Coming out

At the age of 50, Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt has left his wife of 20 years, by whom two children, to "come to terms with his homosexuality". One presumes there is a discovered boy-friend involved, but whatever the proximate cause there is reason to celebrate whenever a politician renounces hypocrisy in his private life.

Was he also hypocritical in public life? Someone has very quickly edited his Wikipedia entry to read that his voting record in Parliament "had previously been broadly unsympathetic towards gay rights", but in fact it reflects the sort of passage from denial to acceptance that one would expect.

Meanwhile the Telegraph reports that an unnamed, married cabinet minister has been accused of having an affair with a Whitehall official and of having a long-term relationship with a journalist.

He has strongly denied the allegations. Senior Downing Street aides are braced this weekend for “suggestive” reports to begin surfacing over the Cabinet minister’s private life. Friends of the minister have warned that he will not hesitate to take “action” should unfounded allegations that he is homosexual, which are circulating on the internet [and which identify him as William Hague], appear in mainstream media.

Now that all the legal proscriptions are gone, it seems to me the final liberation of homosexuals must be personal and one hopes, in future, private. Unless a public figure has made political capital out of misrepresenting his or her private life, then I don't think it's any of my - or anyone else's - business.

I used to think that the crotch-snuffling voyeurism and gossip that characterises British journopukery was just one aspect of the general dominance of male homosexuals in all aspects of British culture; but I now believe it's merely a reflection of the shallowness of whole enterprise, which attracts bitchy homs and heteros alike.