Jeremy Cliffe, Nick Hargrave and Chris Jackson investigate political sexcapades and ask why they are a central concern of the media"My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip,” Cecil Graham exclaims in Lady Windermere’s Fan. “What is the difference between scandal and gossip?” enquires Lord Windermere. “Oh, gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious with morality”.
Wilde’s observations remain spot-on to this day. Sexual vice implies gossip. Politics implies power. Power implies moral obligations. Thus, a political sex scandal is born. And since the dawn of time the corridors of power have echoed with salacious stories, bellowed and whispered, of adultery, deviance and perversion. But what lies behind this relationship between sex and power? What place does a scandal have in this age of personality politics? And at the end of the night, is it any of our business?
Recent British politics alone provides many an example: Westminster, it seems, is rarely devoid of stories of sexual misdemeanours that leave trails of red-faces, outrage and book deals in their sordid wake. Let us refresh our memories.
Back in the 1960s Mick Jagger and Keith Richards may have been trying to get some satisfaction, but they weren’t the only ones; John Profumo infamously slept his way into the history books, fired as Conservative War Secretary for an affair with Christine Keeler, the mistress of a Russian spy. A decade later, the Liberal Party’s Jeremy Thorpe (not content with refuse collection and proportional representation) lost his seat at the 1979 General Election following a criminal trial in which he was accused of conspiring to murder his rent boy lover.
And some of John Major’s Conservatives may have misinterpreted his “Back to Basics” message in 1993. Figures such as Tim Yeo and Piers Merchant were hounded out of office following revelations of illegitimate children and dalliances with Soho hostesses. Nicholas Soames’ affairs became the stuff of Westminster legend, with one ex-mistress famously comparing sex with him to “a wardrobe falling on top of you with the key still in the lock”. Charming.
Not to be outdone by their rivals across the floor, New Labour certainly welcomed in the 21st Century with a bang. Things could only get better for Ron Davies after his 1998 “moment of madness” on Clapham Common, not to mention “two shags” Prescott’s secretarial sexcapades. Over at the Lib Dems, who could forget the way Mark Oaten’s ‘three-in-a-bed’ past returned to haunt him, enlivening an otherwise less than scandalicious leadership contest two years ago?
Not a sex scandal per se until all involved are ‘named and shamed’, but writer and TV chef Clarissa Dickinson-Wright cooked up a storm with her audacious diary claims to have made love to several Members of Parliament behind the Speaker’s chair (presumably Parliament was not in session at the time…).
A glance overseas reveals that the goings-on amongst denizens of the Palace of Westminster are hardly sexceptional. While the ever-pathetic clown Boris Johnson was getting into schoolboy scrapes on these shores, at the other end of the Channel Tunnel Jacques Chirac was pushing the limits of the French media’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on parliamentary promiscuity.
Quite the opposite was the case in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi’s volatile marriage reached tipping point at the start of last year. Italy’s former First Lady, less than pleased at sitting down to the evening news to see her husband telling a woman half his age “With you I’d go anywhere…”, made her feelings known in a letter published on the front page of the country’s best-selling newspaper. Ever the Latin lover, Silvio responded via the headline “I guard your dignity, like a treasure within my heart, even when careless comments slip off my tongue”. But Berlusconi’s wilesome ways had got him into even hotter water in 2005 when he provoked an international diplomatic crisis by implying that he had seduced the Finnish Prime Minister. He apologised, adding that “anyone who had seen a picture of her” must have been aware that he had been joking. The Finns did not see the funny side.
A cursory perusal through the top shelf of history reveals that the deviant politician is far from a modern phenomenon: the Roman Republic owed its very existence to the collision of sex and politics. According to the historian Livy, the scandalous wrongdoings of the Roman prince Sextus Tarquinius provoked Lucius Junius Brutus to lead an incensed Roman people in revolt against the monarchy in the 6th century BC. 550 years later, Emperor Caligula gave grist to the First Century rumour mill by prostituting his three sisters, while tales about his bizarre equine shenanigans were to be heard in many a forum.
But does being caught trousers down necessarily mean the end of the road for a politician? It certainly may have been so in decades gone by – figures such as Profumo and Thorpe left the political arena to sink into the domain of relative obscurity, remembered more for their ignominious downfalls than their political achievements.
These days, however, there is certainly life after the political scandal. Tim Yeo bounced back from resignation to become Shadow Education Secretary under Michael Howard. John Prescott, to his delight and the public’s amusement, was not forced to resign the office of Deputy Prime Minister after his indiscretion. Mark Oaten did resign but found work as a feature writer for the Sunday Times and has since appeared as a Lib Dem representative on such bastions of the establishment as ‘Question Time’ and the ‘Politics Show’. These days the public seem to have little appetite for permanently shunning those caught in compromising positions.
Indeed, looking further afield, Bill Clinton’s reputation as the “comeback kid” was cemented more after ‘Monica-gate’ than it was in New Hampshire in 1992. Despite a Senate impeachment hearing and months, if not years, of outrage in the conservative American press, Bill still remains one of the most popular US Presidents of all time in countless polls. His presence on Hilary’s current Primary campaign is seen in some quarters as a prerequisite to her gaining the Democratic nomination for 2008.
