Blue Balls: A short history of British Press rage at people who've "Never Kissed a Tory"

Worrying about right-wingers' romantic lives is a perennial British press obsession. And it goes back to at least 1831...

Previously: The crocodile and the clown.
In the face of Bassem Youssef's biting satire, Piers Morgan's helium balloon of faux-gravitas quickly deflated.

---

Today’s edition is the result of a reader request from Dan Cooper, who asked:

I’d love nothing more than a total and comprehensive history of the regular newspaper barrel-scraping ‘Nobody wants to date Tories’ stories…

I can promise that it’s comprehensive but it’s a start. Hit the button below if you want to send me a suggestion for a future ‘reader request’ edition:

---

No good Socialist, it seems, can kiss a Tory, at any rate in public — and vice versa. What happened was this: Mrs Mary Morgan, 68-year-old daughter of a Welsh miner, and 20 years a stalwart of the Labour Party on Slough Council, went to a Welsh Society dinner on (or about) St. David’s Day. Among the guests was Sir Anthony Meyer, then Tory MP for Eton and Slough and as nice a man as you could wish to meet. Now he is very fond of Mrs Morgan and so for that matter is everyone who knows her… and so Sir Anthony greeted her with a friendly peck on the cheek. I would have done the same. Brothers, I have done the same… … Unhappily for Mrs Morgan, a camera clicked at the moment of osculation. Sir Anthony’s kiss was immortalised. And as a result, it seems a thousand ships of complaint have been launched from outraged Labour partisans. In fact, dear Mrs Morgan has been flatly accused of setting a bad example by “fraternising with the opposition”.

— ‘Come on! Let’s kiss and be friends’, Sir David Llewellyn,
Reading Evening Post, 19 April 1966

---

The history of the Tories’ political opponents declining to kiss (or do anything else intimate with them) is long. And the British press obsessing over that refusal is equally as storied; newspapers study the sex lives of Conservatives with the prurient and pseudo-scientific interest of a tourist staring at captive pandas caressing bamboo rather than each other.

In 1831, Samuel Carey Richards, writing about the aftermath of that year’s riots following the defeat of the second Reform Bill, in The Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet, and General Advertiser opined:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand” is a maxim of high authority; and glorious will be the day when the flower of Great Britain’s nobility become united — when, like the rival houses of York and Lancaster, each Tory gentleman shall kiss a Whig lady; and each Whig gentleman kiss a Tory lady, in return — when these great rivals shall cease to strive for mastery, and, firmly bound in holy brotherhood; form a phalanx round our glorious Constitution, our Altar and our Throne, as shall, for ever, render them secure from the assaults of English traitors and revolutionists, Scotch disturbers of the public weal, and Irish rebels and demagogues — against radical disaffection, and popular violence — against all the enemies of good government, whomever they may be.

Eighty-three years later, in 1914, the Liverpool Post’s unnamed London correspondent recalled the Whiggish dislike for fraternising with Tories in an item on the politics of the Irish Home Rule crisis:

… We are very far from the days when the late Duke of Westminster turned Mr Gladstone’s portrait to the walls and cancelled an invitation to the present Earl Spencer because he persisted in supporting Home Rule, and we are still farther from the days when a stout old Whig nobleman adjured his son on his deathbed never to marry a Tory.

You have to jump forward just over 100 years to get to the first reference to the modern version — “Never Kissed a Tory” — in print. In June 2015, the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary claimed that Andy Burnham, then a candidate for the Labour Party leadership, had been spotted at Pride wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan. The shirts had been around since 2008 — when then-LGBT Labour chair, Katie Hanson, told a fringe meeting it was “ more of an aspiration. It does not have to be true for you to buy the T-shirt!” — but the non-specialist press hadn’t really taken much notice.

In September 2015, the Evening Standard’s diary writers tracked down Burnham at the Labour Party Conference:

We’d heard [Burnham] had actually had a Blue kiss, despite the t-shirt. “It is true,” confirmed Burnham, talking of snogging a Tory. Her name was Octavia and she went to Trinity College. Well, well.

