After 27 unmarried years together, the question I am being asked is what took us both so long. I cannot speak for Reinaldo (I wouldn’t dare) but for most of my life I never thought it would be possible. If I am honest, I also did not realise how much difference being married would make in the emotional comfort and strength it brings.
I am of the generation of gay men who lived their early adult lives between the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and the introduction of gay marriage in 2014. It was a period when we did not legally have to hide, but public attitudes and especially the tabloid media climate about gay people was totally different from today’s.
My choice, as someone who was gay and with a high profile, was not to make my personal life and sexuality a secret, but to try to keep it private rather than in the public eye. It was a path that felt necessary at the time, but it caused endless problems and real distress.
It is easy to look back now and to wish I had taken a different approach, but that is probably to forget the vastly different media attitudes at the time. It feels great to make such a public declaration as marriage in 2023, but in all honesty I cannot say that being more public about my sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s would have made my life or career easier. There were no easy answers at the time and I just look back and thank goodness that times have changed for younger generations.
The weaponising of my sexuality against me started when in the 1987 general election the editor of the News of the World, David Montgomery, ignored my pleas and splashed on “Labour’s gay campaign chief” and my then “love triangle” naming the three-year-old child my male partner had fathered with a close female friend of ours.
Advertisement
I still have the handwritten letter that John Smith left for me at campaign HQ saying just get on with the job, the rest of the world doesn’t care. And they didn’t although this did not stop my main rival in the Hartlepool parliamentary selection two years later making sure every single party member had a photocopy of the original News of the World article pushed through their door in plain brown envelope.
I beat him in the vote three to one. I felt vindicated but I was also distressed and craved discretion towards my private life.
I justified this to myself, when others were out openly campaigning for gay equality, by insisting that gay politicians had as much right as heterosexual politicians to be judged solely on their political beliefs and ability rather than their sexuality. The role model I offered to aspirant gay politicians was that sexuality didn’t matter — you could rise through the ranks without making a thing of being gay. To some, though, this appeared more like defensiveness. And, truthfully, it was.
So when, years on, Matthew Parris went on Newsnight in November 1998 and mentioned that I was among gay members of Tony Blair’s cabinet, I was both indifferent and angry. I had long since been “outed” so what was the fuss? But when, an hour and a half later, a tabloid reporter was banging on my front door, shouting at me through the letter box demanding a statement on being gay, I was furious. The BBC, rightly, decided it was all none of anyone’s business and banned further reporting but this decision only excited newspaper comment further.
An air of secrecy and controversy was threatening to envelope me and in No 10, the prime minister and his communications chief, Alastair Campbell, wondered what to do. Should I issue a statement acknowledging the truth of Matthew’s “revelation” or treat it all with quiet disdain? I was happy either way but they advised against a statement.
Advertisement
Possibly they judged that a statement would simply trigger further media interest, especially as my life had just taken a remarkable turn for the better with Reinaldo entering it. We were openly living together in Notting Hill and the media were excited. The newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn routinely referred to my “samba-dancing Brazilian partner” and repeatedly questioned Reinaldo’s immigration status. William Hague, then opposition leader, baited Blair at the dispatch box with a reference to Lord Mandelson of Rio. In the first year of our relationship, Reinaldo was entrapped by a British journalist while pursuing his language studies at a Japanese university.
His family and their neighbours were tracked down in Brazil and offered large sums to tell what they knew. This media lather inevitably later fed into controversies that surrounded my resignations from the government. I hated the publicity yet some whispered that if I had not done so much to “draw attention to myself” the circumstances of my resignations might not have arisen. One senior Labour cabinet member appearing on Any Questions soon after my second departure from government was overheard in conversation with Jonathan Dimbleby saying that because of the lives homosexuals lead they get used to telling lies.
Leaving this hostile environment behind was the real reason I was determined to go to Brussels to become EU trade commissioner. I was travelling the world, working intensively, separated from Reinaldo most of the time. Being apart so much added to the strain on us, as we prioritised shielding ourselves from unwelcome media scrutiny. The main burden fell on him. He wanted to pursue his own professional career, which had already been badly derailed by the ups and downs of my own. When I wrote my memoir in 2010, The Third Man, Reinaldo insisted on minimum exposure in it, which led Evan Davies on the Today programme to ask me why the book contained more references to my dog, Bobby, than to my partner. And so it continued.
Trying to retain our privacy has been a failure. So I am delighted to make it a glorious failure, by declaring our love publicly through marriage. There is nothing to hide so why create the impression there is? Reinaldo, meanwhile, is going to keep his own counsel and I don’t blame him. But, for me, it is easier now to be gay and high profile and marriage has put a welcome seal on my happiness and on the past.
Peter Mandelson joins How to Win an Election, on Tuesdays at 10.15am on Times Radio or wherever you get your podcasts
