Ken Livingstone: two interviews
There is “outrage” in the expected quarters this evening about this from a Jemima Khan interview with Ken Livingstone:
Well, the Labour ones have all come out . . . As soon as Blair got in, if you came out as lesbian or gay you immediately got a job. It was wonderful . . . you just knew the Tory party was riddled with it like everywhere else is.
Now “riddled” does jump out from the page as an odd word to use, with its connotation of disease. But the key point is that Livingstone didn’t put it in a page – he said it in an interview.
I suspect what is happening here – though it is impossible to know absolutely in the absence of a verbatim transcript/audio recording - is that Livingstone is trying, as a rhetorical device, to ”speak with the voice” of the type of hypocritical Tory that he has only just referred to in the interview, who “denounc[es] homosexuality while they are indulging in it”.
This type of rhetorical device is very common amongst politicians, who most often use it to try and display empathy with the voting public, (though Livingstone here is using it as a means of scorn). Indeed I pointed out recently how David Cameron used it to show how touch he is with real people, but suggested - given that he used it with a wholly inaccurate term – that he was probably telling a lie.
Now clearly Livingstone’s team is not going to get into this kind of linguistic defence, and sticks with a straight “look at my record” statement. So as I’ve got a book on my shelves that not many others are sad enough to have, I’ll just help out by quoting from another Livingstone interview – this from 1984 – which provides documentary evidence of the ridiculousness of the “homophobe” barbs now being chucked his way:
The removal of empire, plus great achievements in the liberalisation of censorship, divorce and gay rights, meant that the issues that dominated the 1950s tended largely to be resolved in the 1960s. (Boddy M & Fudge C, Local Socialism, 1984, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p.262-3).
For Livingstone, the matter of gay rights was clearly sorted a very long time ago.
No. I think you’ll find Livingstone is genuinely scornful, but of closeted homosexuals, not of open homosexuals. It’s the lack of openess of which he is scornful and, thus, the Tory party and voter attitude towards homosexuality. This is clearer if you read the whole paragraph.