The Tory ‘Lavender Mafia’

Is Will Wragg an outlier?

There has been a strain of high camp and homosexuality in the Tory mindset for decades. Whether it is the heavy innuendo and closeted suffering of Evelyn Waugh’s low door in the wall and strawberries beside a tree in Brideshead; the menacing, omnivorous camp of Francis Urquart in House of Cards; or Britain’s first drag queen Arabist PM, Anthony Eden, British Toryism has played with uphill gardening for quite some time. 

But what used to be an eccentric bit of background noise — the perennial Uncle Monty-type characters drifting in and out of Port and Policy, Party Conference drinks receptions, Freedom Fizz, and Young Britons Foundation soirées — has become a defining trait of the modern Tory Party; one that is staring the public in the face, but refuses to be named. The gay Tory tendency is now a political liability, and a national embarrassment. 

In the last three years alone there have been six sordid scandals on the front pages involving impropriety from gay Tory MPs, three of which resulted in the MPs in question standing down. Two MPs remain through sheer force of shameless will, as does another because he was protected by the establishment. 

First we had the implosion of Rob Roberts, MP for Delyn, who lasted about a week in Parliament after his unexpected election in 2019 before embarking on an — admittedly bisexual — feast of groping and sleazing in Westminster, so bowled-over was he by the volume and availability of young people and gay bars in London, as compared to the sheep and drizzle of North Wales. Roberts, previously discussed in Volume IV, finally lost the Conservative party whip in October 2021. While he was being investigated by Parliament’s bullying and harassment commissars, his ex-wife was enjoying lockdown-busting parties without him in Wales, delighted to have him out of her hair. Pity the poor Westminster staffers who were little more than collateral damage to Mr and Mrs Roberts’ divorce.

Roberts was followed by the literal paedophilia committed by Imran Ahmed Khan, MP for Wakefield. Khan, who is closeted, was amusingly listed by Pink News as the first gay Muslim MP, until that sentence was quietly deleted from their website. This was an offence that predated his time in Westminster by many years and was not detected before his election. However, Khan was noted for the high turnover of young male staffers in his office in his short time in Parliament.

Then, in March 2022, Westminster was greeted by a late-night confession. Jamie Wallis, MP for Bridgend, informed the world that he was in fact transgender — or at least that he was trying to be. It soon transpired that this announcement came after he was found to have crashed his car one night wearing a leather skirt and high heels. He was going to continue going by ‘he/him’, and he wasn’t going to be wearing a dress in the Commons after all. Many have speculated that this confession was actually an attempt to head off being blackmailed. A treasure trove of kompromat must be in the ether somewhere.

Then came the scandal which drew the curtains on Boris Johnson’s time in office, the ‘Pincher by name, pincher by nature’ Carlton Club collapse of Chris Pincher, MP for Tamworth and Deputy Chief Whip. In June 2022, the young men who had suffered his aggressive and unwanted advances spilled the beans to a new reporter at The Sun, ultimately leading to the final, lethal blow on Boris Johnson (some suspect establishment foul play). Pincher had in fact already been forced to resign as Assistant Whip in 2017 over allegations of sexual impropriety, but was reappointed as a Whip by Theresa May just two months later.

We then had a period of relative calm until 2024, when we were greeted with two gay Tory scandals at once. First came the Will Wragg dick-pic blackmail story. Wragg, MP for Hazel Grove, had decided to send a picture of his penis in response to unsolicited messages from a complete stranger who turned out to be a honeytrap. He then passed on the contact details of other MPs to his blackmailer. What happened with Mark Menzies, MP for Fylde, whose scandal broke very soon after Wragg’s, is somewhat less clear, but seems to have involved chemsex party blackmail and the misuse of Party funds. These MPs both had form, and neither revelation should have come as a surprise. In 2014, it was discovered that Menzies was seeing a teenage Brazilian rentboy named Rogerio Santos. As well as showing his new squeeze around Parliament, Menzies allegedly asked Rogerio to procure him drugs, and was forced to step down as a PPS because of the allegations. Rumours about Wragg’s behaviour — which we will not repeat for legal reasons, but just ask any under-35 man who has worked in right-wing politics in London — had already been widely circulating in Westminster for many years, despite never being reported on.

