Euan McColm: Matheson’s career is finished but don’t blame homophobia

WHEN news broke on Friday that the Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, Gordon Matheson, had been arrested and reported to the procurator fiscal for an alleged act of public indecency with another man, one high-profile Scots lawyer took to Twitter to express a completely rock-solid opinion. “What Gordon Matheson does in his personal life is no-one’s business,” he wrote.

The lawyer was right. Matheson’s personal life, his sexuality, is nobody else’s concern. We have no right to invade his privacy nor can I imagine why we’d want to. But that doesn’t apply in this case, does it? Matheson’s arrest is not a strictly personal matter. He was accused of breaking the law in a public place. He’s the leader of Scotland’s biggest local authority. Matheson’s arrest for public indecency is our business just as much as charges of shoplifting or breach of the peace would be.

We shouldn’t let concern that a politician’s sexuality may be used against them become a justification for ignoring illegal behaviour. The law and politics – with their need for public accountability – can’t work like that. The idea that there’s nothing to see here, from the vantage point of being lovely and liberal and comfortable like a onesie woven of angora and conscience-salving direct debits, is wrong.

We can, however, feel free not to be particularly bothered by what Matheson did. The more worldly among you may even have, er, a friend who’s enjoyed a little horseplay where they ought not. You may agree that the law against public indecency, while excellent at stopping people having sex in parks while you feed the ducks with the kids on a Sunday afternoon, might be used with more discretion by police who find adults in cars in the dead of night. But the law is the law and the suggestion – and it’s out there, being whispered by well-intentioned friends of Matheson’s – that public interest in this incident is homophobic is wrong.

Political reaction to it, on the other hand, has been. It has dripped with smears, with the use of Matheson’s sexuality to undermine him politically being shameless. We should have expected the online stuff, the hateful suggestions that his arrest pointed to personal dishonesty, the not-at-all-funny jokes, the conflation of homosexuality with “sleaze”.

It’s not just the slavering online trolls, though. From within his own party have come secret briefings that Matheson is over. How can he continue, whisper some colleagues, when this is “hanging over him”. From within YesScotland has come the weasel-worded “question of judgment” play, in which sexual indiscretion is presented as an indicator of a dangerous instability. If he can get off with another bloke behind his partner’s back, imagine what he might do to Glasgow. That line didn’t ring true when tabloids spun it 20 years ago to justify invading people’s privacy and it doesn’t ring true now.

So isn’t it satisfying that Matheson has decided that he’s going nowhere? Don’t we see some progress when a politician refuses to let a scandal which involves his sexuality stop him? A very few years ago, the very fact of a politician’s homosexuality was enough to end a career. Opponents muttered about blackmail threats and double lives and it was difficult for a lot of gay politicians to come out. Still is.

But things are better. A decade ago it would have been unthinkable that Glasgow Labour councillors – or Scottish Conservatives for that matter – might elect an openly gay leader. Matheson – and Ruth Davidson – showed that sexuality is an irrelevance to leadership qualities. I should mention Patrick Harvie, too, but, among Green party members, issues over sexuality are considerably less sensitive.

In standing up when he feels like lying down, Matheson says his sexuality is neither a weakness to exploit, nor a weapon with which to attack him. Rather tawdry his liaison may have been, but Matheson’s reaction to its fall-out is brave.

Friends say he is down and emotionally fragile after details of his arrest became public but they’re adamant that, after a wobble, he plans to address the matter publicly and move on. Good for him. It’s just a pity this incident will kill his career regardless. And homophobia won’t have a part to play. The culture of Labour in Glasgow is brutal. Successive council leaders have, at times, seemed to spend as much time fighting off attempts to unseat them by ambitious colleagues as they have promoting the interests of the city.

Matheson looked particularly vulnerable two years ago. People didn’t want rid of him because he was gay. They wanted rid of him because they wanted his job. They wanted to lead Glasgow during the Commonwealth Games in 2014. That’s a nice job with shiny things. There were weekly rumours of coups in the planning. At one point, Jim Murphy MP made a panicked visit to the city chambers to intervene personally and head off a challenge on Matheson’s leadership.

A surprisingly good result in the 2012 council elections changed his fortunes. Victory strengthened him and subdued his rivals. Before his arrest, Matheson was untouchable. Now, though, he’s weak again. It’s not that he was arrested for public indecency but that he was arrested at all that’s his problem.

On Friday, one Glasgow Labour councillor failed to whip up enough support for a leadership challenge. Others have kept their powder dry. In May there will be an annual general meeting of the Labour group. Before then, I understand two other ambitious councillors will try to build support for leadership bids.

Matheson’s arrest will play its part in those campaigns. It would be perverse in the feral world of Glasgow politics if that was not the case. We need stability and calm and that means a leader who won’t get lifted. That’s what they’re already saying. There’s no explicit exploitation of his sexuality, but of his tangle with the law.

Matheson has refused to let homophobia end his political career this weekend and for that he has my admiration. Instead, his leadership will be ended by ambitious colleagues who’ll do in anyone, gay or straight, to further their own careers.

And that’s not homophobia. That’s just business as usual. «

Twitter: @euanmccolm