PM jibe at gay marriage critics
OPPONENTS of gay marriage were privately branded ‘Neanderthals’ by David Cameron, his biographer has revealed.
The Prime Minister defied opposition from advisers and hostility from his party to push through same-sex marriage in 2013.
In Cameron At 10, author Sir Anthony Seldon says that, at the 2011 Tory conference when Mr Cameron announced he was consulting on legalising same-sex marriage, ‘a bomb detonates in the party’.
Former Cabinet minister Liam Fox dismissed the plan as ‘the victory of liberal dinner party metropolitan thought over the wider party’, while election guru Lynton Crosby warned: ‘You’re f****** off the party big time.’
But Mr Cameron said: ‘Unless you are making some Neanderthal judgment on gays, those who are gay should have the same rights as those who are not.’
Yet in public, he had tried to make peace with critics, insisting that Tory opponents of his policy to legalise gay marriage are not ‘wrong-headed or bigoted’.
Few issues were as divisive in the party, Sir Anthony wrote. More than 130 Tory MPs opposed the policy in the Commons vote.
In his book, the author revealed that most of Mr Cameron’s work is done between 5.30am and 7.30am with Zen-like calm.
He writes: ‘He is a very unruffled, “Zen” Prime Minister, inwardly calm and self-controlled.’