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Then Dr Pasha, the chairman, told the room that he and other Muslims considered themselves proudly British, that this was the noble mother country they looked up to, that being a Muslim didn’t conflict with being British. He set it up nicely; the men from the Home Office were listening happily. Then he came to the point. As Muslims were the second largest religious denomination in Britain the British government could surely give them more recognition. This applied especially to the law of blasphemy which should be invoked on their behalf. He’d written to the Home Secretary — at this Dr Pasha turned forcefully to the two Britishers — insisting that the film The Blood of Hussein be banned, and more importantly Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which was an attack on Islam, on the prophet himself! Why are those people fomenting hatred against us? cried Dr Pasha, his eyes burning into the pink faces of the men from the Home Office. Surely a religious attack on us is an attack on our beloved Home Secretary himself! Why are they not prosecuted for racism? The men from the Home Office lowered their eyes.

So the conference was warming up, certainly in the conference hall the speeches were emollient and predictable; the uninhibited face of Toryism was presented at the fringe meetings, I’d been told. But it had been restrained there too, so far. Until, after this hors d’oeuvre, I went to see Teresa Gorman speak.

The speakers at this meeting were in a fortunate position. After nine and a half years of Conservative rule there were few genuine enemies in power to rail against. The fortunate ones, those who could speak from experience, were those Conservatives actually in opposition — local politicians in Labour-controlled boroughs. There was, therefore, an excited sense of anticipation in this meeting: we would hear about life in the Red Republics, perhaps a microcosm of life under a Labour government.

It started off mildly enough, with a councillor speaking of young minds being inundated by left-wing propaganda. Gay literature was being smuggled into children’s homes. There were gays-only swimming lessons, he said; there were creatures of indeterminate sex running the town halls. The room grumbled its disapproval. Not only that, there were illegal encampments of gypsies all over Haringey who were being given support by Catholic nuns. As a result, gangs of youths were defecating in pensioners’ living rooms.

This talk of Red Faeces provoked howls and yelps of disgust; wild clapping followed. A man sitting in front of me in a filthy suit which appeared to be entirely composed of stains, removed what seemed to be a snotty gumshield from his mouth and started to eat his tie. Two delicate Indian women came in and sat down next to me.

Soon there was talk of ‘racist black shits who’d impregnated hundreds of white women’. Meanwhile garbage was piling up in the streets.

‘No, no, no!’ yelled the Worker’s Party.

But the room soon hushed for Teresa Gorman. When she spoke she insisted that cuts in local services which led to garbage piling up in the streets were not to be worried about: ‘We have a new way of looking at things. Until we get power we must try and enjoy the awfulness of socialism. We should encourage it! Wasn’t there a Chinese philosopher who said that when being raped you should lie back and enjoy it?’

The racism of the meeting surprised me. After all, there were scores of Asian families who shared Conservative values. Surely the Tories didn’t want to alienate blacks and Asians when potentially they could be a source of support? I’d thought that the hatred of homosexuals had, in general, supplanted blacks and Asians in Conservative demonology. Hadn’t Nigel Lawson said that being gay was ‘unfortunate’? I would find out. As I sat through this meeting I noticed that the next day there’d be a meeting of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality. I’d go to that.

This meeting, which was in a hotel, was hard to find and when I turned up, the name of the meeting wasn’t printed on the notice board: coyly, there was only the initials CGHE. I went down some stairs, trudged through several corridors — under the whole damp hotel it seemed (perhaps this was the Channel Tunnel) — and emerged in a room full of chairs. The one man there, who wore glasses thick as welder’s goggles and had a hare-lip, was hunched in a corner and jumped in surprise as I came in. He handed me a magazine called Open Mind. I wondered if this was perhaps the party’s only out gay, which wouldn’t have surprised me: Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens wanted to recriminalize sexual relations between adult men; and Rhodes Boyson has remarked that the promotion of positive images of gays could be ‘the end of creation’.

In one article in the magazine, by ‘Westminster Watcher’, the writer commends the party: ‘Although some queer-bashing Conservative journalists behaved very badly during the last election, the party at the national level appealed to prejudice with only one poster and a few remarks: at the constituency level the record was worse.’ The paper’s editorial also refers to this homophobic election poster and remarks wistfully that it was designed by the Jewish brothers Saatchi and Saatchi who should know better than to persecute people. Elsewhere in the paper, the writers urge heterosexuals not to be afraid of the end-of-creationists: ‘Homosexuals are as much concerned as heterosexuals with maintaining institutions which contribute to the health and stability of society.’

Eventually a handful of men arrived; but they wouldn’t sit down, and waited at the back. It was quiet in the room; no one looked at anyone else.

The speaker told us that the Labour Party tried to exploit gays, that all local government gay centres and organisations should be privatised and that Section 28 was unlikely to do any damage to sensible activities.

The Worker’s Party was hugging its prejudices to itself; through them it defined itself; this was obviously not the time to expect it to relinquish them.

Later that night I was in a restaurant, at a table with various right-wing journalists and an MP. I started to talk to the MP about Enoch Powell, who I’d seen speak earlier in the day. Powell’s was the most crowded and exuberant meeting I’d been to in Brighton, and Powell had been introduced, by a one-eyed speaker, as a man proved consistently right, a man who was not only a statesman but a Prophet. The straight-backed Prophet said, in his spine-chilling and monotonous voice, that he had never left the Conservative Party, it had left him. And now, he said, to cheers and whistles, it appeared to be approaching him again.

Now, at dinner, the MP told me that the Prophet was his hero. Since the late 1950s the Prophet had supported the free market in all things (except immigration) and had even been denounced by Mosley’s Union Movement in 1968 for stealing its ideas. The MP was proud to be a racist. The woman sitting opposite the MP intervened. ‘By the way, I’m Jewish,’ she said. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, then, as a Jewess you should acknowledge that there are many races and your race is different to mine. The English are a provincial people uninterested in culture. And you Jews are a metropolitan people obsessed with it.’

Speaking of his admiration for the Prophet, the MP said that Powell was the living originator of Thatcherism, pre-dating Keith Joseph in his ideas and unlike Joseph able to by-pass Parliament and communicate directly with the working class. The Prophet’s time had come, but through Thatcher, who was a better politician.

This was interesting because the Prophet had this reconnection in common with another man frequently considered to have slipped beyond the boundaries of sanity: Peregrine Worsthorne, who would be speaking the next evening. However, for the remainder of this evening there would be the Spectator party. Perhaps it would be less ideologically taxing; perhaps there would be some ordinary people there.