How I changed my mind about gay marriage when I worked in Parliament and why I miss the days of David Cameron and calm debate

When the gay marriage legislation was passed, I was working for a Tory MP. My instinct was to be against the idea, but that's because I hadn't really thought about it. To me the issue was about marriage. I came to realise that was only half the issue and that I had been pretty silly not to realise that before.

My MP had a fairly ambivalent view of the whole thing, saying one day: "I don't know why one side want it so much, and I don't know why the other side care so much about not letting them have it." Or words to that effect. She won't have realised she was paraphrasing what Asquith said about women's suffrage, and she probably wouldn't have been too pleased about it. She certainly wasn't ambivalent about women's equality.

My MP was, at that point, more or less in agreement with Steve Baker who was talking and writing about keeping the state out of marriage. That's a libertarian idea, not a conservative one, and that is an important distinction. Many people thought gay marriage was an important libertarian issue, but not everyone did.

For the libertarians who were against gay marriage, it was mostly for institutional reasons, rather than political objections. As Steve Baker said, 'Along with, I think, most people my age and younger, I am relaxed about other adults’ loves and consenting sexual relationships. However, I am not relaxed about muddled law, democratic consent or freedom of religion — whose protection is by no means certain — and I believe strongly that defining marriage is no business of the legislature.'

In this argument, all sorts of problems arose. Cameron had promised not to change marriage laws three days before the election. The rules of gay marriage are not the same as for other marriages, for example, adultery is not grounds for divorce in the gay marriage laws. And in general, it is wrong for the state to start overturning institutions that existed organically in society.

As you see, everything here is abut marriage. And that was only half the argument. Cameron himself was the best advocate of his policy, speaking about the little boys and girls who could stand taller at school knowing gay marriage was legal. Once you see this as a debate about gay marriage, you see it differently.

One night on the way home I read an article by Matthew Paris, where he took all of the arguments I had so far believed and made me realise that however good they were as arguments, they were often cover for bigots. I suddenly realised that I was on the side of all sorts of people who simply didn't (and don't) like gay people. I changed my mind in the time it took for me to wait for a train on the tube platform. The issue, I could now see, was no longer about marriage, but gay marriage.

I think some of the arguments still stand. It makes little sense to me that adultery isn't grounds for divorce. But that's not an argument about gay marriage as such. That's about the wider issue of what the divorce laws ought to be. And in any event, the much more important principle is that the people involved are treated somewhat more equally and justly than they were before, even if the laws we have are not the best laws we could have.

I might have believed in getting the state out of marriage, but while ever it wasn't going to do that, it ought to give marriage to people on as equal as basis as possible. I agreed with Steve Baker 'that defining marriage is no business of the legislature', and I had forgotten that despite my ideological objection, that was what was actually happening. The legislature was defining marriage and had done so for centuries.

As Sam Bowman said, 'It is in the interests of liberty for the state to be as indiscriminate as possible even where it is acting unjustly.' I had been so absorbed in an essentially ideological discussion, I forgot to think about the practical side. There was no way the state was going to get out of marriage. Once you accept that, the objections simply aren't there any more.

What had happened to me happens to otherwise intelligent people all the time. I had read a lot, understood all sorts of arguments, some of them sophisticated. But I didn't see the whole issue. I was thinking about marriage not gay marriage. I isolated the idea of marriage away from wider social implications. I forgot the roughness principle and equated my niche objections to government interference in an institution with the equal status of individuals in a democratic society.

As soon as you reframe the argument it become obvious. But reframing an argument is psychologically very difficult to do.

It's worth noting that many of the people who supported gay marriage didn't see the whole issue either, and still don't. Being on the right side doesn't make you right. I suspect it increasingly means you are more likely to be there for the ride, in fact.

At a constituency surgery during this debate, very much after I had changed my mind, we had a constituent in who was concerned about the effect of this policy on voting numbers. A large poll had come out the week before, showing that although a small core of people on both the pro- and anti- side said it would affect their vote, pretty much everyone else was not only relaxed about the issue but were not going to change their vote either. The net effect for the party was difficult to be certain about (people do really hate Tories after all) but it was highly unlikely to be negative.

Two things surprised me about that constituency meeting. No-one else there was familiar with that polling data. And although it was difficult to argue with (it was the best information we had about how Conservative voters felt) there was a lingering sense that it wouldn't do much to change the constituent's mind. Perhaps I am being unfair on him, but I thought then that while this man wasn't being a bigot or in any way unkind about gay people, he also was wrong, working from a hunch as much as anything, and stubbornly reluctant to take a practical answer to his practical objection. He 'hoped I was right' about the polling numbers and what they implied.

The more I saw and heard, the more I realised Matthew Paris was right. There will be plenty of people on both sides of the discussion now about statues and BLM that are there for similarly wrong reasons as the people Paris wrote about in the article that changed my mind. I had hoped that with Twitter and other influences debates would become better informed. How else would it be so easy to get the thinking of people like Anton Howes? But the more I see, the more I miss the political climate of the gay marriage debate.

I'm writing this now because this week I saw an old Newsnight clip of Philip Hensher and Melanie McDonagh discussing gay marriage. It's amazing how civilised the discussion is, despite the insistent attempts of the presiding journalist to create an argument where none existed.

The more we look back to recent journalism the more we will find that the media wanted objectionable dispute rather than debate. That's partly why we are living through a sort of politics that makes me miss David Cameron and the political culture I didn't properly appreciate at the time. I don't want us all to mimic Asquith and become ambivalent to the point of being disinterested, but it would be nice if we could hold our views without being offended that other people hold theirs.