BOYZ KEEP SWINGING

Peter Whittle talks to playwright James Graham 

 Gays on the political centre-right - and there are indeed many - will without doubt be making their way to the Soho Theatre in London over the next few weeks. On Friday 15th, a new play, Tory Boyz, opens there and is billing itself as 'a bold and acerbic political comedy that shines a light on the hidden faces behind the Conservative Party' - i.e., the gay ones.

Written by the award-winning young playwright James Graham, the play features a portrayal of Edward Heath (possibly his first such stage recreation) and offers an examination of 'the young, exciting men and women who don’t exactly fit with the stereotype.' The play claims to confront questions over the Conservatives' traditionally perceived intolerance and prejudice against gays, and will ask the question of whether it is possible that the party which passed Section 28 maybe also elected Britain’s first ever gay Prime Minister.

Not that Graham will be actually outing the former PM, who's portrayed as a young man in his play. 'This past year there's been some speculation about Heath's sexuality,' says Graham, when I spoke to him recently. 'The play doesn't actually say he was gay, although of course in some senses he was absolutely text book - an overbearing mother, a repressed manner.'

This isn't Graham's first foray into the backrooms and history of the Tory party. He was awarded the Catherine Johnson Award for the Best Play of 2007 for Eden's Empire, which was praised by the Guardian's critic Michael Billington as a 'gripping, dramatic piece of living history.'

Following this, he took on Margaret Thatcher - a figure who in some respects is still proving too big for dramatists - in Little Madam, which looked at the career of Britain's first woman prime minister through the prism of her childhood as plain Margaret Roberts. 'A remarkable conceit,' said The Stage, 'and one that comes off superbly.'

Why the fascination with the Tory party, I ask Graham, who grew up in an ex-mining community. He's not really sure, he says, although its characters certainly interest him dramatically. Tory Boyz is not, he says, a right-wing play. Politically, he is, he says, a mess. 'Some aspects of the left attract me, such as its compassion; and similarly I like aspects of the right, such as the individualism. And I don't like other aspects of both.'

For Tory Boyz, Graham (who's straight) did a fair amount of research and much of it he found eye-opening. The play focuses on the younger gay activists. 'The people I've spoken to, the young Tories behind the scenes, are very explicit and proud,' he says. He went to Village Drinks, a gay networking party circuit which holds gatherings specially for politicos, spoke to Tory gay groups and looked into the plethora of blogs and forums which now exist. 'One of the things that came across was this idea of the individual - that you can rise from your background and go on and achieve.'

This is especially true perhaps in the case of conservative gays who came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and the often stifling conformity which, traditionally at least, went along with that milieu. However this still doesn't account for the perception that there is, if anything, a disproportionate amount of gays active in centre-right politics. I suggest to Graham that it sometimes seems that the further left you go, the straighter things become. 'I think you're absolutely right, he says. 'I find it fascinating.'

There is also that strain on the right of what one might call High Church, high camp queenery, of the type characterised by Norman St.John Stevas. This brand of gay Toryism had much to do with the very aesthetic of the right - the opportunity for theatricality, flamboyance and social status of a more traditional sort, and by comparison, the general aesthetic of the left appeared downright boring. Perhaps this kind of gay toryism is fading from memory now, so it wasn't surprising, when I mentioned it, to find that it wasn't something which Graham (who's twenty-six) had much exposure to when researching and writing the play.

He hopes that his play will be seen as 'forward thinking and progressive.' He certainly thinks that those in the theatre community with, shall we say, an unsympathetic view of the right and the Tory party should find it interesting. Does he agree that when it comes to political drama, most stage writers are on the liberal-left?

''Yes,' he says. ' I think its a shame.' He describes how he was depressed at the reaction of young writers at a Royal Court workshop when, after Nicholas Hytner had made his call for 'right wing plays', the issue was discussed. 'It was very much ''why would we want to do that? We're not right-wing, our audience is not right-wing, we find some right-wing issue uncomfortable."

'We're missing a trick', says Graham. '50% of the country has views which are right-of-centre, and it's looking increasingly likely that we'll be having a conservative government. Writers can either carry on congratulating ourselves and seeing our world view as unchallenged, or we can go out and challenge ourselves on these things.'