The paper’s obsession with ‘Never Kissed A Tory’ merch continued that October in a limply satirical feature on… the meaning of tote bags:

Never kissed a Tory
”I’m a total politics wonk!” laughs this mid-twenties guy, as everyone else scans the room for emergency exits. He got the bag at the last Labour Party conference (highlights: being in the urinals with Ed Balls; “getting” a joke about privatisation of the NHS). He couldn’t make it this year but kept up on the BBC live blog, turning the volume up when Jeremy Corbyn came on (mysteriously, he won’t actually give you a straight answer about where he stands on the new Labour leader). He has a fantasy politics team. He also has a fantasy football one but only because someone hijacked the Facebook thread and suggested everyone went for that instead. He tries not to care that the footie was more popular.

In 2016, the Standard ran a pull quote from then-Scottish Tory leader (now Times Radio presenter) Ruth Davidson, who boasted…

… at Pride, I offered to relieve folk of their ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ stickers for a peck. Several takers.

… and the conclusion of a 2017 interview with Owen Jones focused on the Tory kissing quandary:

Would [Jones] go out with a Conservative? He blushes. “I can’t wear a badge saying I’ve never kissed a Tory because that would be factually wrong. I’d find it hard to imagine going out with a Conservative because what I believe is so central to everything I do…

Since the papers noticed the slogan in 2015, the question of love across the political divide (less ‘reach across the aisle’ and more ‘reach around’?) has become an easy feature hook and topic for columnists in the British press.

In February 2016, Lucy Mangan jumped on the opportunity for a commission from The Telegraph, writing another feature about being married to a Tory — ‘I'd never kissed a Tory - then I married one’ — having written many columns about the arrangement for The Guardian nearly a decade at that point:

I am still not sure, a decade on since meeting him, whether my husband’s Toryism makes him mad or bad, but it does make him interesting to know… But it does banish boredom, which is surely one of marriage’s greatest enemies.

That same month, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett at The Guardian dismissed the risk of actually marrying Tories but kept the option of snogging them open and managed to make it about… proportional representation:

… I’m not so politically blinkered that I’ve excommunicated some of my friends who voted Tory. I’m interested in their heartless, deeply misguided reasons for doing so. But would I sign a marriage contract with any of them? Probably not. Perhaps the only answer is a move away from this two-party state at constant loggerheads with one another, to a system of proportional representation. It would give us a bit of nuance, for once, and more importantly, sexual and romantic freedom for all. The heart, after all, wants what it wants.

Vice typically took a more blunt approach to the question and asked in May 2017: ‘Would You Fuck a Tory, Though?’ Responses ranged from Lauren (23) — “Probably – at least in theory. My brain and my vagina do not, unfortunately, share a moral compass… [but] they would have to be really hot – a positively piping plate of bangers and mash.” — to Angie (23): “I don't like the idea of giving a Tory any satisfaction of any sort.” I can only apologise for making you read an analogy that compares a Tory’s dick and balls with sausage and mash; that’s not comfort food.

The summer season of 2018 saw the New Statesman handwringing about whether “Never Kissed A Tory” exacerbates “increasingly bitter and divided discourse” with Salman Anwar moaning that:

I’m a Tory, but one of my closest friends worked on Corbyn’s leadership campaign. I even get along well with some hard-core socialists. You bet we debate politics, it’s fun to debate issues with people you consider friends. History is full of cross-party relationships. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn were notable friends. Bill Clinton’s chief strategist during the ’92 election James Carville dated and married Mary Matalin, deputy campaign manager for Bush’s re-election campaign. It’s about understanding why they hold their sincerely held beliefs and knowing the character and values of your friends. Knowing that even if you think they may be a little misguided, they’re not coming from a bad or malicious place.

