Maurice Oldfield: Who Knew?

A sharp little mystery has been partially solved. Why had my predecessor as MP for West Derbyshire, the late Sir James Scott-Hopkins, so evidently disapproved of me? Why did he try to stop my secretary from taking the job? It had seemed out of character for this mellow and clubbable Old Etonian.

I’ve been reading the manuscript of Martin Pearce’s Spymaster, a gripping and candid new biography of the late Sir Maurice Oldfield, my former constituent and one-time head of MI6. Sir Maurice had to resign as Margaret Thatcher’s Northern Ireland security
co-ordinator when stories of his homosexuality surfaced. Pearce (Sir Maurice was his great-uncle) reveals that Mrs Thatcher visited him on his deathbed and — alone with her former appointee — asked him point-blank if he was gay. He confessed. His family found the dying man weeping after she had gone.

Two years earlier in 1979 Scott-Hopkins’s Westminster secretary was taken aside conspiratorially by the retiring MP and warned that for reasons he knew but could not reveal, she should have nothing to do with his successor — me. Dear Eileen, who now has dementia, confided in me decades later. She had ignored him, bless her, to become my secretary.

Now, in Spymaster, I learn that Scott-Hopkins had been an MI6 officer too.

Matthew Parris, The Times.

In next week's news, Danny LaRue was a drag act.

Matthew Parris Watch: Behold My Face!

No idea what she's going on about this week.

Anyone?

Matthew Parris Watch: Scandal

I will never forget Sunday morning, March 22, 1987. That was the day I was outed in the News of the World. I have the yellowing edition before me as I write.

There had been no advance warning. Preparing for the midday current affairs TV programme I presented, Weekend World, I was leafing idly through the newspaper’s scandal-packed pages with many an amused squawk. A drunk Liberal MP had been dragged by his friends from a brothel. Recently married Sarah Ferguson, desperate to conceive, was taking fertility drugs likely to lead to quadruplets. And a TV personality was worried about spending too much time on the TV sofa with his “TV wife”, Anne Diamond.

I had earlier been giggling, too, about the same paper’s revelation that the prominent and respected Labour MP Roy Hattersley, now Lord Hattersley, had left his wife for another woman, now his wife.

Leafing on I turned to page 18 and, in mid-turn, froze. Hadn’t I just seen my photograph? I paged back. The story, adorned with my picture, was spread across pages 16 and 17. My blood ran cold. The headline? “I am gay, says TV Tory.”

I had said no such thing, of course: as an MP I had learnt never to talk about my private life to avoid lying, but it was true that I was gay and to quibble would be idle. My television production team, fiercely supportive, were outraged that a newspaper would print such stuff and wanted to make a complaint but, though dismayed, I was not outraged. Facts are facts and I’d always argued (and still do) that the papers should publish and be damned, and let readers judge what did or didn’t matter. I couldn’t now complain just because this time the target was me.

Anyway I’d had it coming. What the News of the World did not mention — because nobody knew — was that while I was an MP I’d been beaten up on Clapham Common where I had been “cruising” in search of other men. Looking back now on those years I marvel at what a charmed life I’d led as a politician, and the terrible risks I’d taken...

Matthew Parris, The Times.

Lovely photo of you, Matthew.

I thought she came out in the House of Commons, the first, but nobody noticed - at least that's what she told me - awaiting confirmation.

Matthew Parris: How Did We Get Here?

Parody is now extinct. Boris Johnson has killed the distinction between reality and satire. Remember the Tory who as a wannabe MP called Labour’s repeal of Section 28 “appalling”, who joked about “tank-topped bum-boys”, who sneakily rowed back from homophobia by asking “what’s not to like?” about gays who leave the field of available women clear for straight men? He is now urging gay men to vote Leave because, he says, some Eastern European countries have legislation that represses them.

“It was us,” he burbles on a new Out & Proud video, “the British people, that created [an] environment of happiness and contentment for LGBT people.” It may well have been us. It ruddy well wasn’t him. But now, even into gay saunas creeps the smell of his damp tweed.

