It’s party conference season, a time that traditionally marks the publishing of political biographies. It is also sometimes an occasion when a growing scandal about a politician may come to flower. The fall of Cecil Parkinson, architect of the Conservatives’ 1983 landslide election victory, shocked the country. The revelation that he had fathered a love-child destroyed his chances of succeeding Margaret Thatcher having emerged on the eve of that year’s conference.
This year the focus is on Keith Vaz, long-serving chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. No stranger to controversy during the Blair years, Vaz has been accused of allegedly entertaining two rent boys at a ‘sex flat’ he owns near the London home he shares with his wife. It has seriously damaged his career.
Had Vaz been outed in the early 1980s, he would almost certainly have quit parliament so fast his feet would not have touched the ground. As it is, he tried to brazen it out, calling in lawyers and sending threatening letters. He tested the waters in the Commons chamber and found no supportive noises from his colleagues. He has now resigned as committee chairman but he remains an MP.
Yet I find the attitude of his defenders disturbing. They point out that Vaz did not break any laws, even when recordings obtained by the Sunday Mirror quote him apparently discussing the potential future purchase of cocaine (not for his own use but presumably for the use of others).
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was equivocal, refusing to pass judgement on a man who is also a member of Labour’s ruling NEC, saying that Vaz’s conduct did not merit suspension from the party.
Compare this to another Labour MP’s recent troubles, Simon Danczuk. Last December he was accused of sending sexually explicit text messages to a 17-year-female old job applicant and suspended. And Ken Livingstone’s use of Hitler to justify his anti-Israel stance is also legal but he has been out of the party for months. Using rent boys is, apparently, not as bad as anti-Semitism or sexting.
There has been a comparatively muted reaction by Vaz’s colleagues and superiors and an unwillingness to pass judgment on transgressions of public taste. This indicates the entrenchment of a relativism in political discourse used both to defend past disgraces and to justify future outrages. It debases and degrades by association the integrity of institutions to the point that public confidence is damaged. This is how revolutions start. But that is not all.
What if, instead of being filmed with rent boys, Vaz or another MP had been caught with call girls? Despite our so-called era of sexual equality, things would surely have been a lot hotter. Equality does have its limits, apparently.
Eastern European women in their 20s, who come to this country under the single market agreement and find wages and opportunities so depressed by the uncontrolled immigration such that they fall into vice, are always seen as victims – and rightly so. Yet in the Vaz case, their male counterparts have not been viewed in the same way. Is this right?
An MP in this hypothetical heterosexual prostitution scenario would probably have been seen by his current defenders as a cruel exploiter of the sex-worker industry and, therefore, beyond the pale. The Guardian would have been shrill. Instead, in the case of Vaz, this alleged man-on-man action for cash seems to have been regarded as a rational commercial transaction between people in control of their bodies rather than something as disgraceful as procuring women for a similar gratification.
The general reaction has been bemusement at the juxtaposition of Vaz’s former responsibilities and his secret activities. It is their incompatibility that has caused his fall, not a perception of their immorality. There is no suggestion of exploitation.
This is a disturbing double-standard. It also indicates which kind of sexual activity is regarded as the more politically-correct, as it were, among sections of the commentariat. But surely men can be sex-trade victims, too.
No mention has been made of the homophobic taboos of certain cultures in this country regarding same-sex relations that drive a man to this kind of behaviour, but there has been some speculation. We have had openly-gay MPs for decades. It remains clear that in the contest between gay rights and multiculturalism, the latter always wins. Again, there is a political correctness pecking order.
It is perhaps time to examine this double-standard that exists between male and female sex-workers. This could be a job for the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, whoever that will be. Perhaps Vaz could be an expert witness.