On an unusually mild winter evening, having swiped through five separate apps, each of which promised to deliver The One, I arranged a pub date with a man who had not marketed himself to prospective shags with a selfie from the left-hand side of the aeroplane, so I thought, why not? The bar had been set low of late. As we exchanged bubbles of carefully curated text, he asked where I lived. I told him. He lived in the same area. Oh, right by the pub with the bulldog of a man who openly sells cocaine at the bar? Yeah, right by there! Just around the corner.
I was the first to arrive, as usual, not at the pub with the open-air drugs sales that I go to with my housemates, but the nicer one across the road. It was warm enough to sit outdoors, which I prefer to do anyway, deploying the traditional pairing of cheap lager and tobacco to get me through the beige pleasantries of what is referred to, amongst jaded singles, as “dead chat”.
Five minutes later, a bright-eyed, handsome man walked in. His dark brown hair was neat, and he took off his beanie in greeting. I got to my feet and extended a hand. He swerved it entirely and gave me a hug, greeting me with an accent firmly planted in the western counties. I thought that was a nice thing to do.
We talked about small things. The unnecessarily high stock-levels of panko breadcrumbs in the local Tesco Express. How he turned vegetarian after eating at a kebab shop that was shutdown for using bin meat. How I’d been gutting my pay packet at Whole Foods, in vain hopes of saving the planet.
But Bezos, he replied.
Look, I can only fight so many battles of late capitalism, I said.
He laughed and said: We’re all losing.
I told him that I write about silly shirts for a living. He asked if I wore a suit to work. He pronounced it “syoot”, like someone’s posh grandma who isn’t called grandma at all, but something absurd like Bunty. He said he worked as a political lobbyist for “fintech”, and I didn’t really know what that meant so I focused on the former.
Lobbying is a slippery slope, I said.
Not really, he said. It’s the credit-card companies that cripple working people.
I told him about my brief unpaid stint as a parliamentary lackey for a Labour backbencher, before the silly shirts came calling.
Parliament shouldn’t be influenced by big business, I said. MPs are elected by people who don’t have the money for a lanyard at Davos.
He laughed again, and I felt quite pleased with myself.
We drank more pints. Our knees knocked under the table. His index finger circled the palm of my hand. He said he didn’t smoke, and yet he took one of my cigarettes when I offered. I lit it, and his hands rested on mine as he protected the ember from the non-existent wind. Later, we exchanged a nervous kiss. People can still stare at two men in such a tête-à-tête, so I pulled away.
There was a moment of silence as we grinned at one another.
I worked in parliament, too, he said.
Oh! Who for? I asked, expecting the name of a centrist Labour MP ejected into deep space under the Corbyn years.
A Conservative, he said.
I gawped at him, half smiling, in disbelief, like every other emotionally inept man who laughs in shock at grave news.
To be a young(ish), provincial-born gay Londoner, and not only lend your vote to Boris Johnson, who called us “tank-topped bum boys”, but to be a worker bee in his hive? It astounded me. On dates, with friends, among colleagues, I’d taken it for granted that we all saw the Dark Mark hanging above the Conservatives. We didn’t need to proclaim our political affiliations, because Thatcher’s Section 28 did that for us. Lamenting the State of Everything under 12 years of Conservative rule was, for the people I spent time with, not just a given but a hobby. It had been this way ever since 2016, when the United Kingdom revolted against the capital and when right-wing untruths landed a reality TV star in the White House.
It was hard to remember the time before, when a secret ballot really was secret, and how you voted didn’t seem to matter all that much. My mum is liberal-lite. My dad is a 1980s Thatcherite who thanked the Iron Lady for his mortgage. Their beliefs, though at odds, never came to a head when I was a kid. My childhood wasn’t peppered with discussions about unions, or Iraq, or Major’s moral hypocrisy. In fact, politics was not to be discussed at all (and neither was religion, my family being thankfully and proudly godless).
Maybe we should avoid the politics, he said.
And yet here, right here, was a sounding board, and a good-looking one. Why not talk about Owen Paterson’s odd jobs, and the dodgy Covid contracts, and the parties and the parties and the parties, and Carrie Antoinette? And even after all this, after all we’d just lived through, he was still a Tory?
Yes, he said calmly. Yes, I am. I felt my own face redden. I was trying to poke the bear, only to discover it was a smiling manatee. I wanted some fire and brimstone. I wanted him, like the treacherous MP for Bury South, to cross the aisle, or to point at me in fury and tell me that he had “delivered Brexit”. He politely did neither of these things. So, we got another pint and talked about books instead.
I was confused. This was a person I could probably never take to dinner parties, or house parties, or introduce to my housemates around our favourite table in our favourite pub (yes, the one with the bar-bound coke dealer, and no, not our favourite because of him) where we’d laugh and rage together about Boris Johnson and Priti Patel and Michael Gove. And yet, we seemed to like one another, and the conversation was lively, and his hand still met my palm, and this was, to all intents and purposes, a good date.
He left early the next morning, and I didn’t suggest breakfast. At the door, he said that we might see one another soon, and I gave a full-throated “yeah, definitely” despite the fact that we both knew this would probably never happen. After all, what had we really achieved? Had I learned that Tories don’t all point and laugh at poor people from their golden carriages on the way to Chequers? Did he no longer think that all lily-livered liberals ride around in hybrid vehicles powered by homegrown quince from the allotment? Maybe. Though it was more likely that I was never in contention to be his plus-one at dinner parties either.
For almost four decades, political opposition hadn’t kneecapped my parents’ marriage. It hadn’t even entered it. Perhaps we could be like them. They speak on the phone several times throughout the day, and they eat together every single night, and they laugh with and at one another a lot. But for a time, they didn’t. As I mourned the results of that horrible referendum with one parent over the phone, the other was remarkably silent. They had bristled with rage at each other, apparently. These differences had barely mattered once upon a time. Now, even my parents had taken to the barricades. Along with everyone else.
Maybe, I thought later, there was something poetic here. Like Beatrice and Dante, or Michelangelo and his handsome paramour Tommaso dei Cavalieri, or those patron saints of ill-fated love, Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in Splash.
Would he turn to me and give me a last, longing look as he disappeared back into the Tory swamp? Would I dive in after him, and either grow gills (surely there are a few Tories out there with gills) or drown trying? It had been a good date. I just wasn’t prepared to swim for it.
My housemate asked how it went. Well, I think. Slightly weird. Got on. Spent a lot of time together. Laughed a lot. He once worked for a Tory MP. My housemate winced in disgust. I shrugged and looked at my phone. You can kiss a Tory. But, perhaps, not kiss a Tory and tell.