On top of these six can be added a seventh: the arrest of Crispin Blunt, MP for Reigate, on suspicion of rape and drug offences in October 2023. Blunt had previously campaigned for the legalisation of poppers, a drug popular with some gay men for enhancing anal sex. He had also gone out of his way to defend Imran Ahmed Khan, even after his conviction for the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy, claiming it was a ‘serious miscarriage of justice’. Though Blunt has not been charged, the investigation continues, but there is little more to add for now.

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These scandals account for more than a third of the twenty Tory MPs listed by Pink News as ‘LGBTQ’ in a glowing piece written after the last election. This is an incredible hit-rate for a group of 365-strong MPs returned to Parliament in 2019. What is the cause? Is it purely a matter of candidate selection? Some of the men mentioned above, like Mark Menzies, were fast-tracked into selection: Menzies was on David Cameron’s ‘A-List’ before the 2010 General Election. Others, like Rob Roberts, were selected for seats which the Tories did not expect to win, and were presumably given less scrutiny (similar to Labour’s Jared O’Mara). 

The behaviour of these MPs seems to only be the tip of the iceberg, considering the gay bullying scandal responsible for shutting down Conservative Future (and associated activist organisation the Young Britons’ Foundation) after the 2015 General Election. Indeed, the ex-Chairman of Conservative Future, Ben Howlett, former MP for Bath (2015-17), faced allegations of impropriety and sexual assault against men in 2016. An amusing nano-scandal occurred in 2017 when the Daily Mail was accused of ‘outing’ a young, gay Tory activist who was photographed kissing another man on the streets of Manchester during the Conservative Party Conference of that year. Party Conference, unsurprisingly, has a real history of such goings on. Back in the ancient history of 2011, there were even investigations of taxpayer-funded orgies taking place in conference hotels, involving ‘cute boys’, and Party authorities were criticised for their light punishment of the man responsible.

This is not to deny the existence of heterosexual impropriety in the Tory party, as the leaked 2017 ‘Whips List’ attests. The allegations listed are mainly against straight men, but since 2021-22, there has been a huge rise in the prominence of the gay subculture within the party. Nor is it our intention at Pimlico to call for a witch hunt. We are merely arguing that gay Tory MPs and activists should be held to the same standards of personal behaviour as any other British politician, and that we must speak honestly about the evident problems within the gay subculture in the Conservative Party — problems that almost all right-wing activists in London, of all sexual orientations, will already be well aware of, even if the general public and (perhaps) parts of the press remain clueless.

Are these problems unique to the Conservative Party? It is hard to say. The Labour Party has its fair share of dysfunction and sleaze, but the party is much more clannish, and its MPs and members seem less likely to go to the press in the possession of a sex scandal about their colleagues. When they return to government, the level of scrutiny they are under will increase dramatically, and perhaps they will not be able to keep the allegations against former Chief Whip Nick Brown secret, as they can now.

But if it is unique to the Tories, then why? As mentioned above, there has always been a long tradition of camp in Tory circles, much like the incense and gold-embroidered corners of Anglo-Catholicism. The party has a slightly tortured relationship with gayness, as it has spent decades atoning for the sin of Section 28, which seemed to be the primary motivation for David Cameron’s charge to legalise same-sex marriage in 2013.

Despite Section 28, in many ways the Tory Party was the more liberal of the two major parties in the latter twentieth century. Putting aside the freakish and extremist paedophilia advocates in Labour circles of the ’70s and ’80s, the Conservative Party’s driving force as the party of professional service workers against trade unionist troglodytes undoubtedly gave them an air of progressive liberalism compared to the brutes that made up much of the Labour Party, especially in the provinces. Many gay men were not just attracted to Margaret Thatcher’s Tories for her economic policies and her arch high camp style, but also to a party without large-fisted thugs inclined to beat them up for being a nancy. One of the great errors of Billy Elliot is the film’s insistence that our young ballet dancer would stand in solidarity with the miners against Maggie. Billy Elliot would quite clearly have been a Tory in reality, making a successful life for himself in London, the country’s premier progressive city, and softening his northern accent into something more genteel.

