The UK Parliament boasts more ‘out’ LGBT members than any other parliament in the world. I was recently commissioned to interview some of them for the gay glossy magazine Pride Life. When I began my research the number of openly-gay LGBT members stood at 37. In the light of the Sunday Mirror’s expose of Keith Vaz, we can now make that number 38. The real number of gay MPs is actually likely to be even higher.
While seeking out MPs whom I thought might be happy to speak to me, I inadvertently mailed a male MP I had always supposed was gay. He turned down my request for an interview on the perfectly reasonable grounds that he was in fact heterosexual. And then he forwarded me the names of a number of colleagues who ‘might be willing to help’. Although short the list came as something of a surprise. One or two I dismissed immediately, others I had to ‘google’, only to discover from their Wikipedia entry that they were either married, with or without children, or partnered to someone of the opposite sex. It seemed that none were gay at all. This could of course simply be a case of over-exuberant mischief-making, or it could be indicative of a Commons culture which remains less than open.
The name Keith Vaz did not appear on any list. Anyone who has ever met Vaz knows better than to bring the subject up. But the Sunday Mirror’s revelations, as unnecessary and scurrilous as they were, would have surprised no one.
The surprise, is that a man such as Vaz, known in parliament as ‘Vazeline’ (for the reason that nothing seems to stick to him) should have felt the need to remain so coy in the first place.
It was 33 years ago that Chris Smith became the first gay MP to out himself, at a rally in Rugby. Parliament then was “a very lonely place,” Smith told me. Well it’s a lot less lonely now. Unless of course, you’re Keith Vaz. Unlike the commendable Smith, who outed himself while he still had a choice, Vaz will win plaudits from no one. Nor does he deserve to. Jess Phillips, Vaz’s Birmingham Yardley colleague tweeted: “I don’t give a toss what people do in their private lives, I do give a toss about sexual exploitation. Nothing funny about today’s news.” Except of course, there is. Notwithstanding the fact that sleeping with Keith Vaz would not top anyone’s bucket list, the revelations that he (allegedly) entertained a number of eastern European male escorts in his London flat is likely to send a shiver of schadenfreude through the Commons corridors. “European immigrants must not be used as pawns in a complicated chess game,” he warned post-Brexit. Chess? I thought they were playing Twister! Apparently Vaz told his guests he was a washing machine salesman named Jim. I doubt Vaz knows his drum-paddle from his drain pump.
But does any of this really matter? Well, yes, it does. Why? Because Keith Vaz is a high-profile MP, and with that profile comes not only power, as Chair of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, but responsibility – not least to his constituents, a number of whom will be young gay men, who on reading about their MP, will see ‘shame’ writ large.
Compare Vaz’s indignity with the ‘outing’ of Bishop Nicholas Chamberlain, who has never claimed to be anything other he is. The only shame that attaches itself to Chamberlain, who has become the UK’s first openly gay Bishop, is that he is a man of the cloth, and therefore prohibited by his employer, from entering into a full marriage and all that would entail.
The article I was asked to write was intended to be a celebration of just far we have come as an inclusive society, one that is now happy to elect as many LGBT Tories as it does LGBT Labour MPs to Parliament. In the interests of political balance I also spoke to the amiable David ‘Fluffy’ Mundell, appointed by David Cameron as Secretary of State for Scotland in 2015, thereby becoming the first Conservative LGBT cabinet minister. In fact, as Mundell is the only Tory in Scotland, the entire Scottish Conservative parliamentary party is gay. And that’s a sentence I never envisaged myself writing.
A common theme that emerged during my chats with LGBT MPs was the hugely positive effect that coming out had had not just on their own lives, but on the people they represent in parliament. And then there’s Keith Vaz.
Like Jess Phillips, I couldn’t give a toss what people get up to in their private lives. But when those same people are in a position to make a real difference to the lives of others, it seems a wasted opportunity not to do so. Instead of headlines about ‘Sex Shame Politician Keith Vaz’ imagine ‘I’m Gay and Proud says hard-working Leicester MP’. Now that would be a story worth reading.
