Gay pride

Now that the Tory party is about to embark on an unedifying internal spat over gay marriage, I would commend students of political history to read Michael McManus’s beautifully written and well-researched book Tory Pride and Prejudice: the Conservative Party and Homosexual Reform.

Readers may be surprised to learn that supporters of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private included Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Patrick Jenkin and Ian Mcleod. They were lonely figures in those early days.

The paradox that the Conservative party faced is best summed up by Guy (now Lord) Black: ‘It was one of those phenomena that, when the Conservative party appeared nationally to be at its most homophobic, at the very heart of the organisation were all these influential gay men. Although everybody knew what was going on, nobody made it very obvious.’

The case that captured the imagination of the 1950s was the imprisonment, for incitement, of Peter Wildeblood, the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail, Michael Pitt Rivers and Lord Montagu.