Look, this is a joke but this is not a joke. Somebody has to call a halt to the gathering pretence that if only you’re sufficiently comical in politics you can laugh everything off. Somebody has to remind us that it’s not enough for those who seek to govern us simply to be: they have to do. Incompetence is not funny. Policy vacuum is not funny. Administrative sloth is not funny. Breaking promises is not funny. A careless disregard for the truth is not funny. Advising old mates planning to beat somebody up is not funny. Abortions and gagging orders are not funny. Creeping ambition in a jester’s cap is not funny. Vacuity posing as merriment, cynicism posing as savviness, a wink and smile covering for betrayal . . . these things are not funny.

So I present you with a mystery. How did we get here, with Boris Johnson? ...

Matthew Parris' Times column.

LOL! etc.

Matthew Parris: Tintin & Me

Shockwaves ran through continental Europe. The Belgian press were in uproar. Nannies in English stately homes wept openly. Everyone can remember where they were on that morning seven years ago when I outed Tintin in The Times.

Once aired, the theory was obvious, irrefutable. It stared us in the face. An androgynous youth with an extravagant quiff, formerly of the boy scouts, moves in to the country house of a retired middle-aged sailor — his best friends two chaps in matching “his’”and “his” outfits and his only known female friends an opera diva and a curler-wearing virago. Hello? as they say. Tintin’s mincing white toy dog turns out to be almost the only heterosexual male among the leading characters of Tintin’s creator Hergé.

And Tintin’s love-interest? A Chinese boy called Chang Chong-Chen, of a mystical frame of mind, who he rescues from drowning, who appears in his dreams, and who (near the end of Hergé’s writing career) Tintin risks his life to rescue in Tibet. Believing Chang dead, Tintin weeps: only three times in his life is he seen to cry.

Hergé wrote Tintin in Tibet after a nervous breakdown, and separating from his wife. As a young man Hergé had had an intense friendship with a young Chinese student, whom this most reserved Belgian described as a kind of soulmate.

This last fact I had not known, but learnt last Thursday at the Tintin exhibition just ended at Somerset House in London. For Tintinologists the exhibition was full of interest, but I have to report that the truth about our young hero’s life was completely suppressed. Not a hint. Not even an acknowledgment of rumour. Has my whole career in journalism, my seven years as a trustee of Index on Censorship, all been in vain? 

Maffew Parrish in ver Times. 

Maybe best to keep your wank fantasies to yourself, Matthew.
x

Matthew Parris: Under My Umbrella

Oh, don't ask, just don't ask...

Matthew Parris: Victims

Over my political lifetime I’ve watched a common English noun acquire a kind of holiness. The word is “victim”. In almost every field of politics and administration it is being used to lift claims beyond proper scrutiny.

So widely has this word now been stretched that at least one group of victims have appropriated to their cause the word “survivor” — “victim” being no longer enough. Victimhood is used everywhere as a weapon for getting priority, money or attention. It isn’t always wrong; but it is way of seeing the world that risks distorting our perspectives on government...

Gay men in Britain have been lucky our claimed victim status never turned sour. I feared it would — and did have some hint of that in the “what will they want next?” response that gay marriage legislation attracted from some. The HIV/Aids campaign must be counted a success for victim-led campaigning but I was never comfortable with the conflation of homosexuality with victimhood. Aids was a disease. So is lung cancer. Sufferers must be offered all help and sympathy, and the apportionment of blame is cruel and fruitless. But Aids did not make gay rights a nobler cause; the whimper that homosexuals “can’t help it” infuriates me — what difference should it make if we could? — and (vigorous supporter of Stonewall’s work though I remain) it is high time gays stopped playing the sympathy card, held our heads up and accepted we no longer have any urgent claim on the nation’s finite supply of pity...

The Times. 

Of course some have founded an entire career on presenting gay men as perpetual eternal victims.

PS This from Queerty is something of a masterclass in the 'We hate ourselves so much we are literally fucking and drugging ourselves to death!' mis lit school of gay journalism.

Wouldn't be suprised if he gets asked to write a column for Attitude.

