No Ordinary Fairy

The Government has indicated its support for a back-bench bill to pardon Alan Turing, who committed suicide after being convicted of gross indecency and chemically castrated, under the kind of laws that so many good Christian Conservatives would no doubt be happy to see revived. The bill will go through provided nobody tables an amendment; Turing's work in breaking German ciphers during the Second World War may possibly ensure a degree of immunity to any wrecking tactics by the likes of Peter Bone and Norman Tebbit, who might otherwise be worried about a slippery slope towards exhuming dead paedophiles and forcing royal infants to service them in public, or some such delightful fantasy.

Britain's leading liberal newspaper proclaims the Turing bill a "change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act". Of course, even allowing the questionable premise that the Government has a heart to change, it is nothing of the kind. Unlike, say, Oscar Wilde, who was one of the 49,000 (and a self-proclaimed socialist whose cultural opinions would cause Maria Miller acute commercial indigestion should she happen to understand them), Turing was a military asset. He is being pardoned not because the laws under which he was convicted were grossly indecent, but because even the British Conservative Party has noticed that someone besides Winston Churchill might have helped win their favourite war.