Those Torrid, Tawdry Tories

The returns are in and the hands-down winner for 1994 in the field of public sexual hypocrisy (international division) is Britain's ruling Conservative Party. The Tories have long fancied their party to be the repository of uprightness and morality. Indeed, for the past 15 years the loyal citizens of the U.K. have been subjected to particularly intense harangues by moralizing conservative politicians. Margaret Thatcher always told them to sit up, look lively and work harder for less pay. John Major, her successor as prime minister, has kept up the scolding and preaching. Thus, when a half-dozen Tories were exposed to media humiliation for an array of sexual escapades, much of the public reveled in the comic justice of it all.

Cabinet ministers, members of Parliament and the nation's highest military officer were caught with mistresses (one of them was found to have at least three). There were also tragic episodes. The wife of one senior minister shot herself reportedly after discovering that her husband had taken a lover. A promising new Tory MP was found dead in his kitchen wearing women's stockings, a garter belt and, oh yes, a black plastic bag over his head, an apparent victim of autoerotic asphyxiation.

Outside Britain, people marveled at the frantic pace of the scandals in a country where it is generally believed that the water, the weather or substances unknown suppress the libido. No Sex Please, We're British is the title of a self-deprecating comedy that has been running for years in London's West End. But Britain showed the world that bonking (the expressive British slang for doing it) thrives.

Such sexual escapades can't fail to bring out a feeling of national pride for my countrymen's display of sexual ingenuity and vitality. Compare them with the relatively plodding performances of Gary Hart and Donna Rice on a boat off the coast of Florida, or with whatever President Clinton was or was not doing with Paula Jones in a hotel room in Little Rock. The British involve themselves in a far better class of sex scandal than any other nationality—and that includes the French.

In France, private morality is not a public issue. Stories, perhaps apocryphal, abound about the French minister who liked to dress up as a rooster, stick a feather in his bottom and crow as he reached orgasm with his mistress. Given how refined the French claim to be at such things, there ought to be many of these tales. But French politicians' peccadilloes for the most part go unreported, thanks to the willingness of that country's media to look the other way.

No such restraint exists with the British press. Tabloid reporters never stop to ask if a politician's sex life is relevant to his or her public performance before they peek through windows. Indeed, sex stories of the rich and famous are regularly paid for, either directly or through so-called confidential sources who serve as brokers for those who want to bonk and talk. What made the Tories particularly vulnerable to embarrassing disclosures in recent times was Prime Minister Major's ill-conceived Back to Basics campaign. In October 1993 he called on Britons to fight family disintegration with self-discipline. The morality campaign was aimed at the common man, but the section of British society that proved most in need of reform turned out to be the one at the top.

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Sex helped to topple a Tory government in the early Sixties, when Harold Macmillan was prime minister. John Profumo, the minister of war, was caught in an affair with high-class call girl Christine Keeler, who was bedding a London-based KGB agent during the same time. Even swinging London was shocked, and the Macmillan government did not survive.

During the Seventies, lords Lambton and Jellicoe had to quit their posts when their visits to prostitutes became known. In the Thatcher era, the Iron Lady's "golden boy" and chairman of the Conservative Party, Cecil Parkinson, resigned after it was revealed that he had fathered a child with his secretary. Following Major's 1992 election victory, there was an early tremor forecasting the scandals to come. David Mellor, dubbed "minister of fun" for his extracurricular activities at the Department of National Heritage, resigned amid headlines that he had been too tired to write speeches because of his relationship with an "unusually tall out-of-work actress" named Antonia de Sanchez.

Earlier, in May 1987, Tory MP Harvey Proctor was convicted of gross indecency that included caning and spanking with teenage male prostitutes (known as rent boys). He resigned his post. Alan Amos, another Tory MP, resigned his post after being arrested and cautioned—though never charged—for performing an indecent act with another man in a London park. And Keith Hampson was forced to resign his post as parliamentary secretary to Michael Heseltine in 1984 when he was accused, and later cleared, of groping a plainclothes policeman in a Soho male strip club. In another torrid exposé, transport minister Steven Norris admitted to having three mistresses (the newspapers linked him to two more). None of Norris' mistresses knew about the others, and it was not clear what his wife knew. Evidently Norris used his time efficiently. He stayed on in his cabinet post.

Major chose to ignore these warnings. But 1994 opened with further news of impropriety, this time concerning the suave 48-year-old environment minister, Timothy Yeo—known as Yo-Yo. Yeo admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock with Tory local legislator Julia Stent. He had met her during the 1991 party conference in Brighton; nine months later she gave birth to little Claudia-Marie. Those who knew the genial, red-faced, potbellied Yeo were shocked. Yeo had always championed family values. He had once told an audience that "it is in everyone's interest to reduce broken families and the number of single parents. I have seen from my own constituency the consequences of marital breakdown."

One senior Tory leader dismissed the resulting fuss as "the stuff of pantomime," and Major himself brushed off Yeo's infidelity as a "silly indiscretion" that the British people would probably tolerate.

