Cabbages & Kings: Private matters, public interest

“Even saints can sometimes blunder
One turned a lame man blind —
The impression I was under
Was to be cruel is
sometimes kind

But if one views the damage
That cruelty can cause
The conceit of the proverb
Should give proverbial pause.”
From The Must Calendar
by Bachchoo

I have never gone professional, by which I mean I have never paid a sex worker for his or her services. This is not intended as a moral boast but an assertion of the fear that one’s ego could not withstand paying for a pretended intimacy when one’s charms, such as they are, could not procure a real one. Several people, even close friends, have had encounters and adventures in the sex trade and I’ve heard anecdotes and read about happy, bad, sad and tragic hookers, but have never encountered one in even a conversational way. I remember as a teenager in Pune cycling in a gang through Budhwarpeth, the redlight streets of the city, and encountering painted women shouting “coming darling” from windows and doorways and making loud kissing sounds to attract our attention and possible custom. It was prurient and disgusting and we did it for the thrill of experiencing, through the remotest form of contact, what we dreaded as ultimately forbidden.

In Britain today, prostitution is legal. Sex workers and their clients, seen as offering and buying services, can have consensual sex without transgressing any law. Pimping is illegal, living off immoral earnings is illegal, curb-crawling in search of sex is illegal and, of course, trafficking men, women and children is a very serious crime. If a man is in touch by phone with two male prostitutes and suggests to them that they meet at a flat he owns and they agree that they will bring along a third man and carry some sex-enhancing drugs called poppers, no law has been broken. If, however, the client is recorded and witnessed saying he will pay for a dose of cocaine which the third man can bring and sniff, he may have crossed the line. Just. Even if the client of this paragraph happens to be a member of the UK Parliament and the rent boys happen to be legally adult Romanian immigrants, the whole encounter remains a “private matter”. No public interest has been jeopardised or violated. No laws have been broken, though the heart of the client’s wife, once she learns about the encounter through the front page of the next day’s newspapers, may be.

Suppose the reports are graphic, with the client asking the prostitutes to “treat him like a bitch” and enquiring in more explicit terms who had done what with whom. The hypothetical case outlined above was dramatically played out last week in London when Keith Vaz, an MP of Indian origin for a Leicester constituency, was exposed by the Sunday Mirror, a tabloid, as the client and protagonist of just such an encounter. The leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said what Keith did there and then was a “private matter”. It wasn’t. Keith Vaz was at the time the chairperson of the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee. This committee was entrusted with an inquiry into prostitution and particularly whether, as in some countries, the law should criminalise not the sellers but the buyers of sex. The committee has so far not suggested outlawing the buying of sex from prostitutes as long as they are consenting adults selling it. No prizes for guessing which way Mr Vaz — known in parliamentary circles, for reasons beyond the pun on his name, as “Vazeline” — argued or voted.

The committee was also entrusted with determining which drugs should be criminalised and it stopped short of classifying poppers as an illegal drug. When the scandal broke and was featured all over the media, exhibiting 100 per cent confidence in the evidence and defiant about being sued for defamation or for exposing unsavoury facts which have no public interest, Mr Vaz was faced with a vote of no confidence from the Home Affairs Committee and prudently resigned as its chair. The next few days will determine whether he stays on the committee at all, interrogating witnesses in the prostitution and drug deliberations. There has been no publicised reaction from his family or his Leicester constituency, which has a large Asian electorate.

Mr Vaz is married with two children. I encountered him in the 1980s when he was one of the first MPs from the “immigrant” population elected to Westminster. I thought then it was a common, unremarkable and irrelevant fact that he was gay or bisexual. Very many members of the Westminster Parliament are openly gay. Keith Vaz never was. He was, in immigrant circles, something of a hero, a representative of minority rights in the corridors of power. As an Asian and one born into a Catholic family, it may have been doubly difficult to openly own up his sexual orientation. There will be a large chunk of his Asian electorate who, for religious or just bigoted, traditional reasons, are militantly intolerant of homosexuality. That may have been a strong incentive to remain closeted. From all the evidence I have seen on TV, when he questioned witnesses, he was a strong and effective interrogator. Now he is under the threat of being investigated by another agency of Parliament which looks into sleaze and corruption.

Mr Vaz is no stranger to such investigations. In the past it was alleged that he and Peter Mandelson, both ministers in Tony Blair’s Labour administration, had tried to sell British citizenship to the millionaire Hinduja brothers. Their attempts were unsuccessful, and whereas Mr Mandelson was forced to resign, Mr Vaz survived. Questions are now being asked about the substantial number of properties he and his wife own. One of these concerns the North London flat where he encountered the prostitutes. How did he afford this third residence on his MP’s salary? Sad to see another one, in all probability, bite the dust.