THE ELECTION
BROWNED OFF BY SCANDAL
Richard West on reactions to the divorce of the Tory MP for Winchester
Winchester OUR ancient capital has not enjoyed such juicy scandal since Thomas Ken, one of the royal chaplains, forbade the use of his home to Nell Gwyn, saying 'a woman of ill repute ought not to be endured in the house of a clergyman'. The tolerant Charles II bore no ill will and shortly afterwards offered the see of Bath and Wells to 'the little black fellow that refused his lodging to poor Nelly'.
The cause of the present scandal is John Browne, who has been the Tory MP since 1973, with a majority at the last election of 13,047. He is now very unpopular after his recent divorce, on the grounds of his adultery, followed by legal action to send his former wife to prison over the non- payment of rates and some of the legal cost of the settlement. It has also been sug- gested that he edited the High Court judgment which he had circulated within his party to show himself in a better light. The case also revealed some of Mr Browne's activities as an international banker. These included offshore trusts and foreign bank accounts; means of importing capital by the over-valuation of furniture sold in Jersey; and payment of £17,000 back tax, after having been found 'neglect- ful' in the declaring of overseas earnings. During the course of these marital and financial revelations, Mr Browne married a second wife in December, an American. She is said to be a condom heiress.
The women of Winchester are overwhel- mingly anti-Browne, from what I could hear from conversation, the local press and political activists. The offices of the Alliance candidate, Jock Macdonald, a classics master at Winchester College, are overwhelmed by good wishes' from Tory women, some of whom promise to vote for Mr Macdonald, and others to abstain. The atmosphere at the Tory HQ 'is uneasy. When I called with a colleague, the agent told us that Mr Browne had no time to give us an interview between engagements. But as we were going down the stairs, two Tory gentlemen followed usand said they would like to apologise if there seemed to have been any discourtesy. They turned out to be Sir Peter Lane, the National Chairman of the Conservative Associations, and his counterpart in the Wessex region. So the Tories are clearly bringing their big guns to save the seat for Mr Browne.
As it happened, I later met Mr Browne and his wife as they were canvassing in a shopping street. In fact they accosted me as a potential voter, with Mrs Browne, grim but gallant in her unpopular role, sticking photographs of her husband on both my lapels. He wore a fixed and rather ghastly smile which relaxed a bit when I did not ask him about his private life. He is a swarthy, handsome man with close-set eyes, whose military past one might have assumed from his straight-backed stance and the ridge in his hair from much time wearing a beret or bowler. As he told me about his (perfectly sound) views on the conservation of Winchester from a motor- way, I thought I detected a look in his eye combining defiance with mirth. Perhaps he enjoys cocking a snook at stuffy opinion. He is rather an old-fashioned figure, like one of those sporting and military politi- cians in Trollope. They also often married Americans. It occurred to me that Mr Browne, 150 years ago, would have been a first-rate pistol shot, always eager to chal- lenge those who impugned his honour. Perhaps Parliament needs some Brownes. They counter-balance the goody-goodies like, for example, Michael Meacher.
There are those who think that the press and public have no business to comment upon the private lives of politicians. Perhaps this was true when morality was the business of the churches and of the law. The bishops and vicars told us how to behave; and woe betide them if they themselves transgressed, especially in sex- ual matters. Politicians, of course, were liable to the laws of the land, and if they sued for divorce, they faced unpleasant publicity in the newspaper reports, as well as possible social ostracism. Adultery was a sin, and so regarded, but it was never a crime. This distinction is rarely perceived today, even by clergymen. In the last 30 years, while churches have largely abandoned talking about morality, the politicians have passed laws to legalise or facilitate divorce, abortion, pornogra- phy and homosexual relations. A former News of the World reporter I met here talked almost with wonder of those far-off days when a single telephone call to a vicar filled him with terror. Not any more. In a recent News of the World report on a man who came back and found his wife naked in bed with another man, the fact that the man was a vicar was mentioned only In passing. It was not the point of the story. Vicars can now live openly with a choir- girl, or with a choir-boy if he is over 21. Nobody blinked when a senior bishop said recently that one could not expect homosexuals to live in chastity. To most of our bishops, sexual offences are venial when compared with such mortal sins as eating a South African orange.
Since politicians rather than clergymen now set moral standards, we have both a right and duty to study their own be- haviour. The women of Winchester take an understandable interest in an MP who gets a divorce on the grounds of his own adultery, and then threatens to send his wife to prison. Abandoned first wives take an entirely different attitude from hus- bands and second wives, who are the main proponents of easy divorce. Few people I know care tuppence if David Steel has a girl friend but millions remember him as author of the Abortion Act.
A friend of mine was recently at a dinner where Shirley Williams announced in her intense, bossy fashion: 'I can't tell you how glad I am that Aids has now entered the heterosexual community.' She went on to support this view at length. One sees what she is trying to get at. Almost certainly she has got it wrong. The spread of Aids from the homosexual to the heterosexual com- munity could dangerously incite the latter against the former. But whether right or Wrong, Mrs Williams maddens us by her schoolmarm certainty that she knows what is best for us, the British public. While Prigs like Mrs Williams still forbid us such elementary freedoms as getting a drink in a pub at any time of the day, they have imposed a moral code that some find wrong and dangerous. The cleverest slogan to have emerged so far in this election was seen on the back of a car in London: `Combat Aids. Stay faithful to one woman. Vote Conservative.'
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