William Hague could learn from Robbie Williams

William Hague could learn from Robbie Williams

The foreign secretary's statement has a misjudgment of the first water

What a shame that William Hague decided to handle the internet rumours in such a pompous, heavy-handed manner. It doesn't matter that the rumours have been following him since Oxford University: who, these days, would be so silly and thin-skinned as to be genuinely upset by a gay smear? Or so naive as to admit they are?

Making the underqualified Christopher Myers his aide is one thing, but the pair sharing a hotel room could have been handled easily and lightly – Hague joking that he's a Yorkshireman, too tight to pay for two rooms. As for the "True Bromance" pictures of them walking along the street in sunglasses, Hague in a baseball cap and tucked-in top, Alastair Campbell observed drily: "Most politicians are poor at casual clothes." An understatement, but there was no real harm in the photo. It was just so hilariously camp.

Dining with a friend, I was told how she'd once spotted Andy Bell, the fabulous singer from Erasure, on New York's Gay Street, wearing a bum-bag. She mentally filed it away as the campest thing she'd ever seen. "But the Hague photo is camper!" Crucially, neither of us thought any of this (funny photos, ill-judged room sharing) had anything to do with Hague being homosexual. Why, then, did Hague feel compelled to react in such a po-faced, dramatic way?

Hague should have laughed it off. Sure, there's the whiff of gay Salem around Westminster at times. Right now, we seem to be tripping over politicians coming out or having dramas about their sexuality. However, these people are gay. Merely being accused of being gay isn't the same thing. In fact, it appears to be practically a blooding for a certain stripe of workaholic politician, part of the Westminster territory.

For Hague suddenly to barge around, making public statements, dragging his wife Ffion's miscarriages into it, hints at a worrying dearth of emotional intelligence. Miscarriages are incredibly sad, but they aren't proof of a man's sexuality. Nor is having children, nor is even a 20-year marriage, as Crispin Blunt recently demonstrated.

However, that's beside the point. Hague seems to be a decent man and an experienced international statesman. Why, then, would he embark on a course of action that sends out the toxic message that, if it is not actually shameful to be gay, it is an outright insult to be accused of it?

This is what Hague has done and, in a way, that presumes politicians are uniquely targeted. Far from it. Even at my low level, I regularly receive missives from people asking charmingly, and sometimes not so charmingly, whether I might secretly be one for the ladies. It's inaccurate; I sometimes feel that I should be checking my desk diary in case I did black out and spend a month or so dating Ellen DeGeneres. However, it's not remotely distressing or insulting.

Irrelevant? I've not been splashed all over the papers, nor whispered about for years. No, but others have. Take That's new video for "Shame" features Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow parodying the gay movie Brokeback Mountain, making light of the homosexual rumours that have followed the band since the start of their career. Surely if fluffy boyband members can cope with elegance and humour with this kind of thing, a foreign secretary should have breezed it.

This is the point. If Hague can't cope with bromance rumours, however incessant and irritating, then how can we trust him with issues that really matter, such as Afghanistan or Iran? Arguably, all this pouting and stropping has made Hague seem a million times camper. However, none of us has any right to care a damn whether William Hague is gay or straight. What is significant, and troubling, is that our foreign secretary dealt with gay rumours markedly less maturely than a boyband.