TORY BOYZ runs at the Soho Theatre from August 15th to September 13th. www.sohotheatre.com

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Standpoint

May 28th sees the launch of the much anticipated new cultural and political monthly magazine, Standpoint. The editor is Daniel Johnson, who today answers a few questions from the NCF about what we can expect

Your tagline is 'Think again'. Why do you think we need a magazine like Standpoint now?

We need to start thinking again about many things: what we stand for, what we are prepared to make sacrifices for, what we are. Standpoint exists to defend and celebrate Western civilisation. That is, as Prospect pointed out, "a tall order for anyone, let alone a small-circulation magazine". Well, we'll see: I think there is a much larger constituency for a reassertion of western values such as free speech, the dignity of the individual and the rule of law than cynics on the Left or the Right suppose.

What sort of things will you be covering?

Standpoint will cover the waterfront in politics and culture - everything except the debased celebrity and lifestyle culture that most other magazines are obsessed with. In our first issue, for example, we have new art by David Hockney, Ian Bostridge on Bach, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali and Alain de Botton on faith, Jung Chang and Simon Sebag Montefiore on Mao and Stalin, new poetry by Robert Conquest, Andrew Marr on the Telegraph cartoonist Matt, Tim Congdon on why we shouldn't scapegoat the bankers, Craig Brown satirising Prospect's list of 100 top public intellectuals, Michael Burleigh on how to win the war on terror, Douglas Murray on censorship-by-intimidation, Alasdair Palmer on family courts and Edward Lucas on Russia, Emanuele Ottolenghi on how Europe has betrayed Israel, Jay Nordlinger on the US election, Michael Young reporting from Beirut, an inside look at the Ministry of Defence, book reviews by John Gross, Charles Moore, Noel Malcolm, Jenny McCartney and Raymond Seitz, plus Nick Cohen, Minette Marrin, Peter Whittle and many other writers and critics. We even have Dominic Lawson on chess and the world's first Scrabulous column.

Who do you think your readers will be? Would somebody who buys, say, the Spectator, also want to buy Standpoint?

I hope our readers will include anybody with an ounce of intellectual curiosity - and that certainly includes readers of the Spectator. I believe passionately that most people want to go on learning and appreciating new fields all their lives, as lonmg as they are accessible. Standpoint will satisfy that hunger for fine writing and serious content, but presented with wit and humour. We hope to recruit readers at university and in retirement, at work and at home, people who care about the arts and books, but also people who want to be better informed about the world.

Why a print magazine over an internet one?

Standpoint had to be a print magazine because we want to count in public debate, alongside magazines such as the Economist, Spectator, New Statesman and Prospect. We will have a fine website with lots of blogs and original content - such as my own review of Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt - but for longer articles many people will always prefer a print magazine. We also think that print has a great future in this market, and the continuing success of opinion magazines in the US tends to confirm this.

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Westwood's Manifesto

We now have an audio recording of the NCF event at the ICA with Dame Vivienne Westwood which took place on March 18th. Listen here. (77 MB)

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THE DOUBLESPEAK OF TARIQ RAMADAN

Tariq Ramadan is one of the most influential Muslim figures in Europe today, speaking and writing on Islam to a wide variety of audiences in Arabic, French and English. A constant fixture in the media - most recently, he defended the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks on BBC's Newsnight - he has cultivated an image as an Islamic liberal and reformer.

The only way to show this was to write a book, so I devoted my time to reading his books, reading all of his interviews and listening to all of his tapes, comparing what he's saying in the media and what he's saying 'on the ground',  in order to get a clear idea of whether there was 'double-speak' or not. Basically I'm an investigative journalist, with a University background. I work a lot on all types of Fundamentalism as a feminist and secularist journalist.  I work a lot on Christian fundamentalism too. I created a journal called Pro-Choice aimed at the pro-life movement, and the extreme right in France and the USA also. While studying Ramadan, I very soon recognised the equivalent of a Pat Robertson of Islam. Today in Europe everybody thinks that Tariq Raman is the Martin Luther King of Islam.

P.W. Do you think there exists a wilful desire to see him in this benign way? In this country many people who would say that parts of Europe are just simply not facing up to Islamism.