Matthew Parris: Everything He Wants

Reading biography, one is normally an outsider looking in on another’s life. But for the first time last week, and much to my surprise, a biography solved a little mystery in my own life. Working my way through the second volume of Charles Moore’s enormous biography of Margaret Thatcher (I was reviewing Everything She Wants for The Times) I stumbled upon his account of my last cup of tea with the then prime minister.

I was taking my leave of the Commons in 1986 to try my hand as a TV presenter. Over tea she fussed and talked incessantly, but right at the end I managed to get in what I had meant to say: that I was gay, many Conservative voters were too, and so were a fair few of my parliamentary colleagues. I suggested that our party needed to change its attitude towards homosexuality. Without comment she put her hand gently on my wrist and said “There, dear, that must have been very hard to say.”

As I left, the third person in the room, her parliamentary private secretary, the late Michael Alison, followed me out. He asked for a list of the MPs I had alluded to. “We might be able to help them,” said the wan and churchy MP, rather spookily. I did not oblige, but wrote about the encounter in my autobiography, Chance Witness. Mr Moore must have seen it there, and later interviewed Mr Alison’s secretary at the time.

Moore adds: “Parris naturally assumed that Alison wanted the information to use against the men later. In fact, Alison told his secretary at the time, he had asked for the names so that he could pray for them.”

The Times.

LOL etc!

Syrian Refugee Crisis: Caring, Sharing...

Send us your selfie to show that you care!

Part of the Independent's achingly sincere, self-serving Refugees Welcome 'campaign' - hideous.

The Indy was the only British newspaper to put the emotional pornography of that photograph showing the dead baby in full on their front page yesterday.

A strong piece by Max Fisher for Vox.

The massed index fingers of social media ain't been this angry and sad since Cecil The Lion!

Now to Tweet, Share and RT...

PS Mirror online have resurrected this story from April; Michael Portillo says desperate Mediterranean refugees should be 'dumped on a Libyan beach. Yes, that's the Michael Portillo whose father was a refugee from the Franco regime. Not the first time she's had a strange sense of recall about her past.

Matthew Parris in his Times' column, Saturday...

There are moments when a shaft of ice should enter the soul. Yes, I too saw the photograph of the dead child. Yes, I too had to brush away a tear. But weeping at pictures is not a policy, and saying “we must do more” is not a policy. Policy seeks remedies, and the remedy for the refugee crisis is no more apparent now that we have seen a picture of a lifeless toddler than it was before it.

What kind of primitives have we become that we need to see a drowned person before we acknowledge to ourselves that people are drowning? Did we not know, had we not read, that migrant children drowned? What happened to the written word? Are newspapers and broadcasters to dispense altogether with report and analysis and offer us only a slide show? “Tragic,” “shaming”, “shocking” — this is politics by adjective. We need some nouns... 
 

NOT EXCLUSIVE: We continue to exploit the drowning of two children by pretending we’d have cared about them if they’d arrived here alive.

— The DM Reporter (@DMReporter) September 5, 2015

Matthew Parris: Our Glorious Queen

Heretic!

Ted Heath: Unbelievable

 

Regular viewers may have noticed that Fagburn went into involuntary exile just after one of the most lunatic episodes in the British media of all time; ludicrous and unfounded claims that former PM Ted Heath was a child molester were splashed all over the front pages as if they were serious charges.

I sometimes suspect my old computer may have commited suicide in despair.

Here's the Sunday People - easily the worst offender - claiming Edward Heath attended meetings of the Paedophile Information Exchange and used to rape and murder boys on his yacht.

Uh-huh...

Several papers later ran articles by columnists pointing out what an avalanche of absolute nonsense it all was.

For the record, here are four of the best...

How easy it is to convict the dead and defenceless, Simon Jenkins, The Guardian.

There's no evidence against Ted Heath, Ann Widdecombe (hell yes!), Daily Express.

The crusade against Ted Heath: Dancing on people's graves, Frank Furedi, Spiked.

If Heath was a child abuser, I'm an aardvark, Matthew Parris, The Times.

Admittedly, Fagburn is going out on a limb here and is working on the assumption that none of these people are members of the infamous Dolphin Square VIP paedophile ring and are just covering the late Sir Edward's tracks.

