Daily Mail, September 30 2002

There was a point, in the middle of Edwina Currie’s tearful and self-serving interview with the Times on the revelation of her affair with John Major, when she suddenly sprang back into vehement and self-confident life.

What their four year liaison showed above all, she said, was the fatuity of the Tories’ ill starred ‘back to basics’ campaign. It was not for politicians to preach morality to the public when they themselves were all too flawed.

Anti-family wreckers on the left have leapt upon Ms Currie’s revelations with glee. For she has not merely enabled them to revisit the Tories’ most infamous débâcle and bury the party all over again. In showing how John Major kept a staggeringly risky secret, she has bolstered the claim that any policy promoting marriage or traditional family values is bogus.

For the cardinal sin for the sexual amoralists of both left and right is not cheating on one’s spouse. It is hypocrisy. Indeed, the cheater actually goes up in their estimation. No more grey man, eh, commentators have been saying admiringly of this latest recruit to the sexual profligacy club.

Adultery, they inform us, is even an essential safety valve for marriage. Major has suddenly turned into a more interesting and rounded person. On this logic, personal treachery becomes a social virtue and Ms Currie is its patron saint.

If ever there were an excuse for politicians behaving badly, this is it. It is an utterly amoral credo.

It rests on a fundamental confusion at the heart of the debate about public and private morality - an upside-down reasoning in which public and private are separated where they should in fact be linked, and muddled together where they should be kept apart.

They should be linked because how politicians behave in private matters to us. This is because we trust them to look after our interests. They persuade us to do so on the explicit understanding that we can trust their characters. This is why their behaviour is scrutinised more heavily than other public officials, such as civil servants.

Character matters; and character is indivisible. So if politicians betray and deceive their spouses, it matters. If they behave recklessly with their own or other peoples’ lives, it matters. If they wilfully cause pain or do harm to others, it matters.

And even in our current sexual free-for-all, adultery matters because cheating on the most solemn promise we can make is still regarded as destructive and wrong.

This is not, however, some absolute doctrine, to be applied with no regard to circumstances or context. If such behaviour took place a long time ago, or if the marriage had all but ended already, a sense of proportion requires us to give that person the benefit of the doubt.

So we don’t, for example, hound Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine out of office on the grounds that many years ago he made off with Donald Dewar’s wife. By contrast, Robin Cook’s decision to dump his former wife for his mistress while remaining Foreign Secretary left a permanent bad taste.

Major’s redeeming feature is that he stayed married, sought forgiveness and feels ashamed. We are all frail, and no-one is expected to behave like a saint.

And traditional family policy doesn’t expect this either. Back to basics was a fiasco because the Tories never thought it through - indeed, it was originally no more than a vague restatement of a common-sense approach to a number of issues. The Tories never grasped, let alone articulated, the crucial distinction that a responsible family policy should embody.

This is that what people do in their private sexual lives is their own business, in which the political class certainly should not interfere. But politicians also have a duty to protect the public interest. That means prod ucing pragmatic policies based on sound evidence of what is likely to improve society and diminish harm.

And the destruction of family life is causing enormous harm. Epidemic fatherlessness is abandoning children to educational under-achievement, depression and crime. Abandoned or isolated women and men suffer poor mental and physical health. Adults who cohabit or have serial partners are more

likely than married people to suffer physical violence. Children are at far greater risk of being abused or killed by a non-biological parent than by their own flesh and blood.

These aren’t private issues. They represent vast and unsustainable costs to both the Exchequer and the social fabric. That’s why the state has a role in family law and policy. Either it uses that role to improve society — or to knock away its props. Over the past twenty years and more, it has

unfortunately chosen the latter course through adopting the destructive, ‘non-judgmental’ approach that all lifestyles are equally valuable.

But those who connive at this erosion of traditional values merely endorse the doctrine that ‘there is no such thing as society’. It is no coincidence that the Tory libertine ‘modernisers’ tend to hold an undimmed candle to the

extreme Thatcherite philosophy of individual freedom. And yet ironically, they stand shoulder to shoulder with those on the new left whose attack on the family is rooted in their desire to impose state control over private attitudes and behaviour.

This is all intimately bound up with the loss of moral sense in general by the whole political class. There seems no limit to the sheer shamelessness with which politicians now duck responsibility — from foot and mouth to the A-level shambles, from rigged hospital waiting-list figures to the Martin

Sixsmith affair — through evasiveness, dissembling and lies.

The real hypocrites are those who shed crocodile tears over dishonesty in public life and the breakdown of trust in the political process, while endorsing current amoral behaviour by unrepentant public figures.

But, splutter politicians, taking a moral stance would constantly expose us to the risk of scandal and ruin. Well, yes; if you believe in restoring trust in the political class, this is precisely what it means.

The alternative is to take Ms Currie’s position. Her response to the higher expectations of politicians was ‘not to tell my constituents how to live their private lives’ and campaign for alternative sexual lifestyles instead.

So to justify her right to compromise someone else’s marriage, it seems, she would simply shrug off all responsibility to try to ameliorate one of the principal causes of social breakdown. Keeping out of private lives is emphatically not the same as campaigning for a sexual free-for-all, which

destroys the rules of behaviour which protect all of us.

The fact is that ministers in Major’s administration were indeed a sleazy bunch. The difference between them and the Blairites is that New Labour ministers are without shame, having turned sexual licence into a policy objective. They have thus made themselves immune from the deadly charge of hypocrisy.

But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Without the moral codes that make hypocrisy possible, there can be no virtue either. Hypocrisy is the price we pay for morality in public life - a morality which is now being sacrificed in Whitehall corridors draughty with expediency, cynicism and

deceit.