless, even to those who affect to believe in it.”

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian was less concerned about Johnson’s sexual hypocrisy, more that he promotes himself as Tony Blair’s advisor on family values.

A N Wilson, on the other hand, mounted a defence of the reptile in The London Evening Standard (which, coincidentally, is in the same stable of papers as The Mail). “There are plenty of ways for us journalists to show our loathing of one another,” Wilson wrote, “without resorting to the underhand tricks displayed in The Daily Express.”

Oh, please! Cant on top of hypocrisy, humbug on top of sanctimony. What about the hundreds of innocent people who’ve been destroyed by journalistic underhand tricks? Johnson deserves all the humiliation he gets — so let’s give him some more.

Not only is Paul Johnson professionally repellent, his personal relationships leave much to be desired, too. He may have written rapturously about his 40-year marriage to Marigold, but, as Christopher Hitchens reveals: “In order to make a point in a crowded restaurant, he once struck his wife in the face. Those who intervened were threatened with violence in their turn. In his prose and in his person he repeatedly resorts to wild and lurid threats.”

And his florid, ginger-headed appearance has been likened to “an explosion in a pubic hair factory”.

I have waited a long time to see Paul Johnson get his come-uppance, so you will forgive me for wallowing in it for just a moment longer. For Johnson has not only betrayed his saintly wife, his credulous readers and his children, he has also made a mockery of the religion which he purports to uphold with every fibre of his being.

Mr Johnson has written approvingly of the way that Islam enforces its own moral codes. He seems to think that the choppings and stonings and lashings (especially the lashings) are a good way to keep sinners in line. He will be happy to know that Iran has recently downgraded the penalty for adultery from stoning to fifty lashes. No doubt he will be on the next plane — so long as the flogger is a nubile young girl dressed in leather.

We should not forget that last month two young men in Southport were jailed for 18 months for employing other men to whip them with belts. How come Paul Johnson isn’t banged up, too? Surely he deserves to be punished more severely than most. Or, as Suzanne Moore said: “Johnson’s advice to David Mellor was that he should endeavour to ‘rehabilitate himself with some worthy activity, involving self-sacrifice’. May I suggest that for once, Johnson walks the walk as well as talks the talk and makes the ultimate sacrifice by never writing another word.”

I’ll say amen to that.

***

And while we’re on the topic of grotesque public figures, let us turn our attention to Ann Widdecombe MP, newly-promoted shadow minister for health. Ms Widdecombe, it will be remembered, embraced the Catholic religion a couple of years ago because she did not approve of the CoE’s acceptance of women priests. She has been assaulting us with her personal morality ever since.

We must also remember that this was the woman who stood up in Parliament when the Tories were in power, and justified Michael Howard’s policy of chaining pregnant prisoners to their hospital bed. I remember, at the time, writing to my own MP when I read that another prisoner — a man in this instance who was dying of stomach cancer —had also been chained to his bed during his final hours. Once again, Ms Widdecombe claimed this was justifiable. Ah yes, the joys of being morally superior.

The saintly MP for Maidstone naturally joined the campaign against an equal age of consent for gay men. Writing in The Daily Mail under the heading “Protect your sons from legal gay sex at 16” she describes Labour as “giving its imprimatur to sodomy at 16” and describes the Parliamentary moves towards equality as “the whole revolting business”.

Ms Widdecombe speaks contemptuously of “compassion”, saying that it now just means political correctness. She claims that it is not possible to disapprove of things you find horrible any more, and then goes on to do exactly that, at great length and in a national newspaper.

Ms Widdecombe says in an interview in The Mail that William Hague has done the right thing in getting married: “He has got engaged, he has got married and presumably — in due course — there will be a family. That’s the right progression.”

Oh is it? So why hasn’t she taken that path herself? Why is she still “a spinster” (a term she uses of herself) if she thinks marriage is the “right” way? Another “do as I say, not as I do” merchant.

She reveals that she once had a “chaste” relationship with a man at college, but was relieved when it ended.

Ms Widdecombe is presently being promoted by the right-wing press as the possible saviour of the Tory party (“darling-ised” as The Guardian puts it). She is lauded for her sense of humour and her self-deprecation. The Daily Express even thinks she may be the next Tory leader.

In that case, let’s hope her lousy party never regains office.

***

Those gay Christians who thought that the Lambeth Conference was going to bring them some kind of breakthrough with the Archbishop of Canterbury must be seeing their hopes diminish by the minute. The Church Times reports that “Two bishops with opposing views on homosexuality have drafted a paper which they hope could form the basis of consensus at the Lambeth Conference this summer.”

The bishops in question are John Spong of Newark, New Jersey (pro-gay and a non-believer in most of what the Bible says) and the Reverend Peter Lee of South Africa (definitely anti).

They have produced between them what they call A Catechesis on Homosexuality (what is it with holy Joes and pretentious, inflated language — can’t they just use English, for God’s sake?) Anyway, in this “catachesis” they suggest that the Conference should “take no vote that would imply that one side or the other had won or lost the debate”. They say that if no consensus can be reached (and how could it ever be?), then “an international panel should be set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Christ, not another bleeding international panel. Just the thing for ensuring that nothing happens for at least another ten years.

But, of course, attempts at bringing peace and harmony to the Church of England can only result in further conflict. And it wasn’t long in coming. Canon Michael Saward of St Paul’s Cathedral says that the Lambeth Conference must “massively ignore whatever John Spong says.” And George Austin, the Archdeacon of York says that the plan is doomed to failure because “proponents of the gay lobby have no intention of allowing the real issue to be debated.”

What a fabulous bun-fight the Lambeth Conference is going to be (and, my dear, the frocks!).