PS It goes on. Sky News today; Prison worker makes Ted Heath allegation.

Matthew Parris Watch: What On Earth?

The Times.

Err...

Thought For The Day: Matthew Parris

Those of us who founded Stonewall had it easy. Not because the media and the establishment were sympathetic to our cause (at first they were not) but because we had sharply defined goals, mostly legislative. We knew what we were pitching for, and whom to lobby; and we knew what counted as success. Those formal battles have almost all been won. But in schools, in some police forces, in sport and in the workplace there is still prejudice. No law will change this. Cultural change is slow, untidy, formless — not a pitched battle between two sides — and persuasion is so much harder than legislation. Ian [McKellen], Michael [Cashman] and I don’t envy today’s campaigners. They should envy us.

Matthew Parris, The Times.

PS Comments include a brief exchange between Mr Parris and Mr Fagburn about Mr Cashman.

Matthew Parris: On Public Prosecutions

Last weekend my former parliamentary colleague Harvey Proctor published in a Sunday newspaper a moving statement. You may remember that two months ago the police raided his home in Leicestershire, spending 15 hours there and taking away his mobile phone, his laptop and all his personal records. They told him (and still tell him) he is not a suspect in their Operation Midland inquiry into historical child abuse; but they tipped off the media anyway, and a storm broke over Harvey’s head.

Declaring his complete innocence, and ignorance of anything about the fabled “Westminster gay paedophile sex ring” and anxious to put this on the record he has begged for an early interview, but the police keep postponing it. Now he has lost his home and his job. Desperate to resume his life, he challenges the police to “put up or shut up”.

I know Harvey. We talked on Monday. I’m convinced he had nothing to do with any MPs’ paedophile ring and doubt it existed. My guess is that the police have realised this too but won’t climb down and admit that by turning a routine search into a nationally publicised raid they have shattered a life and impugned a reputation. So they leave an innocent man to rot, until the interest they stirred up has faded.

From Matthew Parris' Times Diary.

Mr Parris does not mention this, but in a sympathetic profile in Friday's Independent, Proctor says that a supportive phone call and dinner invitation from Matthew stopped Harvey from killing himself.

Last week, Parris had this to say about Lord Janner...

I have no brief for (Lord) Greville Janner. I found him ingratiating and a bit of a bully. And I haven’t the least idea of the truth of allegations against him, nor any view on whether today he’s fit to plead.

But in attacking the judgment of Alison Saunders as director of public prosecutions, the behaviour of senior politicians, from the PM and home secretary downwards, was disgraceful. As for (Lord) Ken Macdonald, in post as DPP when it was decided not to prosecute Janner — to criticise his successor in print was offside.

DPPs are independent, they make decisions on the information they have, and the whole idea of their office is that they should accept no interference from politicians, peers or newspaper editorials. They must stand outside what some prattling MP has called — in that sinister phrase — “the court of public opinion”. This general election is corroding the judgments of people who ought to (and, worse, do) know better.

How strange so many journalists have remained silent on these two very different, but equally rum cases.

And how sad so many politicians have spoken out for the posturing populism of overturning the DPP's Janner decision.

Matthew Parris: Gay Orgies And Murder

Borgias are back

Last Wednesday’s edition of The Times carried a report beneath an arresting headline whose first word I shall asterisk while you wonder what we’re talking about. The headline was: “******* rocked by gay orgies and murder”.

Got it yet? Here’s a massive clue. The report appeared on page 28 of the newspaper: editors must have judged the story minor. Guessed it now? Of course you have. “Vatican”.

The Times.

For the record, 'murder' was in inverted commas.

This week Matthew also talks about walking after midnight and his boyf's mum's 70th birthday party.

PS Vatican's silence over 'rejection' of French gay ambassador. Irony!

Thought For The Gay Day: Matthew Parris

From Miss Matthew's Times' column.

