This week, 49,000 gay men were granted posthumous pardons. Had Harold Macmillan’s government taken notice of this magazine in 1957 that number would have been far smaller. After the Wolfenden Report, we called for decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults and at the time we stood out among Fleet Street publications in taking this view, earning us the appellation ‘The Bugger’s Bugle’.
It would be tempting to think that the pardons, which form part of the Policing and Crime Bill, mark the end of a dark chapter. No longer, we are invited to believe, could good people like Alan Turing — himself pardoned in 2013 — be hounded to their deaths by misplaced and misapplied hysteria.
Yet our legal system still struggles to cope with sex offences. Issuing posthumous pardons for gay men is the easy bit for ministers — it costs them nothing to apologise for the actions of distant predecessors.
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