Why the Liberals are the sleazy party...
AFTER his death, Radio 4 broadcast a ‘celebration’ of Clement Freud, the longest-serving panellist on its comedy series Just A Minute. Typical of his lugubrious contributions on the programme was a monologue on the subject ‘How to be irresistible to the opposite sex’.
To huge bellows of laughter from the studio audience, Freud said: ‘Keeping one’s trousers on at my sort of age is a very good way of being irresistible to the opposite sex – else they might expect what they will not get.’
That was in 2006, just three years before he died at the age of 84. But considering what we now know about his past as a child abuser, such humour is pretty sickening.
Freud is just the latest in a very long list of senior Liberal politicians to be revealed as ruthless sexual predators.
Who can forget the recent, sordid case of party grandee Lord Rennard (nicknamed ‘Lord Grope’) who was accused of sexually molesting a female election candidate and was further alleged to have preyed on ‘at least 30’ victims – allegations which he denies.
And no history of sexual sleaze in Westminster goes without mention of the grotesque story of former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe who became mired in a gay sex scandal involving illicit sex in the Commons, blackmail, a murder plot and the cold-blooded shooting of a blameless dog.
Of course, not all sex affairs in Westminster exclusively involve Liberals – but they seem to have played central roles in a disproportionately large number.
Certainly, such incidents make a mockery of the popular image of Liberals as harmless, sandal-wearing, ban-the-bomb, mueslimunching environmentalists. So why is such a small party – which has been in government only once in peacetime in the past 100 years – so beset by sexual scandal?
One explanation is in the name ‘Liberal’. Whereas the Tory and Labour parties were created as moral movements (the former to promote free trade and sound finances; Labour to fight for the working classes against flint-hearted employers), the Liberals were founded on a much more laissez-faire philosophy.
Above all, they were united by the conviction that progress was based on the free exercise of individual energy.
THAT‘individual energy’ has developed into the psychology of ‘Liberal by name, liberal by nature’. At its extreme, in many cases, this has been expressed as wilder examples of sexual freedom.
Another explanation is that, perhaps, forever being the third party and far from the levers of power, their politicians have been under less public scrutiny. As a result, many might have felt able to take far bigger sexual risks.
In addition, a glance at their signature policies over the years shows a party that embraces a very permissive view of society.
I’ve lost count of the Lib Dem party conferences where activists have called for sexual relations to be legalised at the age of 12 or 14. I can still recall a decade ago, Don Foster, the party’s culture spokesman, successfully calling for 16year-olds to be allowed to visit sex shops and buy pornography. ‘Matters of taste should have no role in censorship,’ he said. Foster is now a Lib Dem peer.
For some time, the party has wanted to decriminalise prostitution – believing it to be a legitimate business.
How symbolic, therefore, that William Gladstone, the party’s most successful leader who became Prime Minister four times, was well-known for ‘rescuing’ prostitutes from the streets of London.
A married man, who apparently whipped himself after his encounters, he admitted to a fascination with vice. He wrote in his diary about committing ‘adultery of the heart’.
He was followed by David Lloyd George, the last Liberal Prime Minister, who cynically sold peerages to raise money for his cashstrapped party after the First World War. Nicknamed ‘The Goat’, he had a mistress for 30 years – his daughter’s governess – and fathered several children outside marriage.
Much more recently we witnessed Lib Dem election strategist Lord Rennard who was suspended from the party in 2014 over allegations of unwelcome sexual advances against four young female members whose careers depended on his patronage. The porcine Rennard was eventually reinstated and now sits in the Lords.
Party chiefs also had to act after veteran MP Mike Hancock was deselected for ‘serious and unwelcome sexual behaviour’ towards a woman constituent. He had to apologise in the High Court for the ‘inappropriate and unprofessional friendship’ and also admitted a four-year extra-marital affair with an alleged Russian spy.
A few years earlier, Mark Oaten MP (married with two children), who was running for the Lib Dem leadership, resigned as home affairs spokesman for having an affair with a rent boy who sold his story to a Sunday red-top tabloid.
Oaten admitted he had no proper concept of the risk he’d been taking, saying he ‘didn’t think for a moment’ the young man would have known who he was.
Five days later Simon Hughes, Liberal MP for Bermondsey, announced he had had gay relationships despite denying being a homosexual. Amid much embarrassment, he was reminded that he’d run a notoriously homophobic campaign against Labour candidate Peter Tatchell in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election.
Most notoriously, back in 1979, Jeremy Thorpe was tried for attempted murder after an alleged conspiracy to kill his former male lover Norman Scott – whom he called ‘Bunnies’. Thorpe, a married man, was acquitted of all charges but was branded by the judge a ‘crook, an accomplished liar and a fraud’.
Of course, one of Thorpe’s colleagues was the 29- stone Rochdale MP Cyril Smith who, for years, had shockingly managed to repel police investigations into his abuse of young boys in care homes and special schools.
Allegations against him had first surfaced in 1979 but the then Liberal leader David Steel dismissed them saying: ‘All he seems to have done is spank a few bare bottoms.’
Despite all the rumours, in 1988 Steel ensured Smith was given a knighthood. And on Smith’s 80th birthday, the then Liberal leader Nick Clegg extolled him ‘as a beacon of our party in the 1970s and 1980s’.
FINALLy,in 2012, the police admitted that Smith (who died in 2010) should have been charged with sexual and physical abuse and revealed 44 complaints had been made over three decades.
Any roll-call of sexual shenangians in the Liberal Party cannot exclude the antics of Chris Huhne, who stood as deputy leader. He admitted cheating on his wife, Vicky Pryce, with his parliamentary aide Carina Trimingham, who, at the time, was in a civil partnership with a woman.
How ironic that the Lib Dem manifesto for the General Election in 2010 declared: ‘We will clean up politics.’
From randy Old Goat Lloyd George to Jeremy Thorpe and Cyril Smith and now Clement Freud, the Liberals have repeatedly revealed themselves to be hypocrites – sexual libertines who preach ‘ do as I say, rather than do as I do’.