Johann Hari

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.

POSTSCRIPT: You can read more articles by me on gay issues here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in Attitude to marcelo.dossantos@attitudemag.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

Just click here then scroll down till you see 'Talking with Tatchell'. Eh voila!

And now, congregation, let us turn to the tricky question of Gordon Brown's God.

All Western European politicians now blessedly follow Alistair Campbell's famous injunction - "We don't do God" - in public, knowing that even a hint of theism creeps out their secular electorates. So Brown's surreal hustings speeches across the country, in which he vailiantly campaigns against nobody, are far more likely to talk jobs than Job, more likely to name-drop ISAs than Isaac.

But we cannot grasp what drives our soon-to-be Prime Minister without talking about his religion. Even more so than Tony Blair, Christianity is at the centre of his world-view. In a largely irreligious country, this is an anomaly - and a big deal. So what kind of God does Brown believe in, and how will this shape his Britain?

Most Europeans associate religion-in-politics with the foaming tele-evangelists of the Bible Belt, who believe Jesus Christ is always on the ballot paper next to the box marked 'Republican'. Theirs is a Jesus who blesses the rich and bitch-slaps gays with his crown of thorns.

They are epitomised by the late Jerry Falwell, who proclaimed before the last Presidential election: "I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. The Lord has just blessed [Bush]... It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad." This is the kind of religious figure we left-wing atheists like to argue against: simply, straightforwardly repellent. I'm with Christopher Hitchens, who declared as Falwell was lowered into the ground: "It's such a shame there isn't a Hell for him to burn in."

But there is another political tradition within Christianity - and it is the one Brown belongs to. In the nineteenth century English-speaking world, Christianity was seen largely as a force of the left, bolstering pro-poor, emancipationist movements. After a long hibernation, where it slept only in the the emptying pews of the Church of England, this strain of Christianity has been stirring once again. For example, over the past few years, there has been a historical rehabilitation on both sides of the Atlantic of William Jennings Bryan.

For eighty years, Bryan has been remembered only as the blustering fool who defended creationism and damned Darwin at the Scopes Trial. But increasingly Bryan is being recalled also as the man who ran as Democratic candidate for President in 1896, 1900 and 1908 on a radical left wing ticket, offering the first vision of an American welfare state. He always presented these as evangelical Christian ideas, announcing the poor were being "crucified on a cross of gold". The churches flocked to him.

Brown grew up in the British version of this tradition. His father John Brown was, famously, a minister in the Church of Scotland, radicalised during the Second World War by being sent to Glasgow and witnessing the sunken poverty of the children there. In the early 1990s, Brown Jnr. explained his dad's faith: "My father was more a social Christian than a fundamentalist. His sermons were about charity, good works. There was always a constant stream of people passing through our front door. As a child growing up in a minister's family, you get to see all the hardships that are going on around you at first hand. All of them had been hit hard."

Our next Prime Minister also identified with the rebellious, privilege-hating grassroots of the Church of Scotland. In 1843 the Church split when ordinary churchgoers insisted on their right to democratically pick their own ministers, rather than have the aristocracy hand-pick one for them. As Brown summarised it happily: "They felt they were under the control of the gentry and the Lords, and they refused to be bound by the Lords." This blunt egalitarian persisted into Brown's youth.

But how does this affect his practical politics? The best hint can be found in Brown's little-noticed endorsement in 2005 of a book called 'God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it' by the theologian Jim Wallis. The author damns the right for "focus[ing] only on sexual and cultural issues while ignoring the weightier matters of justice."

So the book is an attack on Fallwellian poison - but also on what it calls "secular fundamentalism." Secularists, Wallis writes, "mistakenly dismiss spirituality as irrelevant to social change." Wallis believes religion should be a presence perpetually motivating people to pursue "justice" for the poor. He argues for a revived "prophetic religion", adding quickly: "Prophecy is not about future telling, but articulating moral truth. The prophets diagnose the present and point the way to a just solution." He argues that when societies were fairly equal, as revealed by Biblical archaeology, the Prophets did not emerge, because "they had nothing to say."

