In other astonishing news, I can reveal that a young man named Ratzinger may, on occasion, have attended Catholic Mass in the 1950s. I hope soon to be able to bring to you the long-anticipated truth of what, precisely, bears do in woods.
At Conservative Home, a debate is getting underway about the outing of Ted Heath, and also about Mr Coleman's claim that the Tory Party in London is run by homosexuals. Personally, I was more interested in something else that Mr Coleman wrote:
The average voter could not care less if their Member of Parliament visits Hampstead Heath at Midnight as long as they get the holes in the road mended. The Anglican worshipper in the pew cares not that the local Bishop has a taste for black leather under their cassocks as long as keeps his hands away from the choirboys.Is this true? I could accept it as true if he said that the average voter couldn't care less if their MP was homosexual. But I do not believe that the public are particularly tolerant of homosexuals (or anyone, for that matter, but it seems to be primarily a homosexual problem) having sex in public. By way of anecdotal evidence, in the 2005 election the local Labour Party in the constituency where my mother lives deselected their sitting MP, and selected a local activist with two convictions for cottaging. He said that it didn't matter, because most people didn't see cottaging as wrong. The Tories, by contrast, made an issue of it, and won on the back of one of the biggest Labour to Tory swings in the country.
And, in any event, cottaging is still a crime, and always has been. Is Mr Coleman suggesting that cottaging is, nonetheless, an acceptable form of behaviour, and one that should be embraced as if it were a hoodie? Apparently so.
It says quite a lot about the Tories, I think, that they have a man of such views as one of their senior elected officials. For one thing, it says, once again, that they cannot really be considered a conservative party, but simply another party of the liberal-left.
