Rod Liddle
Already a subscriber? Log in
Mr Smith runs an organisation called Fever Parties, the purpose of which is to set up orgies for affluent, youngish couples in the south-east of England. It must make a welcome change from discussing EU convergence criteria with Theresa May or Francis Maude.
This is what happens if you sign up to Fever. You pay 50 quid and take your partner (no single men allowed) along to an agreeable Chelsea or Kensington townhouse where you chat with like-minded couples about, you know, convergence criteria, steel tariffs, foundation hospitals and so on. Then the lights go low. The scented candles are lit. The champagne flows. And you proceed to shag each other senseless, making the beast with two backs – or, indeed, three, four, five and six backs, as many backs as is your personal penchant, all in the caring, consensual atmosphere of a party organised by somebody who, perhaps, earlier that day took tea on the terrace with John Redwood.
Dougie’s gone to ground now, conscious of having horribly embarrassed his Cchange colleagues and made life difficult for his political masters. At Cchange, quite properly, they blush and change the subject when you ask them about it – but even then, in private, they concede they have no ideological objections to Dougie’s chosen vocation. It’s just a bit delicate within the party, is all, they murmur. They’re worried about funding, too. And so, somewhat archly, a source close to Dougie Smith told me, ‘Now, they’re living the modernising dream rather more than they expected.’
Indeed. What follows may be an apocryphal story, but it has the ring of truth. Apparently Dougie hit on the idea of Fever Parties when he arrived in London, went for a walk on Hampstead Heath and was astonished to espy hundreds of homosexuals cheerfully buggering each other in the open air. It was an epiphanous moment, it seems, for Mr Smith and, like Martin Luther King before him, he had a dream. Why can’t heterosexuals be given something like this, except indoors and with an agreeable Chablis on hand, he reportedly wondered. And so Fever Parties was born.
Believe me, Smith and his fellow Fever workers are not remotely embarrassed by their line of employment. They are positively evangelistic about it – and not simply for financial reasons. A couple who choose to attend a Fever Party will dissolve the sexual tension and emotional jealousy which bedevils and destroys so many relationships. That insane craving for sexual différence, described so succinctly by Cobbett above, can be a most malign force: it breaks up families, it costs the Exchequer lots of money, it causes havoc. Why not have it rigorously assuaged in a pleasant, controlled environment with other, like-minded people?
The Conservative party, though, is not so sure. Ann Widdecombe – who has never, to my knowledge, attended a Fever Party, although I’m sure she would be a most welcome attraction were she ever to do so – has already stamped down with her size-12 boots. ‘I certainly don’t regard it lightheartedly,’ she said. ‘I take a dim view of that sort of behaviour.’ Well, thank you, headmistress.
Trouble is, there are plenty in the party who would entirely agree with her, and a good many who would go still further in their condemnations. Quite why they would do so is the question to be resolved.
When, exactly, did the Conservative party become the party of sexual repression? It certainly never used to be thus. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was the Whigs who, in public at least, were censorious about the sexual behaviour of individuals, in court and Parliament, as this obscene, anonymous poem from 1682 makes perfectly clear:
The King, Duke and StateAre so libelled of lateThat the authors for Whigs are suspectedFor women in scandalBy scribblers are damned allTo court and to cunt disaffected.
The irony is that censoriousness was forced upon the Conservative party by the Left when it swung behind the various liberationist struggles of the 1960s. But the Left embraced gay rights and women’s rights not out of an ideological commitment to the freedom of the individual – quite the reverse – but because they thought they were undermining the patriarchal society. In other words, they weren’t enjoying the sex; they just thought it was politically useful. Indeed, the Left has its heart in a dismal, totalitarian and very Victorian ideology which emphasises the need to restrain, confine and overcome human nature; if you doubt that, read the Communist Manifesto, and tremble.
The Right, for its part, never even pretended that such things were either possible or desirable. As that aforementioned source close to Dougie Smith put it, ‘The Left spends all of its time trying to make people act contrary to their impulses. For lefties everything is political. But it doesn’t have to be like that.’
The Conservative party now, though, has a choice to make. It can follow Ann Widdecombe and return to the repressed, as Freud put it. It can, in other words, be the party which takes a ‘dim view’ of other people’s harmless behaviour. In which case, I suspect, it will be left behind. Or it can allow people the freedom to behave precisely as they wish in the privacy of their own homes – or one of Dougie Smith’s rented apartments – without censure or social or financial penalty. Watching Iain Duncan Smith this last year or so, one cannot be entirely sure which path will be taken. Maybe he should spend an evening at one of those terrifying Fever Parties. It might be hell, but he could learn something.
Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Also in Society
Also by Rod Liddle
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in