‘To Fall Like Lucifer’ by Ian Harvey

Ian Harvey (1914 – 1987) was a British Conservative politician who was a contemporary of some well-known figures such as Edward Heath, Ian Macleod, Enoch Powell and Reginald Maudling. He was brought up by his mother and step-father after his father was killed in the first world war, got a first rate education at Fettes College in Edinburgh, did very well and went on to Christ Church in Oxford where he became president of both the Conservative Association and the Oxford Union.

He then had a distinguished war record, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He went into the public relations industry after the war, got married, became a local councillor and was elected to Parliament on his second attempt as the MP for Harrow East at the 1950 general election.

When the Conservatives returned to government he began to climb the greasy pole, being appointed as junior minister in the Ministry of Supply, before heading to the Foreign Office in 1958. He was at this stage forty-four years old, with two daughters and a bright future ahead of him. He was ambitious, effective in his jobs, well-regarded and likely soon to achieve high office.

The first chapters of this autobiography tell his story in a wholly conventional manner. It is no different to dozens of other political memoirs in its tone and style. It is vaguely interesting if the minutiae of British political history is your thing (as it is mine), but in no way at all original.

Then on page 100 everything changes, as indeed it did literally - and overnight - for Ian Harvey MP:

Although I have been homosexual all my life I had only once had any physical experience before the end of the war.

He then takes the reader back in time and discusses his first sexual experience at school and then, in the post war period, his decision to embark on what would turn out to be his ‘road to disaster’ when he was living in Knightsbridge and got into the habit of entering Kensington Gardens of an evening for the purpose of fraternising with guardsmen in and around the Peter Pan statue:

In view of my undoubted political ambitions, this conduct could well be adjudged as verging on insanity. Every time it was over I pretended to myself that this was definitely the last time. I knew perfectly well the risk I was running and exactly what would happen if I was caught.

And yet he continued, like a drug addict, to visit the same park regularly for many years, including after he had been elected to Parliament and had become a minister.

Then in November 1958, after many years of getting away with what was at this time widely considered to constitute grossly immoral and illegal activity. He got caught:

It is common practice in our society to break the ten commandments with comparative impunity, but it is not permissible to break the eleventh. This I did and paid the price.

He was taken to Cannon Row police station, was charged with gross indecency and told to appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court the following morning. Driving home he briefly considered suicide but thought better of it. Instead he turned up at the required time, was committed for a full trial three weeks hence, headed straight to the Foreign Office to resign as a minister and then immediately resigned his Parliamentary seat. He pleaded guilty, and turned up to stand in the dock alongside the guardsman concerned in front a courtroom packed with gentlemen of the press. His lawyer spoke on his behalf:

I remember him saying ‘He will pay for this for the rest of his life’. How right he was.

And that was the end of his political career, something he found it very difficult to live with for the rest of his life. He was fined and thus avoided prison, but all ambitions had to be abndoned. He returned to the advertising business but was never happy in his work again and went through periods of deep depression as he watched his contemporaries build the kind of career he had once aspired to from the outside. He pays fulsome tribute to his wife, family and close friends who supported him throughout this time. Most though dropped him like a hot brick.

The latter chapters are focused less on his own life, and more on the tortuous battle for reform of the laws in the UK on consensual homosexual relationships, finally achieved in 1967 in the teeth of opposition from many Conservatives who Ian Harvey judges on the whole to have been ignorant more than simply prejudiced. Most saw homosexuality as a mental condition that could potentially be ‘cured’ with the right treatments.

He evaluates his own experience as follows, imagining what a psychiatrist might conceivably have written about him given an opportunity:

This man has been subject to heavy mental stress and to psychological pressures arising from frustration and deprivation and resultant social isolation. He has sought relief through alcohol which has diminished his powers of self-control and has weakened his judgement. He is a homosexual with a limited heterosexual capacity: in fact he is bisexual with a homosexual bias. He has not reacted favourably to treatment, mainly because he does not seek to be changed. Some of it has been unsatisfactory and he has access to sedative drugs which, mixed with alcohol, have had a damaging effect upon him. His physical condition is capable of cure but he will remain a homosexual and there is nothing to be done about that.

Throughout the book Ian Harvey repeatedly requests readers not to pity him, but it is hard not to, particularly towards the end when after the Sexual Offences Act 1967 was passed, he writes about how he made enquiries about potentially rejoining the Carlton Club and was rebuffed on the grounds that were his membership to be reinstated ‘some members had said that if that happened they would resign’.

It would be another thirty years - a hundred years after Oscar Wilde left prison and thought it prudent to live out the remainder of his forty-six year life in exile - before a openly gay man was appointed to cabinet post in the UK. This was something Ian Harvey did not live to see.

Like the Peter Wildeblood memoir that I read earlier this month, I found this very personal story to be fascinating. Both demonstrate how in so many ways little about life in Britain (including political life) really changed so fundamentally in the second half of the twentieth century. It was very much a question of evolution and not revolution.

But there was one big exception. There was a veritable revolution in the whole relationship between the state and personal moral conduct; what was sanctioned, what was licensed, what was permitted and how these matters were policed. Everything turned upside down as conceptions of individual freedom and 'live and let live' won out in a fight with the previously dominant guardians of public taste and morality.

After 1971 when this book was published, Ian Harvey would go on - eventually - to rejoin the Conservative Party. He chaired campaign groups aiming for the achievement of homosexual equality but lived quite a lonely existence. How different his life would have been had he been born fifty years later.

We can now view these profound social developments with a good degree of hindsight and detachment, and can thoughtfully assess their causes, course and consequences. It is an extraordinary story in so many ways and I will be reading a great deal more about it in the future.