HOW GAY MARRIAGE ALMOST COST PM HIS JOB
AS THE standard bearer for a new law on gay marriage, Cameron found himself alienating many traditional Tory activists and MPs. Even his own mother found it hard to defend his stance.
Mary Cameron, a magistrate, was asked at a lunch about the negative reaction among party supporters. Reportedly, she said: ‘I know, but David just won’t be told.’
In the run-up to the vote on gay marriage, many Tory MPs who didn’t personally feel strongly about the issue faced a furious backlash in their constituencies.
There was much resentment about a policy that was neither in the Conservative manifesto nor the coalition agreement. Threats to resign became commonplace.
‘Pretty much the universal advice of any colleague who spoke to [Cameron] on the subject was to drop it, whatever their personal view,’ says Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee. Cameron, he believes, didn’t grasp the implications for the party — particularly MPs with marginal seats. ‘A lot of colleagues were being driven to despair by the loss of support,’ he says. ‘There were people with small majorities, who were losing all of their activists.’
Indeed, Brady believes the Prime Minister risked being toppled over the issue. There was a ‘real danger point’ ahead of the crunch vote, he says, when many MPs were coming under unbearable pressure from their local associations to take a stand.
As it was, fewer than half of Tory MPs voted in favour in February 2013, though other parties carried the day for the PM.
‘I really believe that had he known the scale of the aggro, he wouldn’t have done it,’ says former Defence Minister Nicholas Soames, who is nonetheless ‘utterly convinced’ it was the right thing to do.
Cameron’s determination to push through such progressive legislation is curious, given his reluctance to be the figurehead for other radical change. And his views on homosexuality haven’t always been especially liberal. An acquaintance who knew him in his late 20s recalls him being ‘surprisingly squeamish about homosexuality for someone of his age’.
As an MP, Cameron attacked Tony Blair for ‘moving heaven and earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools’, and twice voted for amendments that would have excluded adoption by gay couples. So why was he so keen on gay marriage? On a political level, the PM and his aides believed that it would reinforce the party leader’s credentials as a ‘modern, compassionate Conservative’.
Moreover, Cameron, who has many gay friends and colleagues, simply found his views changing. And once he came round, he did so wholeheartedly.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Catholic who voted against the Bill, concedes: ‘It was something he believed in. And I do believe in politicians who stand up for things they believe in — even if I don’t agree with the outcome.’
Despite laying his neck on the line for gay rights, however, Cameron has never accepted an invitation to a gay wedding.