CF: There are a lot of peole who in good faith want to resist the risk of racism, and because of that, they are starting to deny the danger of Islamism. Tariq Ramen is not the open-minded reformist he appears to be in the media. I would much prefer it if he was, because he's so effective, he's so influential, in Europe. Most people here are convinced that he can be a moderate influence on Islam. It's true that he's more moderate than a Taleban or a Salaafist Judge; of course he's more moderate than that. But the problem is that he has no influence in Pakistan or the Middle East. Nobody knows him there. He is regarded as a clown, a Western Guy. So his influence is on the European Muslim. This is where his influence is bad, because instead of helping the European Muslim to be a citizen and a citizen first, he's helping them to become a citizen in order to make political Islam more important in Europe.

P.W. Could you give us an example of this double-speak?

CF If you listen to him in the media he will tell you that he's teaching the European Muslim to be a good citizen who respects the law of the country where he is a citizen. He says, "Respect the Laws of the country where you live." But when you listen to some of his tapes, he then continues the sentence "when those laws are not contrary to Islamic Principles."

Another example: when he says "I am for Islamic Feminism", you hear that he is feminist; you do not know his definition of Feminism. If you listen to some of his tapes about women's rights, you will learn it. For him real Islamic Feminism is a feminism which is against Western Feminism. It is a feminism where of course the woman is treated as equal in the eyes of God, but in the family the real power is in the hand of her husband, as with the religious principle. So, in a conference where people are attacking him on women's rights, he will only say "You're kidding. I am for Islamic feminism. Are you accusing me of not being an Islamic feminist? I am for it."

You know, in France, 70% of French Muslims are completely secularist. We have 95% who are for equality between men and women. I am not sure that it is going to be the same in ten years because of peole like Tariq Ramadan. I am not saying that he's teaching people to be sexist directly, but at the end of the day it's the same. What he's doing is teaching a political Islam connected to the political agenda of Islamism. For example, without Tariq Ramadan in France, I can tell you that very, very few Muslim young men would have known who Hassan al-Bannah is. He is the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood was not present in France twenty years ago. But it started during the nineties with the War in Iraq, and the Algerian problem, but also because of people like Tariq Ramadan, his brother Hami Ramadan and many other preachers who are all in the same network. They all belong to the same network which has the Muslim Brotherhood approach.

P.W. I'm interested that you say that the Muslims in France do respect secularism and are more liberal in their attitude to women. That does not appear to be the case in Britain.

CF:  I think the big difference is that here in Englsnd you have had more immigration from Pakistan, which is a country which is more hard-line than Tunisia or Morocco or Algeria. In France we have a lot of youth of North African parentage and some of them, the more recent arrivals, are coming to escape Islamism, and they've a lot to teach us because they know very well what Islamism is about.

France and England have had different models so far as integration is concerned. I'm not saying that the French model is perfect, not at all. We are all struggling to make it better. In France we consider people on the basis of their identity as citizens first,  before any 'community' identity. But there is racism, so the Islamist can use his propaganda on the French Muslim. They say "You see they don't love you. We love you. Become a Muslim: you will be respected. As French citizens you are not respected, as a french citizen from an arabic country."  Twenty years ago, there were young Muslim men who would never have defined themselves as Muslims - they spoke about themselves as Arab maybe, and French, because they were proud to be French. Now, because of men like Tariq Ramadan, that has started to change, because Ramadan is one of those preachers who has convinced them that they can find the way to be proud in Islam, in Political Islam. He is not a separatist; he is completely involved in the public debate. But definitely he thinks that Muslim Identity is the major issue.

P.W. What was Ramadan's reaction to your book? Has he tried to sue you?

CF. . No he hasn't sued me. He cannot really, because I went ahead and did what he had been asking for for years. Each time he was attacked,  he would say to people, "Read my books and comment upon them." And this is exactly what I've done.  I quote him, I give the source where I found it and more than that, I explain the context; where he said it, why he said it and what he forgot to say. However, I did receive some threats and intimidation on the internet. But it's not really a question of death threats or physical attacks; he's smarter than that. He is a professional when it comes to lying. What I've had to face is constant defamation of my work and of who I am. They try to present me as a neo-consevative which I am not. They try to present me as a racist when I am an anti-racist activist, and they try to present me as an Islamophobe. Well, I've written books where I defend the idea that all kinds of Fundamentalism are bad. But even with all of that, I was prepared to face a big progaganda attack on me, and I was not disappointed.

P.W. Thank you very much, and very good luck with the publication of your book here.

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