Sex and the politician

The lens of public curiosity magnifies the minutiae of politicians' sex-lives, as CHRISTOPHER HURST was reminded by two recent deaths.

IN autumn of 2000, two prominent politicians died within a fortnight of each other. One of them was Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979, and again for a shorter term in the early 1980s. In that time, he made the world take notice of what was happening in his country as never before. This was partly because his terms of office produced dramatic events (some, but not all, of his making), but also because of the accomplished ease with which he bestrode the world stage. His personality was in utter contrast to the dullness that had come to be expected of Canadian politicians (since his time they have reverted to type). When he took office he was a vigorous, youthful-looking bachelor of 48 - a brilliant, bilingual, liberal intellectual, tough and energetic in pursuing reforms and, at the same time, sexy. One could have called the latter quality charisma, which he certainly possessed, but there was hardly a political leader in any country with his glamour, good looks and potent charm.

Trudeau was 80 when he died, but Donald Dewar was only 63. If the latter name is unfamiliar to my readers, I will only say that Dewar was the most important Scottish politician of his time. In Blair's Government that took office in May 1997 he was appointed Secretary of State for Scotland, which turned out to be a stepping-stone to Scottish devolution, approved in a referendum later in 1997. This was the apex of his career and seen as his personal achievement. He was the unchallenged choice to become Scottish First Minister, and thus the dominant figure in Scotland's new parliament in Edinburgh.

One thing that he had in common with Trudeau was strong cultural nationalism allied to resolute opposition to separatism - represented, in Trudeau's case, by the Parti Quebecois and, in Dewar's, by the pro-independence Scottish National Party. Their stand on this issue above all entitles them to be distinguished as statesmen rather than as mere politicians. They also shared a much less happy distinction: the treatment they received from their wives (in admittedly very different circumstances).

Pierre Trudeau married for the first and only time at the age of 51, having had a succession of high-profile girlfriends. His wife, Margaret Sinclair, was the daughter of a politician, but it was as a West Coast "flower child" that she penetrated the defences of this protean Prime Minister. Their ages were 30 years apart, but what the hell? He was ageless (or seemed so), and they were passionately in love and had three sons in quick succession. Then, notoriously, she spent their sixth wedding anniversary at a Rolling Stones rock concert, and two months later she was gone. Trudeau was left to bring up the children.

Donald Dewar was, in personality, almost the diametrical opposite to Trudeau. Of charisma, he had none, or perhaps a negative quotient. Lean and cadaverous, anything but handsome, and with a precise and lawyerly style of speech, he was none the less a man of wit and private warmth, beloved by his friends. He was Scottish through and through, and had no ambitions unrelated to the Scottish nation.

He met his wife Alison at Glasgow University, and they married in 1964 when he was 27 and had a son and a daughter. Two years later he became a MP, but in 1970 he lost his seat in the election that brought the Conservatives back to power, and Alison left him for another Scottish lawyer of very different character: Derry Irvine, later Lord Irvine of Lairg and, since 1997, Lord Chancellor. She took their children with her. The obituaries all said what few could have doubted: that he never recovered from this cruel blow. He continued to live alone, in the former matrimonial home, and never remarried.

It seemed like a further turn of the screw when he and Irvine, to whom he had not spoken since the end of his marriage, found themselves thrown together as fellow-members of Tony Blair's cabinet. Irvine made himself a national figure of fun soon after assuming the Lord Chancellorship with some self-important and humourless remarks about that exalted office, and by re- decorating his official residence in the Palace of Westminster with a period wallpaper costing £ 750 a roll, paid for with public money. A large fleshy man with the self-satisfied air of a cat that has swallowed the cream, he seems the very antithesis of the taut, watchful, wryly humorous Donald Dewar.

Of course, we have no idea what Dewar was like to be married to, and by conventional standards Irvine would have to be reckoned the more attractive man of the two, but I could never forget what he had done whenever either man was in the news, and it seemed like something crying out for divine vengeance. In the event it was Dewar who paid the price once again. Earlier in the year he had a heart operation and made a good recovery, but needed a blood-thinning drug to prevent a clot reaching the brain and causing a stroke. The result of this was that when he had an ordinary fall on the pavement outside his house, it started a brain haemorrhage from which he died five hours later. The tribute from his former cabinet colleague George Robertson, now secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). ("He was a warm, generous, plainly decent human being"), was typical.