A more critical editor might have suggested that dredging up two examples — one between political operatives in the US, the other a stretch that turns Benn giving Powell the time of day in the Houses of Parliament, and attending his funeral into them being bosom buddies — did not equate to “history [being] full of cross-party relationships”. Read Benn’s diaries and you won’t discover he and Powell playing in an ideologically broken five-a-side team or yukking it up down the pub.

The 2019 version of the story saw Charlotte Gill stitched up pretty thoroughly by the Telegraph’s diminishing band of sub-editors with the headline Does being a Tory mean I'm not 'woke' enough for love? She wrote:

One of my good mates, a 34-year-old guy with similar views to me, is sick of politicised dating apps. He showed me a screenshot of one of the many woke women he’s been subjected to. One profile reads: “I get along best with people who can check their privilege and hate the Tories”, another says men can only contact her if they “also strongly believe that toxic masculinity is suffocating and there should be no room for its traits & damaging behaviours in society”. There was also the girl who warned not to go out with her if “You disagree with veganism”. He eventually called dating apps quits after an evening with a whiny Corbynista, although it turned out her worst crime was being teetotal.

But when she messaged a left-wing guy who engaged with her and seemed interested, she quickly “[wonders] what the point is”. It’s almost like the column angle trumped complexity and the man she complained about at the start of the column, who “[felt] weird about the fact [she was] a Telegraph writer”, had a point.

For 2021’s ‘Never Kissed A Tory’ debate season, Janice Turner decided to lecture “twentysomething graduate women” who are definitely not reading her column:

… argument is bracing, it crash-tests your own beliefs, and if Labour is ever to win another election, pillow talk will work better than face-palms. But also young women are likely to be disappointed if they think limiting their dating pool to avowed left-wingers means they’ll only encounter kinder, gentler men.

Yes, Janice is right. There’s nothing more arousing than being lectured in bed about Brexit or why the gender pay gap doesn’t exist by someone whose views on trickle-down economics translate directly to selfishness about other things that can trickle down [THIS SECTION DELETED FOR TASTE AND DECENCY REASONS]

The 2022 outrage outbreak was triggered by the Labour frontbencher Lucy Powell wearing a Never Kissed a Tory t-shirt at Manchester Pride. For the Daily Telegraph, Michael Deacon, who has tacked further and further right as he’s acquired more standing and column inches at the paper, howled:

No doubt Conservative voters are disappointed to have been denied the opportunity to kiss Ms Powell, but I’m sure they will respect her decision nonetheless. Conservatives believe in personal freedom, and that includes the freedom not to kiss Conservatives. So Ms Powell and her fellow Labour supporters are perfectly entitled to wear a T-shirt boasting that they’ve “NEVER KISSED A TORY”. There’s just one small question I think we should ask them.

How do they know?

I’d be fascinated to hear the answer, because on a purely practical level, maintaining a strict no-Tories policy on kissing sounds extremely difficult, if not outright impossible. How do these activists go about it? Before they kiss someone, do they order them to confirm which way they’ve voted in every general and local election since their 18th birthday? As the candlelight flickers, and their date leans in, do they murmur, “Darling, before we take this any further, there’s something I need to know. Where do you stand on Margaret Thatcher’s 1984 privatisation of British Telecom?”

Deacon is right that Tories can sometimes be difficult to spot but the braying, gilets, and a penchant for red trousers are all fairly good indicators.

Of course, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer made a big point of telling the world that he could not, in good conscience, wear one of the t-shirts. He told Times Radio:

I’m afraid I’ve broken that rule.

If he thought it would guarantee his route into Number 10, Starmer would publish a custom edition of the Karma Sutra featuring him demonstrating each position with a very convincing Margaret Thatcher look-a-like (and Tony Blair peeking out from inside the wardrobe offering advice on technique). [FOLLOWING SECTION DELETED FOR TASTE AND DECENCY REASONS]

For Esquire, Murray Clark wrote about his night with a Tory man so Tory that he’d worked in Westminster for a Tory MP, and concluded:

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.