Telegraph: Th Arrival Of Same-sex Marriage On Year Ago... [sic]

I was seventeen in 1987; if I recall correctly, that was my year of chairing the local Young Conservatives. Thatcher’s conference line, and Section 28 that followed it, devastated my psychological development. I resigned from the YCs, but couldn’t, of course, spell out why. First love arrived a year later, at 18, but I fled from, and hurt, that first man who had found me in the university library, and thought me worthwhile. I couldn’t square my desire for that man with the sermon the Prime Minister and her – my – party were teaching the country...

Jesus wept.

Must be a scream at the Telegraph offices these days - even if you've sacked all your subs - say hiya to Paul and Tim!

PS Oh, hang on...

Said the gay Tory who was an MP in the Thatcher years...

Harvey Proctor: Fly Swatting

Needless to say the media had been tipped off. The BBC bulletin that morning said: “Police investigating allegations of an establishment paedophile ring have searched the home of former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor... fined in 1987 for gross indecency.” As it happens that was Alan Turing’s crime in 1952.

Mr Proctor’s comment may not surprise you: “I do not think I’ve been oversensitive in thinking that there is an element of guilt by association in your report.” In fact the police haven’t even suggested Proctor is a suspect, but he has now been cornered into denying what nobody has alleged — triggering a new round of media headlines “Harvey Proctor denies . . .” etc. Kafkaesque is precisely the word.

I watched the BBC’s footage (some of it filmed from a helicopter) when Cliff Richard’s place was raided in his absence and without his knowledge, after an exclusivity deal had been done between the police and the BBC: footage the corporation then had the impertinence to enter for a Royal Television Society award. I’ve never met Cliff Richard — but heaven knows some astonishing unlikelihoods have turned out to be true in other cases — so I said nothing.

I followed the year’s hell the broadcaster Paul Gambaccini went through after his arrest on suspicion of historical sex offences as part of Operation Yewtree (dropping him as my guest on my Great Lives radio series) until, finally, no charges were brought. I do know Mr Gambaccini slightly and seriously doubted there’d be anything in this — but, heaven knows, etc — so I said nothing.

I was a friend of Harvey Proctor during his ordeals; and if Harvey (a very private man who never talked about his homosexuality even to me as a fellow-gay, fellow-Tory MP, but has had, so far as I know, not the remotest interest in children) was ever involved in a “ring of top people”, then I’ll eat my hat. But, heaven knows, etc . . .

Or, rather, no: this time I’ll say something. I think the story’s absolute b****cks. The comment about Mr Proctor from the MP-turned-witchfinder-general John Mann, that “the police have said they will go where the evidence takes them and that’s exactly what they should do” is disgraceful. What evidence? Does Mr Mann know of any here? I very much doubt the police do. This is nothing to do with evidence: it’s the police canteen culture talking: “He’s gay, he’s got a conviction, a loner and he was an MP, hey — let’s check him out. And tell the media. Who knows — maybe someone will ring in.”...

A rightly and righteously impassioned piece by Matthew Parris in The Times.

It was well-known while he was alive that Cyril Smith was guilty of the most heinous crimes against boys,  and he was allowed to get away with it, but the Dolphin Square story sounds like complete fantasy.

Or, as Mr Parris so eloquently puts it, 'absolute bollocks'.

Matthew Parris: On Drugs

Why was I babbling about soup kitchens? Only minutes had passed — I knew that because it’s about five minutes to Temple in London by minicab from the laboratory I had just left near Russell Square. Yet surely my researcher and I had been in the cab for half an hour and surely his worried silence had lasted all that time? Dalí-like, the clock had gone all rubbery.

With some heightened sense of mood I knew he was worried: worrying that he should have warned me off. And here I was now, babbling about soup kitchens and due at my partner’s place for dinner with his boss in an hour, and my mind kept stalling and all idea of time had gone elastic. How was I going to hold it all together when I couldn’t hold my own train of thought for ten seconds?

This was my lowest point. I was truly stoned and it wasn’t amazing and it wasn’t cool, it was just horrible. I felt stupid, I was battling to keep control and didn’t want anyone to know.

The Times.

Matthew Parris Watch: Hmm...

Looks like Matthew was having a jolly good think about something over the weekend.

More when we find interest.