‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia,’ wrote Laura Brady, Second Secretary in our Moscow embassy, ‘it will be a doddle.’ I quote her story in an anthology of diplomatic writing, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, that the BBC’s Andrew Bryson and I have collected for the new book. Miss Brady was giving the Foreign Office an account of her efforts to collect a horse from Moscow’s station. The horse was a present to the Prime Minister, John Major, from the President of Turkmenistan, who had despatched the fierce Akhal-Teke warhorse by train accompanied by a wagon-load of melons to pay the Russian Railways. The point Brady is making is that after a hilarious few days learning her way through a maze of Russian red tape, veterinary bureaucracy and railway obstructivism (and shovelling manure), she now knows the ropes. She smiles that she’ll probably never need the knowledge again.
Well, next time we want to make marriage available to same-sex couples, it will be a doddle. It’s likely that in the year ahead this measure will reach the statute book. But between here and there stretches a painful political road. And it didn’t have to be like this.
In its essentials this legislation could have been so much more painlessly eased into law, with less offence given (and taken) on all sides. We who support the measure should have learned from history. History would teach two things in particular: that words are terribly important to people; and that issues of conscience and party politics don’t mix.
First to conscience. Infinitely the most important piece of homosexual reform legislation was the 1967 Act that decriminalised sex in private between consenting adult males. A Labour home secretary, the late Roy Jenkins, was responsible for the reform.
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