Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (65 page)

Thatcher, however, chose to ignore the advice of the social and religious commentator Malcolm Muggeridge who wrote to her advocating bringing the anti-smut campaigner Mary
Whitehouse into the Cabinet to articulate the response to the crisis.
⁴⁷
Much as the prime minister instinctively found distasteful the sending of
leaflets discussing ‘anal sex’ to every home in the land, she accepted the judgement of her health secretary, Norman Fowler, and health minister, Tony Newton, that an uninhibited
explanation of the risks and preventive measures should be the priority. Fowler and Newton also secured an increase to their department’s budget for Aids publicity from £2.5 million to
£20 million. The government’s first major campaign was launched in March 1986 and gave practical – as opposed to moral – advice. In November, a special Cabinet committee,
chaired by the deputy prime minister, Willie Whitelaw, began coordinating government action, discussing the threat from Aids in tones previously reserved for war and terrorism. Among the ideas
muted (before being dropped) was for the health secretary to deliver a broadcast to the nation. Two weeks later, an emergency debate in the Commons revealed considerable cross-party support for the
approach adopted by Fowler and Whitelaw’s Cabinet committee. In the New Year, the official leaflet went out to the nation’s twenty-three million households. It recommended the use of
condoms and advised against sharing needles for injecting drugs, counselling parents to discuss these precautions with their family, because ‘whether you approve of it or not, many teenagers
do have sex and some may experiment with drugs. Even if you think your children don’t, they will need advice because they may have friends who encourage them to.’ It went on to offer
reassurance that the virus could not be passed on through shaking hands, kissing, sharing cups and cutlery or from public baths or lavatory seats.
⁴⁸
The leaflet, entitled ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’, was supported by an intensive advertising campaign which ran across billboards, television (the BBC as well
as ITV and Channel 4) and in cinemas, relaying the hard-hitting message alongside imposing images of icebergs whose great bulk lay concealed beneath the surface and giant tombstones chiselled with
the word ‘Aids’.

While the government was at pains to instil the message that protecting against the virus was everyone’s responsibility, the disease naturally returned homosexuality to the forefront of
national attention. Lesbianism had always escaped the restrictions of statute law, while sex between consenting men over the age of twenty-one had been legal in England and Wales since 1967. But it
had remained illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where public opinion had prevented the reform’s extension. It took the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 to legalize it in Scotland
and, following a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the government legislated to decriminalize male gay acts in Ulster in 1982. Throughout the realm, the
law continued to prosecute men under the age of twenty-one who had gay sex, for which there were over two thousand arrests between 1988 and 1991 alone.
⁴⁹
Popular apprehensions were hardly likely to be allayed by the spread of Aids. A British Social Attitudes survey suggested the proportion of those believing homosexual
relationships were either always or mostly wrong had risen from almost two thirds in 1983 to three quarters of the population by 1988. Only 10 per cent of Scots stated that they thought there was
nothing wrong with homosexuality.
⁵⁰

In 1976, what became the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement was founded by two Anglican priests, Richard Kirker and Peter Elers, the latter having escaped with a mild admonishment for performing
a service of blessing – interpreted as a symbolic wedding – for two lesbian couples. In February 1981, Elers and another vicar, Robert Lewis, testified to their sexuality before the
Church of England’s General Synod. Both clergymen continued to enjoy the support of their parishioners and efforts to pass condemnatory motions were sidelined by the synod. Already poised for
possible schism over the issue of female ordination, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, was particularly keen to avoid opening a new avenue for division, though he did express his
personal sentiment that homosexuals ought not simply to be condemned as sinners but treated with greater understanding, as if they were disabled – because the disabled could often
‘obtain a degree of self-giving and compassion which are denied to those not similarly afflicted’. He thought it acceptable for clergymen to campaign for gay liberation, but they could
not remain ordained if the zeal of their campaign was to the detriment of their other duties.
⁵¹
In November 1987, the General Synod passed a
motion that gay sex – along with fornication and adultery – fell ‘short of the ideal’ and therefore necessitated repentance, while rejecting another motion calling for
homosexual clergy to be removed from their posts.