But they did not. Traditionally, Britons have looked to their politicians for moral guidance. "Anybody who sets himself up in public life has a duty to set an example," Tory MP David Evans said on the BBC. "You don't drive through red lights, you don't drink and drive if you are a minister and you don't go knocking off everybody."

On January 6, Yeo resigned—later disclosing that in his youth he had fathered another love child.

Next came the case of lawyer and MP David "Two-in-a-Bed" Ashby, 53, another promoter of family values. Ashby welcomed in the New Year in France with a male friend. He subsequently admitted to reporters (and to his wife, Silvana) that he had shared a hotel bed with his friend, but only for reasons of economy. The angry Silvana said that Ashby had left her. Their marriage had ended, she said, because of his "friendship" with this other man. Silvana said she had gone unannounced to Ashby's new address on Christmas Eve and was thrown out after a male friend called the police and accused her of being "an intruder." Ashby denied that he is a homosexual and said only "dirty minds" would see anything unusual in his bunking (not bonking) arrangements. He had gone to France, he said, on a "gastronomic holiday."

There was worse to come. On January 8, Lady Diana Caithness, wife of aviation and shipping minister Lord Caithness, killed herself with her husband's shotgun in a bedroom of their house while he and their 15-year-old daughter sat downstairs. Caithness resigned from his job the next day. He claimed that his wife had been worried about money, but his father-in-law later told the Times that his daughter "would have lived in a shack. The main reason was this other woman." The woman in question turned out to be Princess Anne's former secretary, Jan Fitzalan-Howard, whose ex-husband had been a colonel in the Scots Guards.

The Tories closed ranks to fend off the media, but their manly efforts soon came undone. In February Stephen Milligan—a 45-year-old bachelor, newcomer to the House of Commons and rising star within the Tory Party—was found on his pine kitchen table, an apparent victim of autoerotic asphyxiation (a practice known as "scarfing," which is supposed to heighten orgasm through partial strangulation). Except for women's stockings, a garter belt, a black plastic bag over his head and a length of cord wound around the bag at his neck, Milligan was nude. The cord ran across his chest and he was holding it in his hands. A piece of orange that might have been spiked with amyl nitrate was in his mouth, perhaps to enhance the act. Those back benchers know how to party.

The press promptly dubbed Milligan the "kinky MP." He had paid £1000 to a dating service called Drawing Down the Moon, but he must have decided to take matters into his own hands. His death aroused suspicion of foul play—especially because he worked in the defense ministry. But the police concluded that he had indeed killed himself accidentally. Detectives suggested that Milligan might have died because he used his own sex equipment: As an MP and former TV broadcaster, they explained, he could not risk being recognized at sex shops that could have provided less-hazardous tools of autoeroticism. Milligan's death was particularly untimely because he had taken over as unofficial spokesman for the Tories' Back to Basics crusade.

One wayward MP got into trouble even though he displayed unusual restraint with the object of his affection. Hartley Booth, 47, a foreign-office official, Methodist lay preacher and ardent campaigner for family values, admitted to having a "close relationship" (continued on page 190)Tawdry Tories(continued from page 164) with a 22-year-old research assistant from his office—but nothing more.

"None-in-a-Bed" Booth, as he was quickly nicknamed, claimed he was only giving the woman (who had worked part-time as an artist's model) a chance to further her career. Instead of bedding her, Booth wrote silly love poems such as "He who is tall/Has farther to fall/And I fell/How I fell." Booth insisted that he had never slept with the young lady; he had merely been infatuated by her—"knocked sideways. I loved her," he said. A colleague said he had learned from Booth that Booth "kissed her but there was no sex. I think he has been a fool. It is a lapse completely out of character and that is the end of it." Booth resigned his post in the foreign office but not his seat in the House of Commons.

But that was not the end of the scandals. The press soon turned up another shocker, this one in the Ministry of Defense. The marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Peter Harding, 60, was chief of the British defense staff, the nation's highest military post. Harding had recently approved new codes of conduct for military personnel. Adultery was listed as a "most serious matter"—disciplinary action would be taken against offenders. When out of uniform, however, Harding frolicked like a raw recruit.

The source of his downfall was Bienvenida Perez-Blanco, said to be in her 30s. Perez-Blanco, also known as Lady Buck by virtue of her three-year marriage to Sir Antony Buck (a veteran Tory MP and former Royal Navy minister), had been involved with Harding between 1991 and 1993. Their affair might have remained a secret had not Lady Buck gone to News of the World, a Sunday newspaper that thrives on sex scandals and lurid court reports. (It is known affectionately as "Screws of the World.") Perez-Blanco claimed that she went to the newspaper because she believed that Harding had become a security risk. A more immediate reason was that the paper paid her a handsome sum (said to be $250,000) for her memories.

Before accepting Perez-Blanco's story, News of the World demanded corroboration and a fresh angle. Perez-Blanco lured Harding to a meeting at a London hotel bar for a chat. Reporters at a nearby table eavesdropped on the conversation, in which Harding reportedly expressed "reckless opinions" about Prime Minister Major and also mentioned that he was on his way to a meeting with toplevel intelligence officials to discuss IRA attacks. Harding and Perez-Blanco parted outside the hotel with a kiss, which a photographer recorded.

