Public apathy greets media witch-hunt of gays

When the former Welsh Secretary, Ron Davies, walked into the Commons to give his resignation speech, a few colleagues shook his hand, somebody handed him a glass of water and he confidently strode over to the backbenches to take his seat. As the cameras zoomed in on a baggy-eyed, tired-looking Mr Davies, they picked up on a single word scribbled on the back of his hand - "Sorry". Had it been written, the media asked, to remind him that he should apologise to Mr Blair, the government, or his constituents? Or perhaps, as "sources" from the Metropolitan Police had led Downing Street to believe, for giving a number of misleading statements to officers investigating that incident on a rainy night on Clapham Common?

His resignation speech two weeks ago was devoted more to an attack on the media for their "arbitrary abuse of power" in allowing "rumour and lies" to be asserted as truth, than to any attempt to clear up the confusion about the circumstances of his resignation. In doing so, some observers argued he had fallen into the trap of appealing on the one hand for a more open and tolerant democracy, while on the other failing to see that as a public figure there was a case for arguing a legitimate public interest in the events which prompted his resignation.

One can only guess what lay behind Mr Davies's choice of words, and now that he has resigned his Cabinet post and his prospective appointment as leader of the Welsh Assembly, he has attempted to draw a line under the "stream of rubbish" that was written about his private life.

A few hours earlier, addressing the CBI conference in Birmingham, the Trade and Industry Secretary, Peter Mandelson, made a veiled reference to the BBC edict warning its reporters not to mention the unmentionable. "So nice," he said, "to see so many of my friends in the media, reporting my every word - including correspondents from the BBC, without mentioning me by name." The BBC was spun into action by the outing of Mr Mandelson by the former Tory MP and columnist, Matthew Parris, on Newsnight. Mr Mandelson's supporters claimed a "gay Gestapo" was at work.

Mr Parris, who is openly homosexual, was later sacked as a Sun columnist on the day that the newspaper performed an amazing Uturn, claiming it would no longer "out" homosexuals unless there was "overwhelming" public interest. The decision was seen as an attempt by its editor, David Yelland, to claw back some of the support it had lost in government over Mr Parris's "outing" of Mr Mandelson. And the insulting treatment, bordering on sexual fascism, that it had dished out to homosexuals after Ron Davies's "bizarre incident" two weeks earlier.

Offensive headlines, such as the Sun's suggestion that the British government was being run by a "gay Mafia", in the wake of the enforced "outing" of the Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, did not go down well in Downing Street. The attempt to whip up a public frenzy, with a large dose of Salem and McCarthy mixed in for good measure, was a dangerous road to go down, said the Liberal Democrats. Even more astonishing was its theory that some closet gays, for which read Peter Mandelson, were more acceptable to the public because they were clever and destined for the top, than other less media-friendly closet gays, viz Ron Davies.

It was the same old story from the tabloids, the Daily Telegraph and to a lesser degree the rest of the broadsheets. Most traded in tired cliches about homosexuals and raged about the need to know every salacious detail of Ministers' sexual lives. The repentant Yelland, who hitherto had conducted a Kenneth Starr-style investigation into gay politicians, sought to restore the cosy relationship with Labour by writing an editorial this week insisting the Sun was no longer in the business of "destroying closet gays' lives by `exposing' them as homosexuals".

Some argued that behind the Sun's U-turn was its owner, Rupert Murdoch's, support of the Blair government. And by the same token, Tony Blair's and Peter Mandelson's support of the Sun. Why else then did the Prime Minister's official press spokesman not condemn the Sun's coverage of the enforced "outing" of the Agriculture Minister when the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, was denouncing the newspaper on TV and radio?

On another level, the coverage of the Ron Davies and Nick Brown stories left a very nasty taste in the mouth and was grossly misjudged and ignorant of current public opinion. Just as the public was being force-fed the details of Nick Brown's outing by the News of the World, British voters were telling a Guardian/ICM opinion poll that most people were not concerned about homosexuality.

Fifty six per cent of respondents said being gay was morally acceptable, while 36 per cent disagreed. Encouragingly perhaps, for Mr Mandelson, and definitely, for Mr Brown, was the fact that 52 per cent agreed that being gay was compatible with holding a Cabinet post.

The mistaken assumption was that the public, while gorging on the intimacies of prominent figures, would also sit as avenging judges on Mr Davies et al. Indeed, the British public is largely ambivalent about the sexual orientation of Cabinet members and MPs, and has turned the narrow-minded assumption of a "gay Mafia" on its head by its support of gay MPs so long as they are hardworking, dedicated politicians.