Brown is, he claims, "listening to the message of the Biblical prophets" when he brilliantly slashes Africa's debts, doubles aid, and increases tax credits for poor kids here at home. (He is presumably defying it when he permits the super-rich to continue jaunting about all-but-untaxed). Wallis' favourite Biblical tradition is the Jubilee Year, where periodically the debts of the poor were cancelled, slaves were set free, and land was redistributed more fairly.

All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandry. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking - it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end? As for citing the Holy Book, I'm with Woody Allen, who wrote that a new foreword to the Bible had been discovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls. It read: "Any similarity to any persons living or dead contained herein is purely coincidental..."

Yet at the same time, when there are so many Murdochian pressures on a British Prime Minister dragging them to the right, pressing him to fellate the rich, isn't it good to have a counterveiling pressure to help the poor - even a superstitious one? If religion drives Brown's best instincts and whittles down his worst, should we still condemn it?

Hmmm. Perhaps the more important question is - can we have this benign, pro-poor element of some of Jesus' teaching, without all the other abhorrent lessons his religion brings? (Remember: Jesus said to follow "every jot and tittle" of the psychotic Old Testament.) Jim Wallis is anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and on and on. Worryingly, we have little information on where Brown stands on these issues. He has not voted on a single one of the 18 pro-gay measures brought by the current government (although he did once vote for an equal age of consent in 1994). Is this an oversight, or ambivalence?

There is another political bog that Brown's faith may suck him into: the expansion of faith schools. The government is now actively promoting the division of Britain's kids into religious and ethnic educational enclaves, where they will not mix. This is a recipe for racial division and hatred, but Brown's bias towards faith as a positive force will almost certainly stop him secularising our schools.

So Gordon Brown's God is cantakerous and ambiguous. At His best, He likes to help the poor and hates hereditary privilege. At His worst, He may stay his followers' hands on gay rights, and He likes dividing His flock into schools where He will be worshipped fulsomely in His many different guises. This God is alternately encouraging and disturbing - but we cannot understand our next Prime Minister without Him.

POSTSCRIPT: This is part of a series about the intellectual influences on Gordon Brown. You can read about James Maxton here, and Bob Shrum here.

The blog Stumbling and Mumbling has a persuasive response to this article here. There's some other responses here, here, and here.

Norman Geras responds to this discussion here and Tom Freeman responds here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

I talk about Press Gang (the best TV program in human history), Newsround and even Roland Rat.

So the long sado-masochistic tango of Liz Jones' marriage to Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal has finally ended, with only a few yellowing press cuttings blowing around the dancefloor now.

For those of you who missed the saddest anti-love story in Fleet Street, it's easily summarised. Liz Jones was the brilliant, batty, beautiful 38-year old editor of fashion mag Marie Claire, when a cocky but talentless 26 year old called Nirpal walked into her office one day five years ago. He had vague plans to "set up a website", and asked her out to dinner - only to take her home for dessert.

Liz was a neurotic loser-in-love who had only ever had three boyfriends, "and they all dumped me." She found it refreshing to be chased. Nirpal was nice to her cats and tolerant of her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (she has a chronic fear of creasing her settee).

So within months, Nirpal had moved straight from his mum's dillapidated home to Liz's minimalist luxury-pad, becoming The Boyfriend she described with near-autistic honesty in her weekly You magazine column.

Once he was safely ensconced in her life, Nirpal began to surgically jab a knife into Liz's neuroses and periodically twist it. Liz had been anorexic for decades, living for a few years on a single yoghurt and four Diet Cokes a day. Nirpal took to calling her "chubby" and "bloated." Liz was anxious about the age gap. Nirpal called her "Mummy", and said she looked like his Nan.

He dumped Liz on her birthday, only to come back later; he blanked her on their wedding day. He swiftly embarked on seven extra-marital affairs - and at every stage, Liz blamed herself. She wrote in her column: "No matter what I do, he takes it and forgives me... I ask you, who on earth would want to be with me?"