So perhaps we can conclude that the public’s tolerance, even acceptance, of the sex scandal has reached such a point that the sexual misgivings of our politicians may not even be damaging, let alone fatal, for aspiring representatives of people. Some may talk of a shift in the West’s moral compass, and this is not out of the question. However, rather than there being greater or fewer occurrences of sexual deviance in the corridors of power than in the past, it seems that the wandering eye of the pressured, risk-loving politico always has and always will lead to affairs, illicit love-children and tabloid exposés. But the difference today is that while we all love a good scandal as much as ever, we have learnt to make the distinction between an unfaithful lover and an incompetent legislator.
If this is the case, should the media differentiate between the remit of Hansard and that of ‘Hello!’? While even our nation’s most illustrious newspapers have few qualms about slathering the gruesome details of every little sleazy Westminster affair across their pages, be they tabloid, broadsheet or Berliner, the French press concern themselves solely with the political goings-on at the Assemblée Nationale. Thanks to stringent restrictions on where newspaper hacks can poke their noses, the late President Mitterrand managed to father an illegitimate family without so much as a drop of ink split about the matter for twenty years. The right to privacy has been enshrined in French law since 1790, and the no amount of revolutionary trysts, Dionysian orgies and ménages a trois in the bowls of the Elysée is not shrouded by the law.
So which state of affairs is preferable? One where every sordid detail of politicians’ private lives, even those of fatuous relevance, is voyeuristically subjected to public exposure? Or one in which such tales form a thick undercurrent of dubious rumour and shadowy gossip, forbidden by law from breaking out onto the front pages and thereby into the public sphere, where ‘gossip’ is rarely sufficiently official to become full-blown ‘scandal’? One could reasonably argue that, in the words of Wilde’s Cecil Graham, gossip is charming, and that a healthy democracy should allow the public, inevitably hungry for confirmation that its law-makers are as flawed as anyone else, free reign over facts, regardless of their direct relevance to the process of government itself.
But what about the broken families, personal offence and psychological upheaval that a front-page scandal implies for those involved? Why waste valuable column inches on such arguably ephemeral and ethically questionable reporting when beyond the trivial matters of overactive parliamentary libidos there is a world of famine, climate catastrophe and war to be covered?
In these morally relaxed times, our approach to such behaviour needs to be re-examined. If consensus no longer demands that sexual vice lead to political downfall, there is now but a thin veil covering stories that are effectively little more than indulgent exercises in frivolity. There is, it seems, a fine line between hawking sensationalism and reporting subjects of genuine news value. Mark Oaten’s penchant for Polish labour had practically no bearing on his capabilities as a would-be contender for the post eventually won by Menzies Campbell – press coverage could barely justify itself as anything more than gossip-spreading. In contrast, David Blunkett sailed much closer to the winds of impropriety in his affair with Kimberley Quinn; not due to the adulterous nature of the relationship but to his unprofessional intervention in her au-pair’s visa application. It is this sort of element to a sex scandal which is unquestionably necessary public knowledge.
Nevertheless, even those newspapers that enjoy a reputation for carefully considered, serious journalism see fit to publish details of sex scandals alongside parliamentary sketches, market reports and measured opinion. This implies the expectation that politicians maintain higher standards than the rest of us, that while representing the public they should constitute models of virtue and occupy a higher moral plain than the rest of the populus. Outside of cloud-cuckoo land, this is surely blindly unrealistic. After all, as the guru of modern statesmanship, Niccolò Machiavelli notes, “Many men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation”. The holier-than-thou brigade with their gloating reports of moral faux-pas are either living in one such “non- existent principality” or are dressing whimsical gossip in the garb of weighty, relevant political crisis.
In reality, editors publish what the public want to read, and the public want to read confirmation of the fact that they live not in a world where power is synonymous with virtue but one where everyone, regardless of their office, is subject to the same human weaknesses. Strange though it may sound, a political sex scandal is a ‘feel good’ story (if not for the politician in question). Whether this reminder of the fallibility of those in power justifies its expression in the crude form of innuendo-filled headlines is a matter for debate.
One thing is certain though; this genre of story certainly captures the public imagination, which in this age of voter apathy may not be such a bad thing. In certain cases it may even provide the more indistinct member of the backbenches with some much-needed media coverage. In recognition of the fallibility of those in power, however, this should surely be balanced with more humane treatment of disgraced politicians by the media, or as Tony Blair called it, “the feral beast, tearing people and reputations to bits”.
The fact of the matter is that politicians, drawn from varied walks of life, and (at least in theory) representative of the public at large, are just as likely to mirror the vices of their constituents as their values and aspirations. Seen from this angle, history – political events – really is “merely gossip”. ‘Gossip’ in the sense that it comes down to basic quotidian realities, however sordid, perverted and macabre these may be. In the words of American writer P.J. O’Rourke, “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”
The art of the political sex scandal
