Sex, politics & paradox...

Having now finished reading ‘Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power’, I am struck by a modern paradox.

 

Jefferson’s father-in-law kept a concubine with whom he had a number of children. One of whom was Sally Hemmings, a light-skinned, long-haired beauty.

 

When Mrs. Jefferson died, Sally took over the matrimonial bed which she occupied for the next 44 years until TJ died.

 

This fact was widely known and much commented upon in the scabrous press of those times.

 

This had no effect on his career whatsoever, and he held high office almost continuously for many years until he became 2-term President.

 

The sexual behavior of politicians was regarded as of little political consequence until comparatively recent times.

 

It was fairly common knowledge in Fleet St and establishment circles that Lord Boothby was a bisexual who pleasured both Dorothy MacMillan and the Kray twin deviant; that Lloyd George was a serial adulterer; that Tom Driberg, in Cap’n Bob’s memorable phrase when  Chairman of the Commons Kitchen Committee, ‘ would bugger the restaurant waiters’; that Hutch the nightclub pianist and singer from the West Indies was in great demand amongst  upper-crust ladies, including Lady Mountbatten, on account of his prodigious endowment; that Princess Margaret would put it about a bit (the joke at the time was that Mag’s lover was on the stage - he had a small part in ‘Charlie’s Aunt).

 

The Profumo affair was not about the goings-on at Cliveden but was about John Profumo, Minister War, sharing his squeeze with a Russian spy, with horrendous implications for national security.

 

In earlier times it would have been regarded as the worst possible taste even to suggest that the great and good actually had sex lives at all. The papers would go out of business if they published anything in the least prurient. Even the NotW, when describing sexual intercourse, would coyly say ‘Intimacy took place”!

 

Cut to the 21^st Century, an age that has never been so promiscuous, and yet any kind of sexual deviation on the part of politicians is seen as a bar to high office. When people are at it like a frog up a pump, why should sexual adventures be seen as anything but part of life’s rich tapestry, and irrelevant in the extreme to a person’s capacity for public affairs?

 

If today’s hypocritical sanctions had been applied in our dirty-minded age, the US would never have emerged in its present form (Jefferson’s master stroke was the Louisiana Purchase which more than doubled the size of the US at a stroke); FDR had a long-term mistress (and looking at Mrs. R one can scarcely blame him); Ike would have been booted out because of his semi-public affair with Kate Somersby, possibly changing the outcome of WW2 and depriving the US of one of its best Presidents.

 

So when it might have mattered, it didn’t, and now it doesn’t matter, it – er- does.

 

A rich paradox indeed.