Meanwhile, gay politicians remained reticent about ‘coming out’. The revelation in the mid-seventies that the Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun had left her family for another woman was
quickly followed by an attempt to deselect her by her constituency party. She was reinstated, only to lose her seat in the 1979 general election. That George Thomas, the Speaker of the House until
1983, was gay remained unknown beyond a few trusted friends. It was a private life the Methodist lay preacher was prepared to protect even at the expense of paying off blackmailers.
⁵²
Speaking briefly during the Commons debate in October 1982 which legalized homosexual acts in Northern Ireland, Matthew Parris made clear he supported the
measure ‘strongly and personally . . . with all my heart’, a choice of words to which no deeper meaning was accorded at the time. As Parris later confessed: ‘Not the whips, not my
parliamentary colleagues and not the press, but anxiety
about my constituency and all the good people there who had taken me on trust and worked for me: this was what in the
end held me back from making myself plain.’ The following year, after Parris had spoken at an Oxford Union debate in favour of gay rights, a whip tried to offer him well-intentioned advice:
‘I don’t believe in God. But I don’t shout about it. I don’t feel the need to add it to my election address at general elections – special box, bold type:
Your
Conservative candidate does not believe in God
. . . It’s private.’
⁵³

The Bermondsey by-election of February 1983 demonstrated both the perils of making an issue out of gay rights and the level of innuendo to which a candidate suspected of homosexuality could be
subjected. The local Labour party had adopted as their candidate Peter Tatchell. The young agitator’s views were controversial, for besides gay rights he was also an opponent of the monarchy
and had written about the case for ‘direct action’ beyond Parliament. But he was defending a majority of almost twelve thousand and there was not much chance of a constituency in a
deprived stretch of south-east London returning a Tory. Tatchell was nevertheless persuaded by the Labour Party not to confirm his sexual orientation – though given the publicity, nudges and
winks to which he was subjected during the campaign, staying in the closet hardly offered much shelter. The attention of the tabloid press, for whom Tatchell was the embodiment of everything that
had gone wrong with Labour, was supplemented by the smear tactics of local Liberal activists campaigning for their candidate, Simon Hughes.
⁵⁴
Badges were produced with the boast ‘I have been kissed by Peter Tatchell’, while Hughes’s campaign literature announced that he offered ‘the Straight Choice’ against
his Labour opponent. Anonymous leaflets were also widely circulated with a picture of Her Majesty and a photograph of a particularly effeminate-looking Tatchell alongside the question ‘Which
Queen Will You Vote For?’ The result was an unwanted post-war record for Labour: a swing away from the party of 44 per cent and a 9,319 Liberal majority. Having won the seat, ‘the
Straight Choice’ did not admit to his own bisexuality until twenty-four years later, by which time he was president of the Liberal Democrats.

In such circumstances, it was courageous of the Labour MP Chris Smith to become, in November 1984, the first politician to ‘out’ himself. His example spurred no immediate imitators,
even though within three years he was appointed to the shadow Treasury team. Instead, in June 1986 scandal exposed the right-wing Conservative MP for Billericay, Harvey Proctor, whose participation
in spanking parties with, among others, a seventeen-year-old rent boy, ended his parliamentary career with a prosecution and a fine for gross indecency. The actor Michael Cashman’s portrayal
of an altogether more committed gay relationship – the first of its kind to be aired on
British television – featured in
EastEnders
in 1987. Cashman duly
found himself joining Sir Ian McKellen and other prominent campaigners in opposing a measure that came to epitomize the counter-attack against gay rights. In doing so, Cashman and McKellen were
instrumental in establishing the gay pressure group Stonewall. The
casus belli
was the stocking in some libraries of
Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin
, a picture-book for primary
school children about a young girl living happily with her father and his boyfriend. Having received little attention on its publication in 1981, the book suddenly became – at least in terms
of public notoriety – the
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
of 1987. For those like the arts minister, Richard Luce, there seemed to be an extraordinary double standard operating whereby
the Labour-controlled councils that intentionally stocked children’s libraries with books ‘which seemed positively to advocate homosexuality’ were usually the same authorities
that simultaneously banned books ‘which had given generations of children great pleasure because they were allegedly “racist” or “sexist”’.
⁵⁵
While no legal mechanism existed to save Biggles or the Famous Five from becoming proscribed reading in Labour-run libraries, two Conservative backbenchers,
David Wilshire and Dame Jill Knight, took it upon themselves to retaliate by banning the likes of
Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin
. They did so by tabling an amendment – Section 28
– to the local government bill which stipulated that local authorities ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality’ nor ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of
the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. The measure passed with government support, even though legally it was effectively unworkable because the difference
between providing information upon – as distinct from promoting – homosexuality was not easily definable, and the government had made clear that it did not apply to educational material
in the fight to contain Aids. The expectation of the Tory backbencher Peter Bruinvels (who duly lost his seat in the 1987 general election) that it would ‘help outlaw’ homosexuality,
‘and the rest will be done by Aids’, proved far from prescient.
⁵⁶
No prosecutions under Section 28 had been brought by the time of its
repeal in 2003. What was intended as a totem of Tory support for family values and opposition to the supposed ‘misuse’ of local ratepayers’ money by left-wing councils managed
only to garner sympathy for the gay rights cause. A law directed specifically against a named minority smacked of vilification and contributed towards the perception that the Conservatives were not
the party of civil liberties.

