The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

Within a year of The Sun backing Blair in 1997, the uncomfortable re-alignment of the newspaper was broken by one of the most unedifying headlines of recent times upon the revelation that Peter Mandelson and then Nick Brown were both gay.

As a rather more right-wing than I am now Conservative student, I didn’t give the question “Tell Us Tony: Are We Being Run By A Gay Mafia?” as much consideration as I no doubt should have done but in the furore that followed, the newspaper pledged to bring its attitudes to homosexually into somewhere approaching the 20th century.

Now older, and questionably slightly wiser but certainly more liberal with a small “L”, I note with sadness that people rarely change and newspapers never do. Today, as One Nation Tory notes, the paper is asking its readers the question “Should gay people be cabinet ministers?“ Really.

All of which goes to show that in 12 years the Sun has gone nowhere on this, that Labour’s strategy of legislating to rid ourselves of bigotry is a total sophistry and that it is personal experiences that change values and attitudes. The experience of reading the Sun today is hardly likely to be helpful.