There comes a point when individual incidents cease to look like isolated lapses and begin to suggest something more troubling. I fear we may have reached that point with Reform UK.
Following the tragic murder of my dear friend Ann Widdecombe, I made what I regarded as an entirely uncontroversial appeal: that politicians of every party should respect the police’s request not to speculate publicly about the motive while a murder investigation remained under way.
Ann Widdecombe understood something that appears increasingly rare in politics
Reasonable people are entitled to disagree with that view. What surprised me was not disagreement but the response. Rather than engage with my argument, Reform UK’s ‘Shadow Home Secretary’, Zia Yusuf, chose to describe me as “disgraced” and “depraved”, I assume, resurrecting events from almost forty years ago under laws that discriminated against homosexual men.
I have never hidden my past. In 1987, I pleaded guilty to an offence of gross indecency. At that time the age of consent for homosexual men was twenty-one; for heterosexuals it was sixteen. Parliament has since acknowledged the injustice of those discriminatory laws. They have been repealed and, under what has become known as the ‘Alan Turing law’, those convicted of consensual homosexual offences under now-abolished legislation may apply to have such convictions disregarded as part of correcting historic wrongs.
