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British Prime Minister Tony Blair has lemons on his hand, and aimed to make lemonade. Two cabinet members were outted last month, and one of them resigned, after being beaten up by his presumed pick-up while cruising a London park. The tabloids declared Blair's government unduly influenced by a secret gay cabal. Opposition party members called homosexuals "morally flawed" and said they should be banned from the cabinet.

So why not put a positive political spin on adversity? Blair sent openly-gay culture minister Chris Smith to the unveiling of a new statue of Oscar Wilde in London's Charing Cross, as if to encourage perception of his cabinet's sex scandals in the light of the now generally discredited Wilde prosecution.

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"It's due to Oscar Wilde in many ways that we today can celebrate a society that generally appreciates diversity and the richness of diversity in our community," Smith announced, standing before the bronze bust of Wilde that rises from his tomb and shows him mouth-open. The inscription quotes him, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

Those assembled included actors Dame Judi Dench and Nigel Hawthorne, who themselves read some Wilde aphorisms. Hawthorne had been pointing out to a BBC reporter the irony of this attention to Wilde-- there's been the Stephen Fry movie on his life, an off-Broadway play, and a TV biography-- in the midst of the attacks on Blair's government. Hawthorne said that this showed that British society hadn't changed much since Oscar's time. There is a similarity, Hawthorne suggested, between today's attacks on Peter Mendelson, one of Blair's closest advisors, and Wilde's treatment. The BBC cut him short, as they now have a policy forbidding mention of Mendelson's sexuality-- after they were instrumental in recently outing the minister.

These men, unlike Wilde, do not fit the profile of sexual rebel, and certainly don't face a stint in Reading Prison. The real Wilde, had "feasted with panthers," his term for sexual adventures with working-class English boys, and would go off to Algiers with Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) for the delights of teenage Arabs. André Gide in his memoirs tells of being introduced by Wilde to a young Mohammed, who made quite an impression. "Every time since then that I have sought after pleasure. It is the memory of that night I have pursued." Wilde took another boy to the next room. This is a level of "diversity" that would still get you locked up today, and-- thanks to Tony Blair's reforms-- registered for life as a sex criminal.