Come home-to-bed secretary: Rudd’s winning ode to safe sex
Hunt is on for mystery man who inspired Cabinet minister’s poem about a lover planning to take risks
IF EVIDENCE were perhaps needed of Amber Rudd’s talents, the Home Secretary’s ability to find a word to rhyme with “contraception” must rank highly.
Ms Rudd, it emerged yesterday, won a sexual health poetry competition two years before she became a Conservative MP.
Her prize was a £50 voucher donated by the chlamydia screening clinic in Hastings and a local pharmacy.
The prize was deserved not least for the rhyming couplet: “But why dear heart, did you not mention, What we’ll do for contraception?” The lines sit at the heart of her award-winning poem. The ode to safe sex, entitled Loving
You Is So Exciting, will set tongues wagging in Westminster over who could possibly be the inspiration.
The poem revolves around the writer urging a mystery man to come “home to bed”, with the knee-trembling promise that she’ll “move your world throughout the night” only for the reader to discover that her lover-tobe has no plans to use a contraceptive.
The disclosure punctures the mood, enabling Ms Rudd, 53, to artfully ram home her safe-sex message.
In spite of her would-be lover’s urgings of “Tonight’s for pleasure, take a chance”, the author declines the offer with a retort that could become a mantra for cautious Home Office bureaucrats everywhere: “If risk is in your mood and speech, How about bingo on the beach?”
Ms Rudd, then a businesswoman with her eye on becoming Tory MP for Hastings and Rye, submitted the poem to the Hastings & St Leonards Observer in 2008 in a competition to raise awareness during National Contraceptive Awareness Week.
The poem won joint first prize in the over-25s category, and her entry was displayed in a shopping centre.
One professor of poetry, who declined to be named, said of Ms Rudd’s poem: “It’s a gallant effort in the style of Pam Ayres. Good on her for having a go; the message is surely sound.”
The Home Office has declined to comment on Ms Rudd’s poem and spec- ulation as to the identity of the muse is likely to rage on.
Ms Rudd is said to be currently in a relationship with Kwasi Kwarteng, the Conservative MP for Spelthorne, although that didn’t begin until 2010. Another contender is AA Gill, her former husband and father of her two children.
Ms Rudd, while now the minister in charge of the police and the intelligence services as well as immigration, wasn’t always so well behaved.
As a pupil at Cheltenham Ladies’ College in the Seventies, she was barred for tying all the chairs in the dining hall together, preventing anybody from sitting down. She subsequently described the stunt, on her last day at school, as a “timid rebellion”.
Politicians writing on themes of sex is nothing new. In Edwina Currie’s debut novel A Parliamentary Affair, her prose was altogether racier, while Alastair Campbell’s novel Maya was nominated for a Bad Sex in Fiction award.
Gill, by contrast, scooped the Bad Sex award in 1999. Alas, the choicer passages cannot be published in a family newspaper.
‘It’s a gallant effort in the style of Pam Ayres. Good on her for having a go; the message is surely sound.’