Historian discounts claim that Churchill and other British PM's were gay

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, which the Mail serialised on Saturday and yesterday, 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’.

Even by the standards of the most revisionist histories, Bloch’s book makes frankly astonishing reading. Among his other closet queens are at least four prime ministers — not merely Churchill, but 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.