Faith, Hope and Charity

In 1975, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, issued a ‘call to the nation’ beseeching Britons to consider the sort of society in which they
wished to live and to embrace the need for spiritual renewal. Fleetingly, there was a response, followed by a murmur and then silence. Understandably, Coggan’s successor, Robert
Runcie, was not encouraged to come up with an encore. Holding together a Church of England whose unity risked fracture over the extent of its engagement with secular attitudes, rather than a
comprehensive reassertion of the spiritual over the secular, encapsulated Runcie’s tenure at Canterbury, which ran from 1980 to 1991, almost contemporaneously with Thatcher’s
premiership. In his politics as in expounding his personal theology, Runcie’s tone was undemonstrative and, as such, suited to the task of conciliation. This unceasing search for consensus
– not least where little of it could be discerned – represented a very different approach from that of Thatcher, whom he had first met in 1946 when both were members of the Oxford
University Conservative Association (though only one of them also had a subscription to the University’s Labour Club). Some controversial issues he safely navigated. The issue of homosexual
clergymen was deferred rather than defused. The pronouncement of the General Synod’s standing committee in February 1981 against re-examining the prohibition on church weddings for divorced
persons kept another contentious matter off the agenda, though – after a struggle with the ecclesiastical committee of Parliament – being divorced ceased to be a bar to ordination in
1990. Calming the debate over ordaining women clergy proved altogether more difficult.

That the church could proceed, in principle, towards examining how women might be ordained as priests had been affirmed by the General Synod in 1975. The practical difficulty of finding the
necessary majority for any such scheme explained why no enabling legislation ensued. In July 1979, the Movement for the Ordination of Women was founded with the Bishop of Manchester, Stanley
Booth-Clibbon, as moderator. Battle lines were drawn by the formation of its two opposing forces, Women Against the Ordination of Women and the Association for the Apostolic Ministry. These
‘antis’ found a champion in Graham Leonard, the traditionalist whom Thatcher appointed in 1981 as Bishop of London, even though the prime minister also expressed her personal support
for women’s ordination. Among the clerics duly outraged at her effrontery in straying beyond the temporal realm was the Bishop of Leicester, who slapped her down with the retort: ‘I do
not recall that she has studied theology.’
⁵⁷
In reality, the theological nature of the debate was complicated by practical politics –
in particular, what provision would be made for dissenting clergy. Ordaining women could only hinder ecumenical approaches towards the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, if the dissenting vicars could
not be appeased, the prospect lay open for a sizeable defection to Rome. Eventually, in 1987, all three houses of the General Synod got as far as passing a motion that would enable
a definitive vote to be taken on women’s ordination.
^EN29
It was a sign of how much persuasion and inducement remained necessary in
order to secure reform that a further five years elapsed before the vote was finally held, in November 1992, with victory for female ordination then secured by a margin so narrow that if two
members of the laity had voted the other way the necessary two thirds majority would not have been reached.