Liz handed over wads of cash so Nirpal could laze around at home all day for five years writing a novel. He used this time in her house, living on her money, to write a vicious novel-length attack on her. In the mediocre 'Tourism' - eventually published last year - the young Asian male protagonist shacks up with 'Sophie', an anorexic, breastless fashion journalist. He calls her "dim but easily flattered" and "a nutcase", and only stays with her because "she kept the fridge stocked with expensive food and left cash on the mantelpiece."

When asked if 'Sophie' is in fact Liz, Nirpal replied, "Sophie is much younger."

Even after Liz lost her job for rebelling against the fashion industry's sick obsession with Twiglet-sized girls, he continued to happily eat his way through her redundancy payment. He blamed Liz for his every failing. When he put on a huge amount of weight, he raved at her: "Look at me! You've fattened me up deliberately so I no longer have options." He blamed her for his own laziness too, writing: "Women cultivate imbecility in men; inflantilised by overindulgence, men become dependent on them."

Earlier this year, he finally pushed Liz too far. He began sadistically describing in his writings how much he enjoyed hurting her: "I could press my body against hers, wrap her in my arms, kiss her neck and breathe slowly against her skin. But I won't do that. And I know how much it hurts her that I won't. Knowing this gives me the closest thing I have to happiness."

And then yet another affair emerged, and Liz filed for divorce. After refusing to have kids through her last potential child-bearing years, he announced a few weeks after the split that he is "thinking about becoming a dad for the first time".

So what lifts this story above the ranks of just another squalid Jeremy Kyle segment? Partly, it is the brilliance of Jones' writings, which in their collected form will still be read in decades. (I should declare that I know Liz Jones a little, and I have found her to be a generous, gentle person).

But this story has also captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers because it is an unwitting parable about feminism in the Noughties. Can men accept being the second-earner, inferior to their wives and girlfriends, the way women did for millennia?

The marriage has led Liz to conclude they can't. She writes: "New men, metrosexual men, men who are in touch with their feelings, who are willing to take a back seat, supporting and nurturing you, don't exist. They might pretend to be able to cope with you but they are, instead, storing up anger and will hate you for being fabulous, for being independent, for not needing them in your life but just wanting them there."

But in this understandably wounded passage, Liz skips over a strange complicating factor. She not-so-subconsciously sought out a man she knew to be a boor from fairly early on.

Why is this? A hardcore minority of my female friends - often the most successful in their careers - keep ending up with nasty, boorish little toad-men like Nirpal too is as if they feel guilty for having succeeded and need to marry a chauvinist as penance, the way Opus Dei followers wear a wire tight around their thigh.

This can also been seen in the extraordinary amount of sympathy Nirpal has received from women. It must be hard, they say, to be the wife of a successful woman. Really? Is it so hard to be given loads of money to lie around in a luxurious house, having everything done for you, so you can write a novel?

Nirpal has also been keen to present this as a story about feminism - although of course, in his telling it is a sign these uppity bitches have gone too far. In the Sunday Times, he published a nakedly misogynistic rant where he talked about how to "acquire dominion over women". Presenting himself as the last Real Man left, he barked that there has been a "feminist conspiracy" imposing (yawn) "raging political correctness."

Men have been castrated by "Alpha women", while secretly "they love men who will look them in the eye and tell them to shut up when their hormonal bickering has become too much." His abuse of Liz, he declared, was proof of his rugged masculinity.

Despite the fact that women earn 12 percent less than men for the same work and do 80 percent of the unpaid labour, Nirpal conjures a world where men are terrorised and emasculated by controlling women who turn men into "drippy, sexless bores". And hundreds of thousands of people somehow agree - including, in the less-rational part of her own mind, Liz Jones. It's why she let him stay.

I don't think Liz knows, even now, that she is a wonderful person who deserves far better than this cossetted, spiteful leech. She is a reminder that the feminist fight today is not only against unreconstructed misogynists like Nirpal out there in the world. It is against the misogynist thoughts that linger in women's own minds. It is these thoughts that make women think they don't deserve much, and cause them to seek out and persist with fetid little Nirpals.