These two failed marriages were not political scandals, and did not interrupt or end the careers of the protagonists; they might have happened to anyone, but because the protagonists were prominent public men, they were public knowledge. Sexual scandals involving conservative politicians occurred with regularity during their party's long period in power after 1979, mostly in the later years under John Major. Most, if not all, of them are now forgotten, but historians will surely not overlook the most lurid of all, the case of Cecil Parkinson. Parkinson was a favourite of Margaret Thatcher and at one time thought to be her intended successor. A smoothly handsome, immaculately dressed man - his air of studied sincerity always suggested to me a super- salesman - he had a long-running extra-marital affair with his secretary Sara Keays, and the news of this burst on the public when she was already pregnant.

It was announced at the same time that he had ended the affair and that his wife had forgiven him. Sara Keays was, not surprisingly, furious, and it was she who told the story to the media; he had promised to divorce his wife and marry her and now she was left, literally, holding the baby - as yet unborn. Her bitterness continued to be aired in public for a long time (too long for her to retain much sympathy), and was compounded by the fact that the child, a girl, was born with an impairment. Cecil Parkinson returned to political favour, but was never again a front-runner for the highest offices of state.

No doubt he will be crippled financially for the rest of his life by the allowance he has to pay Sara Keays (though Mrs. Parkinson is said to be a rich woman), but one is left musing over one aspect of the affair. Since there is no way that Parkinson, in the situation into which he had got himself, could "do the right thing" by both his wife or his mistress, would not traditional morality say that the one with the first claim on him was his wife, and that therefore what he did, even if it could never exactly be "right", was the least worst thing?

The contrast with Nigel Lawson, Mrs. Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer and probably the cleverest man in her cabinet, is instructive. A few years before the Parkinson-Keays affair, he had left his wife and their three children and married a younger woman, by whom he had a second family. Nobody made any comparison, when the Parkinson scandal was at its height, between the conduct of the two men, but it could have been argued that Lawson, even if he managed his sex-life more adroitly than Parkinson, had acted with a heartlessness towards his first wife of which, when it came to the crunch, Parkinson found himself incapable; he was heartless instead to his mistress. Where does this leave us?

Of British Prime Ministers in the 20th Century Baldwin, MacDonald, Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Home, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major and Blair were all married once only, and as far as we know their marriages were (and, in four cases, still are) happy. The same is doubtless true of Wilson, although it was persistenly - though now, it appears, falsely - rumoured that he had a mistress. Eden was cuckolded by his first wife, but his second marriage was happy. Macmillan's wife had a lengthy affair with one of his political colleaugues, but the marriage lasted. Balfour and Heath were/are bachelors, and there have never been salacious rumours about them. Lloyd George (Prime Minister 1916- 1922) is the only exception. His relationship with Frances Stevenson - originally a tutor to one of his daughters, then (from 1913) his mistress, and his personal secretary and closest companion for the rest of his life - deserves to be considered a story of true love, in spite of its flouting of conventional morality. Lloyd George's wife Margaret, like him a Welsh-speaking Non-Conformist, lived on till 1941. He then married Frances and died in 1945. They had a daughter, born in 1929.

Two politicians of note in late Victorian England had their careers destroyed by being cited as co-respondents in divorce suits. One, Sir Charles Dilke, had been considered a possible future Conservative Prime Minister by Disraeli . The other, Charles Stewart Parnell, was historically a more significant figure. This landowning Irish nationalist and hater of the British, succeeded, through his sustained obstructive tactics in the Westminster Parliament, in turning Irish home rule into a serious national political issue for the first time - with the support of Gladstone's Liberal Party. His fall in 1890 caused the home rule issue to lie dormant for a generation, till shortly before the First World War.

It is impossible to discuss the influence of sex on politics without mentioning Bill Clinton. Will future historical research perhaps discover evidence that his desperation at the prospect of being impeached over the Monica Lewinsky affair prompted him, in an effort to divert public attention and boost his popularity, to launch the immoral and unnecessary bombing war against Serbia in 1999? And is it possible that if, despite Clinton's charisma and political skills, the American public had not been sickened by his shoddy private behaviour, Al Gore might have won enough additional votes in November 2000 to swing the presidential election his way?

When it became known towards the end of his life that President Mitterrand of France had a beautiful 20-year-old natural daughter (he had remained married to his partly estranged wife Danielle), who was seen standing by the grave-side at his funeral amid all the VIPs, it seemed - in the perception of this British observer - like a breath of fresh air. There was no fuss in the French press, and the situation was accepted with insouciance and charity. This rather chilly and calculating politician suddenly appeared human. I suspect that we in Britain, left to our own devices, would be equally laid back about our politicians' sex- lives when they deviate from strict monogamy, but the cheap tabloid press, with its characteristic blend of facile, hypocritical moralising and prurience, will not allow this to happen. Destroying a politician's career and private life counts for little when there is a chance to boost circulation, even for a day.

hurst@atlas.co.uk

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