When News of the World ran the story, the government claimed that it had already launched a security inquiry into Harding's affairs. Sources at M15 claimed that love letters written by Sir Peter to Perez-Blanco had been intercepted from the start. One of them, leaked to the papers, said, "I find you utterly captivating, enchanting, intelligent, overwhelmingly beautiful and desirable."

One follow-up story suggested that Lady Buck had been recruited as an Iraqi spy by a cousin of Saddam Hussein. "I wouldn't know a cousin of Saddam Hussein if I fell over one," she said. "If I am a spy then I am a very bad one. I must be the first spy so intent on secrecy that she tells her story to News of the World." Harding, married for 39 years and the father of four, denied the affair had ever been consummated. But he had the good sense to resign, saying it was the "only honorable thing to do."

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As winter gave way to spring, the Tories hoped for a break from the run of revelations, but there was none. News of the World accused Tory MP and junior whip Michael Brown of having a homosexual relationship with a student who was 20, then one year under the age of consent. (The law has since been revised, making 18 the age of consent for homosexual relationships—16 is the legal age for heterosexual ones.) The paper said Brown had shared the young man with another Tory, Paul Martin, a defense ministry official.

News of the World had sent a reporter to Edinburgh, where he found Martin in a gay bar called the Laughing Duck. He was clad in black leather trousers and a skimpy black T-shirt and was in the company of an 18-year-old youth. Martin readily admitted to knowing Michael Brown. Thus did the newspaper make the connection.

Top Tories came to Brown's aid, much as they had done for Yeo earlier in the year. Virginia Bottomley, the health secretary, called the incident a "wretched personal story." Most loyal of all was Brown's housekeeper, Iris Parks, who said the hullabaloo was all "a load of codswallop." She said the 20-year-old in question, Adam Morris, had indeed stayed at the MP's house. "He is an extremely nice student and I am very fond of him," she said. Of the paper's insinuations, she said, "It's a setup and it's disgusting. I will defend Michael hook, line and sinker." Despite the support of his friends, Brown resigned, threatening legal action.

Last summer a former Tory defense minister named Alan Clark emerged as the quintessential British bonker. A castle owner, Clark indulged in family-pack adultery that has been the climax of the Conservative Party scandals so far. During weeks of tennis at Wimbledon and the Royal races at Ascot, Britons talked of little else over their strawberries and cream than the scandal of Clark and his self-described "sex coven," which included a judge's wife and her two daughters.

It was first mentioned a year ago when Clark published his diaries about his days and nights in government service. Among the political bombshells about the Thatcher government were tantalizing references to the coven that Clark had ruled. Clark didn't disclose the names of the women, but they were subsequently identified as Valerie Harkess and her daughters, Alison and Josephine.

The Harkess family, which had long since moved to South Africa, decided to tell all and make some money. The cuck-olded James Harkess hired a PR man and brought Valerie and Josephine to England to talk with the press—a family outing that brought them a tidy sum.

They provided good copy. Valerie disclosed that she and Clark had met for sex twice a week for nine years, usually in the afternoon. Josephine revealed she first slept with Clark when she "had a severe drink and drug problem." She claimed that Clark's advances to her began when she was a schoolgirl. According to her account, Clark had picked up her and her sister from a train in his Rolls-Royce. No sooner were they in the car than he undid his fly, produced his erect penis and said, "Look what you've made me do." Trying to look tough, poor James Harkess said, "If I had known, I'd have horsewhipped him."

The Harkess stories broke in the press in June and revived the Clark diaries, which provided other lurid stories. In a diary entry, he wrote: "I can enjoy carol services only if I am having an affair with someone in the congregation."

The Clark affair differed from past scandals in that neither Clark nor the Harkesses seemed even slightly embarrassed about their activities. As Clark declared, "I probably have a different sense of morality than most people."

The uncovering of such a cast of lotharios, repressed sexual deviates, prostitutes and randy old men inevitably brought forth psychiatrists and sexologists who offered to explain why people in high places bonk the way they do. These experts presented a familiar list of emotional deprivations visited upon hereditary wealth in Britain, including expensive single-sex private schools and the nannies who look after rich children, often substituting for an absent mother. Paul Brown, a London psychiatrist who specializes in sexual deviations, explained the nanny trauma. "Once one discovers that the person one has bonded to emotionally is not the real person but a substitute, then the possibility of other substitutes arises in the psyche," he said. That may be why, Brown observed, "the English upper-class male is miserably lacking in a serious understanding of how to manage a relationship with a woman." A Labour MP, Tony Banks, was blunt about the elite schools. "It's such an artificial sort of dehumanizing existence. Buggery seems to be part of the core curriculum."

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Many Britons took comfort in the wackiness of it all. Jane Clark, scorned and wronged for years by her loutish husband and his coven, emerged as a cautious optimist. She announced that the episode actually made her marriage stronger. "I had got very good at throwing things, but now I don't need to," she said. At 66, her once-errant husband says he is reformed. When asked if she thinks her husband will stop chasing women, Jane Clark said, "No. Well, he's a politician, isn't he?"

"A reporter found a defense ministry official in a gay bar, in leather trousers and a skimpy T-shirt."