To Fall Like Lucifer

This is a story of a scandal and its victim, of a society that looked the other way, and of the few who remained loyal. On the night of the 18 November 1958, Ian Harvey, then a junior minister in Harold Macmillan's Tory government, was arrested with a guardsman in St James's Park. Homosexuality would not be decriminalised until a decade later; the scandal that ensued prompted Harvey's resignation from the government and Parliament, and brought a brilliant and promising career to a premature end. Originally published in 1971, Harvey's startlingly honest account of his spectacular fall from grace is an extraordinary record of a time and its attitudes, as well as a poignant reflection on a life caught unexpectedly in scandal.