Listening out for the silent minorities

A day or so after writing a column, when the horse has certainly bolted, you read it in print. Now you are hit by l’esprit d’escalier. Ideas you left out stare you in the face. Friends call with arguments you never thought to include — obvious, once mentioned — and again you kick yourself.

My Times column last Saturday is a case in point. I wrote after David Cameron had warned Phillip Schofield (on a TV programme called This Morning) against giving a stir to the unfounded belief that there’s a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. I suggested this was one of three great subterranean public prejudices that campaigners for homosexual equality have had to combat over the past half-century. The other two, I said, were that gays are more prone to treachery and secret recruitment by foreign powers; and that there’s an inherent link between same-sex attraction and promiscuity, furtive and loveless sex, and (therefore) sexually transmitted diseases.