With the Conservative Party potentially set for a record-breaking defeat in this general election, many people have been using the phrase ‘Portillo moment’, but few appear to understand what it really means.
It has become a generic phrase for the slaying of any political big beast, but you won’t be surprised to hear that there were many such moments during Labour’s famous 1997 election victory. What made this one stand out? At the time, it had a much deeper meaning. It was a triumph over Conservative hypocrisy and social control, and a vitally important step forward for LGBTQ+ rights.
LGBTQ+ people were excluded from politics
It was a personal one for me. Back in the late 1980s, I was a member of the Labour Party. After a decade out of power, it was struggling to attract young blood, and as a result my local party – in Sheffield, where I lived at the time – was very excited to have me on board. I went to council meetings, I assisted with planning. I was being prepared for a political career, but the more that moved forward, the more pressure I felt, and in due course I dropped right out of politics. The reason was this: it was all too apparent that a career in politics would have to mean never having a relationship with a woman, or, if I did, keeping it secret and living in constant fear of blackmail. It wasn’t just that I was young and in love; it was that I couldn’t face the prospect of living a lie for the foreseeable future.
In those days, openly LGBTQ+ people just didn’t go into politics. MPs who were outed became the subject of scandalous headlines and always subsequently lost their seats. This was the era of Section 28 and Margaret Thatcher’s ‘family values’ campaigning. Laws against ‘buggery’, ‘gross indecency’ and ‘unnatural offences’ were still on the statute, and gay and bisexual men were being arrested at the highest rate since the 1950s, when all sex between men was illegal. Lesbians and bisexual women were frequently ridiculed in the media and there were campaigns to keep them out of public toilets, where they were perceived as representing a threat to ‘normal’ women. Sometimes they were explicitly excluded from the definition of the word ‘woman’ altogether.
Moralising Conservatives were constantly caught in sex scandals
While this was happening, and LGBTQ+ people were being used as a political football, those building their careers on the high moral ground were continually engaging in the sort of behaviour they denounced in other people. National Heritage Secretary David Mellor cheated on his wife with an actress. Transport Minister Steven Norris left his wife after carrying on a string of affairs with up to five ‘mistresses’ that largely overlapped. Environment Minister Tim Yeo, who had denounced single mothers on multiple occasions, turned out to have fathered two illegitimate children, while backbencher Gary Waller had a child with another MP’s secretary. Citizens’ Charter Minister Robert Hughes took sexual advantage of a constituent who sought his help to escape from her abusive partner, and several Conservative MPs were accused of affairs with their (mostly very young) parliamentary researchers.
Then there were the LGBTQ+ ones, engaging in behaviour that they condemned in others. Jerry Hayes, who cheated on his wife with an 18-year-old man (the age of consent for gay sex then being 21). Michael Brown lost his job as junior whip following claims about a holiday he took with a 20-year-old man. The News of the World said it had caught Parliamentary Private Secretary Richard Spring in bed with a man and a woman. And then there was Michael Portillo.
The untouchables – and the moment of truth
“Michael Portillo, come on mate, you’re obviously gay. Come out of the closet. You’re a big gay man”, Chris Morris suggested during the course of an interview with Peter Tatchell on spoof current affairs programme Brass Eye in March 1997. The politician’s name was obscured when the programme ran, but most viewers had a pretty good idea what it was. A man who had consistently voted against LGBTQ+ rights. Who had supported Section 28. Who had supported the ban on LGB people in the military. The rumours had been swirling for months – and yet Portillo seemed untouchable.
Roll on two months – until, to be precise, 3:10am on Friday 2 May. There had been a lot of excitement about the potential for change at the election but, until that moment, no-one fully grasped the scale of what was about to happen. I was watching with an ex-girlfriend of mine, an American who had never seen a UK election before and loved the whole thing, though I felt obliged to explain that they were not all that exciting. We had recently returned from holiday and were drinking through a crate of leftover beer.
I had thought that it might provide commiseration when I watched Stephen Twigg walk onto the podium. A young Londoner who had weathered the same storms as me but had decided to keep fighting, had simply refused to deny his truth. Portillo had approached the count with his usual swaggering confidence. Twigg looked slightly shy, vulnerable. Then the presiding officer made the announcement that changed everything. There had been a 17.4% swing to Labour there in Enfield Southgate. Twigg had won.
A seismic shift in British politics
It was the start of a legendary night. It was also the start of a seismic shift in how the UK treated LGBTQ+ people. Over the next few years, those old laws would be scrapped. The age of consent would be equalised. It would become illegal to discriminate in employment, service provision or housing. Same sex marriages would become legal, same sex couples were allowed to adopt, trans men and women could get their true gender recognised in law and medical help for them became much more widely available on the NHS.
Portillo survived. Two years later he was back in Parliament after winning the Kensington & Chelsea by-election. He came out of the closet, though Ken Clarke said he believed that it disadvantaged him in the 2001 leadership election. On retirement, he launched a TV career, beginning with a spot on Andrew Neil’s political digest This Week. Twigg, meanwhile, enjoyed a long and distinguished political career, eventually becoming secretary-general of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
The moment passes
After that night, gay and lesbian people – and, eventually, openly bisexual people too – knew that they could participate in the political process as something like equals. It was the dawn of a new age. But the thing about dawn is that, of course, eventually the sun goes down again.
This year, LGBTQ+ candidates in some parts of the UK are reporting levels of abuse they have never encountered before. Within the wider LGBTQ+ community, there is not a lot of hope. Keir Starmer appears to be all too comfortable to continue the trend, started by the Conservatives, of taking away LGBTQ+ people’s existing rights, and nobody knows where that will end.
There will be no Portillo moment for us this time around – some schadenfreude perhaps, but we know that there are dark times ahead, and we can’t rely on Labour to save us. So enjoy the night – enjoy the moment – but spare a thought for us on the morning after.
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