AUDASE

Britain's gay Prime Minister It was only forty years ago
Has Britain already had a gay Prime Minister - only a few decades ago? The answer now seems to be yes. Brian Coleman, a Tory member of the London Assembly, finally pushed the rumours into the public domain last month when he said it was "common knowledge" in Tory circles that Edward Heath, Conservative resident of Number Ten Downing Street from 1970 to 1974, was gay. Coleman claims Heath had to be warned warned by police to stop cottaging in 1955, when he ascended to the Cabinet. There were splutters of denial from some of the old Tory establishment to the allegations. Heath's successor as Tory MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, snapped: "Ted was absolutely wedded to politics. He didn't have a great deal of personal companionship in his life but there are people who are capable of getting on without companionship."But people who knew him well said Coleman was broadly right. Matthew Parris, a gay Tory MP-turned-columnist who knew Heath, thinks he "probably was" gay. He explains: "Ever since, as a young MP, I escorted his car into my constituency, leather-jacketed on my motorbike, I used to notice the twinkle in Ted's eye... Ted simply loved male company. He like to be teased, even twitted, by younger men. Women at his table - and there were few - tended to be ignored unless they stood up for themselves."Yet gay people have been strangely reluctant to embrace the news that Heath was (to borrow a phrase from his arch-enemy, Margaret Thatcher) One of Us. Julian Clary asked: "Must we? Aren't there some grounds on which he can be disqualified? I do hope I didn't inadvertently pleasure Ted Heath all those years ago. Please God, I feel nauseous just thinking about it."So who was this lost gay Prime Minister? Edward Heath was the first Tory leader in modern times from a poor background. His mother had been a maid in Broadstairs, Kent, and he climbed from grammar school to Oxford into the Tory ranks. He seems to have sublimated his sexuality into obsessive ambition, becoming a champion sailor, a concert-level conductor, and the leader of the country. At the time, the rival Labour politician Barbra Castle looked at these achievements and said: "We do not know if Mr Heath is a repressed homosexual or a repressed heterosexual. All we can say is that he is a repressed something." He seemed so sexually unusual that his biographer John Campbell records a rumour that swept across London during his Premiership. Every Friday night, it was said, a black limo was pull up outside Number Ten and he would be whisked to Regent's Park. The gates to London Zoo would silently swing open and Heath would be led to the panda den - into which he would descend for a long fuck-session with the Chinese bears.This ridiculous fantasy nonetheless captures something. Heath seemed to the outside world to be a notoriously cold, odd man. His Prime Ministership is usually considered to be a disaster, since he was forced to turn out the lights in Britain and reduce the country to a three-day working week in the face of industrial action. But he had one towering passion and achievement: he brought Britain into the European Union, the cause to which he dedicated his life. As a young man, he cycled across Europe, even feeling Hitler brush past him at a Nazi rally where he gaped at in horror. After serving as a soldier in the war, he became determined that the only way to prevent Europe from consuming itself once more in fire and blood was to build a united continent.This was only one of the issues on which Heath became bitterly divided from the woman who came to dominate the last years of his life: Margaret Thatcher. As PM, Heath was reluctant to promote Thatcher to the Cabinet because he presciently guessed that "if we do, we'll never bloody get rid of her." But he did - and Thatcher knifed him, siezing the Tory leadership from him in 1976. For the rest of his life, Heath famously sunk into "the longest sulk in history", refusing to accept he had been deposed and damning Thatcher (usually for good reasons) at every opportunity. When she finally fell from power in 1991, he said just one word: "Rejoice."Although he kept it secret, at no point was Heath a hypocrite about his sexuality. He supported liberalizing the country's anti-gay laws. It's true that, as Chief Whip in 1958, he had to sack the Foreign Office minister Ian Harvey in 1958 after he was caught sucking off a 19 year-old Guardsman in Hyde Park - but that was for stupid indiscretion, not his sexuality. If Harvey had been caught performing cunnilingus on a 19 year old girl in a park, he would have suffered the same fate.But should we care? Does this submerged history matter? Peter Tatchell thinks it does. He says that the gay rights movement has been "fighting a great liberation struggle handicapped by an almost total lack of knowledge of our own past. Our minds are colonised by a straight version of history, where we gay people are invisible. Our existence has been erased from the historical record. Apart from Oscar Wilde, the only gay people who come to attention in the history books are mass murderers, spies, child abusers and men entrapped by the police in public toilets."Heath probably was not our first gay Prime Minister either. Pitt the Younger was famously attached to a young male friend, Tom Steele, who he would take to Brighton (then, as now, a gay haunt) on long holidays and write fawning letters to him. At the time, people compared Steele to the gay men who had influenced kings. Pitt would go with straight friends into brothels, but never touched a woman. His biographer William Hague - who faced gay rumours himself until he married - says "we have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual" but the most likely answer is that "Pitt had homosexual leanings but supressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions."Showing that there were gay people in every crevice of history - even at the apex of power - shows how normal and ordinary and ineradicable homosexuality is, and always will be. It's not about "role models". It about our sheer, unexciting ordinariness.And it's revealing that the people most keen to scorn these revelations about the gay Prime Ministers in our past are the people who would be most hostile to gay Prime Ministers in our future. Andrew Roberts, a far right historian, sniped in the Daily Express that discussing the sexuality of dead figures is "a baleful phenomenon" which "adds to a new terror to death - that someone can be accused of performing then-criminal acts such as cottaging." He insisted Heath was suffering from "a rare for of thyroid complaint" that made him "asexual".A gaggle of ugly right-wing commentators has declared that Britain will never again tolerate a gay leader. Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph says it is "undesirable" that "political parties or governments should have an unrepresentative number of homosexuals in their upper ranks. As the present Labour administration has demonstrated, it is difficult for ministers to grasp problems affecting the family if you don't have one." Glossing over the bizarre idea that gay people don't have families - does he think we hatch from an egg? - he continued, "The obsessive nature of politics that so absorbs homosexuals may also deny them a sense of perspective, and deny them a hinterland in which to retreat."Similarly, Bruce Anderson - a colleague of mine at the Independent, who once charmingly called me "an uppity little queer" during a drunken rant - says, "A homosexual who seemed to be a contender for the premiership might be subjected to the most intense scutiny. Though homosexuals may be the beneficiaries of increasing tolerance, this would not extend to an attempt to adopt children. 'Jonny lives with Bob and Jerry' - possibly, but not in Downing Street."If we want to prove these bigots wrong, we have to show that gay people have always been around power (and everywhere else too) - and we always will be. The only difference is that now we are no longer going to supress our sexuality, as poor sad Ted Heath did, to appease their rancid bigotry.