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Where this gets most interesting is when we examine the possibility of a ‘Lavender Mafia’ existing within the party, where some kind of promotion or protection scheme exists. Promotion seems unlikely; protection seems more than plausible, but fiendishly hard to prove. An interesting piece from Politico in 2022 suggested that networks of loyalty and mutual benefit were being built between gay staffers and gay MPs in the party. It was certainly strange that when both the Wragg and Menzies scandals broke, the party’s initial response was to defend the indefensible. The Chancellor of the Exchequer took to the airwaves to suggest that Wragg — included in the 2017 list for, to quote verbatim, ‘video exists of three males urinating on him’ — must feel terribly sorry and ashamed for sending pictures of his penis to a complete stranger, and then passing on contact details of other MPs to said complete stranger. It was reported that CCHQ repeatedly swept under the rug allegations against Menzies, and it took a disillusioned activist going to The Times to uncover his use of Party funds to pay off blackmailers and his ‘private medical expenses’ for Menzies to have the whip removed. The details of the story around Menzies — a 3am call, parties in undisclosed flats in London, threats of blackmail from ‘bad men’ — have all the hallmarks of an MP finding himself in a deeply compromised (and compromising) position at a chemsex party. This is not a masonic conspiracy, but it does raise eyebrows.

Doubtless, the Westminster lifestyle can enable and encourage affairs and infidelity, whether with men or with women. Many MPs live hundreds of miles from their spouses and children, sharing flats in Vauxhall, surrounded by adoring and enthusiastic young researchers, eager to please, with all the pleasures of a capital city to entertain them. It is a far cry from leafleting with elderly party members in the provinces whom the MPs secretly despise.

Since the phone-hacking scandal, media culture around reporting of sexual scandals has changed. This is not to say that MPs should be looking over their shoulders for a ratty tabloid hack desperate to report on their vices and indiscretions, but to note that in Britain, the balance of taboo has changed from a taboo against sexual impropriety to a taboo against invasive journalism. Holding public office requires the maintenance of high personal standards. That is true of MPs of all parties and all sexual orientations, and it is in the public interest for us to know about some aspects of an MP’s personal life. The French approach of complete privacy in this regard is not the better alternative. 

There are gay scandals and gay subcultures in right-wing political parties throughout the West, and it would be silly to deny it. The ’90s and ’00s Republican Party saw a string of gay sex scandals, such as Senator Larry Craig and Representative Mark Foley. Add to this list the various evangelical pastors found to have been seeing male prostitutes and you have an irresistible case of socially conservative, ‘family values’ public figures indulging in the greatest hypocrisy possible. There is also a strain of right-wing homosexuality in Europe, but it is not shrouded in scandal or secrecy like it is in the Anglosphere. Prominent anti-Islam activist, the flamboyant gay Dutch polemicist Pim Fortuyn — murdered in the street for his views — is considered the forerunner of something that Unherd calls ‘homo-nativism’, where anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment are specifically linked to the protection of a liberal and gay-friendly society. Florian Philippot, Vice President of French right-wing populist party National Rally from 2012 to 2017, is a contemporary example of this tendency. 

There is little of this on display among today’s Tory ‘Lavender Mafia’, however. Gay Tory MPs, both past and present, are generally more to the left of the Party, advocates of an imagined ‘Cameroon Conservatism’ with a selective amnesia about his repeated promises to cut immigration to pre-1997 levels and to repeal the Human Rights Act. A great deal of anger is meted out against the evangelical SNP MSP Kate Forbes; very little against mass migration and multiculturalism — the greatest threats to British liberty today, for both homosexuals and heterosexuals. Its main manifestation, however, comes in the form of Westminster parlour games: briefings and counter-briefings to the press against other MPs and other factions, an immensely petty political culture that turns on drinks parties, press releases, and fawning over Penny Mordaunt’s ‘mic-drop’ responses to SNP questions in the Commons. 

The important article by Esther Webber for Politico mentioned above aside, there has been little examination of the effect of this dynamic on the Conservative Party. The most damaging secrets are always ‘open secrets’, as they encourage dishonesty and deception, and never reform. Evidently, among the gay Tory subculture, there is a culture of abuse, harassment, and blackmail, and it is being kept hidden by collusion at the highest levels, buttressed by fears of a supposedly ‘homophobic’ reaction. As this chapter of the David Cameron Green Tree Conservative Party comes to a close, the British Right should reflect on how it allowed its primary political party to become an annex of Grindr, and ensure it never happens again.