That’s a good payoff line but it’s slightly undermined by the act of writing it all up for the pages of a men’s style magazine.

In March, Rachel Reeves answered the question in an interview with Politico (“I’m sure I have. Unlike maybe some of my colleagues I don’t go around voter ID-ing people.”) But it wasn’t until summer 2023 that Never Kissed a Tory season returned, after the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, wore a badge with the slogan on it in an Instagram post to celebrate Pride Cymru. Tory politicians demanded an apology, the Daily Mail howled that he had been “slammed”, and perpetually thirsty, drink-driving enthusiast Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes sneered that Pride Month is “time to cover everything in rainbows to prove you’re a good person”.

You could roll Paul Staines in all the rainbow glitter in the world and he’d still be a turd.

At the Labour Party Conference earlier this month, Guardian editor-in-chief Kath Viner asked Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, whether he’d rather “kiss a Tory or kiss a lefty”. His answer? “Why choose?”

Streeting’s most committed relationship is with the fence he’s perpetually sitting on.

And now this short history reaches the almost present day, with Kate Lister’s i paper column — published yesterday — and headlined Why does no one want to have sex with a Tory? Lister, a great columnist and expert on the history of sex, highlights a trend on dating apps of including the injunction NO TORIES in bios. She writes:

It would never have occurred to me to put “No Tories” on my dating profile. In the interest of full disclosure, as well as running the risk of my parents disowning me entirely, some of the best sex I ever had was with a Tory I met on a dating app. At least, I think he was a Tory. It wasn’t long after the referendum and he had voted for Brexit. We had a very heated argument about the Irish border before ending up in the sack. It was amazing. We were just so angry with each other. There was no way I was letting someone who thought so little of European fishing policy be on top.

Presumably, he felt the same way about being sat on by a vegetarian who couldn’t see the benefits of a points-based immigration system, because the result was some seriously energetic sex. It turns out that hooking up is a hell of a way to work through your political differences.

Neither of us changed our minds about Brexit as a result, but after your third orgasm, it is hard to care that much about revoking the EU ban on imperial measurements. If nothing else, we had both worked off some anger and came away from the experience with a renewed respect for one another.

I mentioned the “No Tories” dating trend to a good friend of mine who views Grindr as a multiplayer game that he has completed several times. Not only did he know all about it, but he had a similar statement on his profile, and genuinely, seriously would not even consider the notion of having casual sex with someone who voted Conservative.

It’s an entertaining and honest column, but it falls into the same trap as most of the British media’s obsessional scab picking on this issue. Lister concludes:

Ultimately, we are not going to get very far together if we cannot work together. Bertrand Russell once wrote that “the only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation”. So, maybe consider going on a date with a Tory? (Or a leftie, if you are Conservative.) Talk about your differences, you might even find some shared ground. If you’re really lucky, you might even wind up being pounded in a Travelodge, while shouting about the merits of a free market. All I am saying is, don’t rule it out.

Hacks in general and columnists in particular have a tendency to treat the world as a place with an endless series of angles to take; journalism is overstocked with devil’s advocates and, if you’re willing to sum in favour of Satan, you’re probably not going to worry too much about snogging or shagging someone whose political positions are nominally anathema to your own.

After all, the British press is a place where people routinely congratulate their friends and acquaintances when they secure a new job at The Sun or The Daily Mail. It’s like standing up and applauding when someone confides in you that they’ve picked up a dose of crabs; though the analogy falls apart when you realise that crabs are far easier to shift than Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere. A ‘Never Kissed a Newspaper Proprietor’s Arse’ t-shirt would not be a bestseller in Fleet Street.

---

Thanks for reading. X/Twitter is one of the main ways people find this newsletter so please consider sharing it there…

… and also think about following me on Threads and TikTok.

Upgrade to a paid subscription to this newsletter, you’ll get bonus editions, and I’ll be able to keep writing these newsletters).

It really helps and allows me to spend more money on research and reporting. Buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt