London - Winston Churchill could not have been a more faithful husband - and he never showed the slightest romantic or sexual interest in other men.
Yet in a controversial new book, the respected biographer Michael Bloch has presented Churchill as a “closet queen” - one of a long series of 20th-century politicians who, he says, ran enormous risks to keep their homosexual inclinations hidden from the public.
These men, says Bloch, “were past masters when it came to keeping secrets and taking calculated risks. They were also actors on life’s stage, with a strong sense of showmanship and a flair for intrigue and subterfuge”.
Among Bloch's other closet queens are at least four prime ministers - not justChurchill, but also the late Victorian Liberal Lord Rosebery, the Edwardian Tory Arthur Balfour and the late Edward Heath, the keen yachtsman who took Britain into Europe - as well as a host of ministers, backbenchers and political hangers-on.
In some cases, Bloch’s evidence is irrefutable. For example, Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader in the early Seventies, was a flamboyant risk-taker who was later accused of hiring an inept hit-man to murder his former lover Norman Scott and picked up rent boys on the streets.
The Tory MP Bob Boothby, meanwhile, slept indiscriminately with men and women, and carried on a long affair with Harold Macmillan’s wife Dorothy (even when her husband was in No 10). Apparently, Boothby liked Dorothy because she reminded him of a male golf caddie he had seduced at St Andrews.
But some of Bloch’s efforts strike me as pretty desperate. Churchill, for example, was very obviously not gay, and after several pages trying to show that our wartime Prime Minister had gay friends, even Bloch finally has to admit that Churchill was “a virtual stranger to physical homosexuality”. By “a virtual stranger”, he presumably means “a complete stranger”, because there is not the least evidence that Churchill so much as made eyes at another man.
And though Edward Heath disliked women and had no interest in acquiring a wife or even a girlfriend, there has never been the slightest suggestion that he spent his days in No 10 ogling his male civil servants when he really ought to have been thinking about the economy.
By way of evidence, Bloch declares that Heath employed a gay interior decorator, which hardly strikes me as very unusual, and also claims to have heard a rumour that on his trips to Hong Kong, the former prime minister was “discreetly ‘supplied’ with Chinese youths’. This is mere tittle-tattle, impossible to prove and very hard to believe.
Indeed, since Heath is dead and cannot answer back, it strikes me as not merely unfair but tasteless to throw allegation after allegation, as if hoping that some mud will stick.
In another characteristic stretch, Bloch suggests the late Enoch Powell, the early Thatcherite prophet who became famous for his crusade against immigration, was gay, too, citing letters and poems he wrote as an intense young man in the Thirties and Forties.
But as Powell’s friend and biographer Simon Heffer pointed out years ago, these showed merely that he was a shy, rather withdrawn man who had yet to form relationships with women - not that he was secretly gay.
In reality, like many of Bloch’s supposed closet queens, Powell soon became a happily settled husband and father, whose personal life seems to have been utterly conventional.
All in all, Bloch is so keen to identify dead politicians as closet homosexuals that I wonder whether it might have been easier to write a book about those he considered heterosexual. It would probably have been a lot shorter, though, because in Bloch’s eyes, merely saying “Good morning” to one of your colleagues could well be a tell-tale sign of sexual deviancy.
In its way, though, this very dubious enterprise is enormously revealing about our strange modern obsessions with sexual eccentricity and our fixation with the private, rather than public, lives of our great statesmen.
Indeed, Churchill, Heath and Co are merely the latest in a long line of historical figures who have recently been “unmasked” as covert homosexuals, from Alexander the Great to Abraham Lincoln.
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable for historians to dig for buried truths about great historical figures.
One of the fascinating things about history is that there can never be a definitive verdict: there are always more things to be said and more arguments to be made.
And it is true that in the past, historians tended to gloss over or even to bury embarrassing facts about their subjects’ lives.
Until 1967, homosexual behaviour in this country was not merely taboo, but illegal.
So, many historians, especially if they were personally conservative, shrank from writing about activities they found distasteful or feared would shock their readers.
Many biographers of Alexander the Great, therefore, skipped over the fact that he had almost certainly had a physical relationship with his close friend Hephaestion.
And historians of the Renaissance drew a discreet veil over the love lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, both of whom almost certainly had relationships with other men.
Yet though gay rights campaigners have been quick to claim all three historical figures as role models, the reality is more complicated.
Alexander, Leonardo and Michelangelo would surely have been baffled and upset to find themselves labelled as gay, because they lived in an age when people were not neatly divided into two or three sexual categories.
The very concept of homosexuality, after all, is a relatively recent one. The word dates only from the late 19th century, and many earlier societies simply did not try to classify people by their sexuality. Yet all too often, modern writers try to enlist historical figures as role models for their latest cause.
A classic example is the treatment of Abraham Lincoln, the US president who won the American Civil War, abolished slavery, was assassinated in 1865 - and in the past few decades has become an exceedingly unlikely poster- boy for the American gay rights movement.
The irony is that in reality, Lincoln was a thoroughly conventional husband who fathered four children and showed no signs whatsoever of being interested in other men. Though a tolerant and deeply humane man, he would surely have been astonished - and perhaps a little amused - to find himself being misrepresented in this way.
But in 2005, an American psychologist called Clarence Arthur Tripp, a keen gay rights activist, wrote a controversial book claiming that Lincoln was, in fact, an active homosexual.
As evidence, Tripp showed that as a young man Lincoln had often shared a bed with other men - while conveniently ignoring the fact that this was considered perfectly normal and non-sexual at the time.
Most serious historians dismissed Tripp’s argument out of hand. But it went down well with the gay rights movement, who were delighted to see the greatest US president recruited to their ranks - and the controversy naturally made for excellent book sales.
It is, of course, true that since we are human, we all have our own vices and weaknesses, our own predilections and peccadilloes.
But though these may be super-ficially titillating, they are not ultimately very interesting.
To take an obvious example, it is mildly amusing to know that William Gladstone, the greatest statesman of the Victorian age, liked to spend his evenings earnestly talking to prostitutes he found on the London streets, and would then flagellate himself afterwards.
Amusing, yes - but not really very important. What is important about Gladstone is what he did as prime minister - from his political reforms, such as the introduction of the secret ballot and the modernisation of the British Army, to his occupation of Egypt and attempt to give Home Rule to Ireland - not what he did in the privacy of his bedroom.
To take one of Michael Bloch’s examples, meanwhile, it is entertaining to read that Selwyn Lloyd, who was Foreign Secretary and Chancellor in the Fifties and Sixties, acquired a taste for homosexuality at boarding school, where he was nicknamed ‘Jezebel’ after eagerly offering his sexual services to older boys.
It is unrealistic, I know, to expect modern readers to be uninterested in the details of historical figures’ sex lives. We all like a bit of gossip. Indeed, there is nothing worse than a history book that deliberately seeks to suck all the fun, zest and colour out of its subject - as so many high-minded academics like to do.
In some cases such details genuinely matter. Trying to write the political life of, say, Bill Clinton without mentioning his extraordinary sexual indiscipline would surely be a mug’s game.
But I can’t help thinking that too many modern writers have their priorities all wrong.
To transform historical individuals into advertisements for 21st century lobby groups not only turns them into two-dimensional caricatures, it completely misses the complexity and the seriousness of our shared past.
Daily Mail
* Closet Queens: Some 20th Century British Politicians by Michael Bloch is published by Little, Brown.
** Dominic Sandbrook is a historian