You’d think that a Tory shadow minister saying that he sympathised with the homophobic religionist B&B owners would be propaganda gold. It has all the elements of a perfect anti-Tory story; a view seen as socially backwards, mass popular feeling going the other way, and a name whch wouldn’t be out of place on the desk of a Bond villain. Yet the Grayling story will fail to be the kind of stuff the Labour party can spinkle on the back of their most recent poster failure, roll up, and smoke their failure away. And that failing will lie in the wobbly spin propogated in the first 12 hours of the story breaking.
First off let’s look at the red corner. Labour rolled out the powerful, and yes homosexual, Mandleson to lead the charge against Grayling. The idea was obvious – let our favourite prince of darkness unleash his demeur, modern and precise performance against the foot in mouth, stuck in the past, un fit to lead Grayling. Yet instead of converting this golden chance, Mandelson looked clumsy, perching on his chair like an incontinent senator and stuglling to defend his position even in the face of weak questioning from Sky News.
Mandelson began with the obvious jabs about the Conservatives having not changed, that if “You turn the camera off and you find that they think and speak quite differently,”. And that was fine, it was delivered with the gusto of a history teacher discussing sea fishing reforms in the doubly landlocked Liechtenstein, but it was solid enough. Except for the use of the phrase “great changes” to describe what Cameron has claimed to do to the Conservatives – the word great just jarred too much and left you thinking – oh what ‘great changes’ are these?
The real trouble however came when he was questioned on the rights of those with religious convictions to turn away from their own homes those who had view with which they disagreed. Instead of launching into a defence based around the liberal democracy within which we are all glad to live, Mandelson began to bark out phrases that have been out of date in law faculties around the world for decades : “The law is the law and one must live within it”.
To find the gaping flaw in this attack one need only to look back to the laws on sodomy which outlawed any sexual acts between two men (or two women) until 1967 in England and Wales. If Mandelson’s attack is taken to its logical conclusion he would be forced to say that any gay man living before 1967 should have repressed his personality and live a lie. This is most likely not the view he holds but is the result of his attack. Law is a reflection of our moral views as a society of which tolerance is one, and any defence of a law musn’t be built simply on pointing to statute but to why we feel it is required.
Flawed too was the attack by the Lib Dems, for whilst they identified that the real issue was not one of legality but one of discrimination and intollerance, Chris Huhne seemed dedicated to repeat the phrase “No gays. No blacks. No Irish.” and variations upon it as frequently as possible. Rather like Simon Foster saying “diarrhea” repeatedly on a radio show in the film “In the Loop”, Chris Huhne won’t be remembered for delivering a precise and eloquent attack on intolerance but rather as the man who reminds us of every discriminatory period we had hoped to move on from.
In short, both parties missed the chance to nail the Torys and take back the momentum. Grayling should have been painted as only paying lipservice to tolerance for homosexuals, as the face of a systemic failure to change within the Conservative party and it should have been stamped upon his head that the whole point of non-discrimination legislation is to eliminate intolerance. And with those three brush strokes they should have gone home. And the failure to do so means that the Conservatives, and perhaps Grayling, will ride out the storm.
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