There is a curious battle being fought in the wings of the Scottish Parliament.

In one corner stands the Rev George Hargreaves, leader of the Scottish Christian Party, whose belief that homosexuality is a sin underpins his election campaign. In the other is Patrick Harvie, the openly gay Green MSP for Glasgow and a prominent gay rights campaigner.

However, only one of the contestants for the Glasgow vote is also the songwriter behind the 1980s Sinitta hit, So Macho, and its double A-side, Cruising, which were gay anthems for the disco generation. And it isn’t Mr Harvie.

The challenge by the pop-producer turned evangelist to unseat Mr Harvie in the forthcoming Scottish elections has become fraught with allegations of homophobia and hypocrisy, as Mr Hargreaves stands accused of waging a prejudiced, personal attack against his political rival.

Having made millions from his success on the gay club scene, the Pentecostal minister is having to deny accusations of double standards as he uses his fortune to fund a campaign berating homosexuals.

“This is not about gay rights, it’s about gay wrongs,” he told The Times. “It’s not all homosexuals. Just the militant ones. There is a certain type who should stop criticising the Church and get a life. This is Christianophobia, peddled by the pink press.”

The political row has now become personal after Mr Harvie, 34, approached police to investigate allegedly offensive comments made by the Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, during a sermon last year.

“I think that Patrick has things to answer for,” said Mr Hargreaves, 49, who says that he has concerns over the MSP’s well-known previous role as a sexual health worker involved in projects with gay men.

“This is not just a cuddly Green MSP. I do not think that people were fully aware of his whole agenda when he was elected. He is a gay fundamentalist who got in using a green card of convenience and I want to expose him.” The claims have been dismissed by Mr Harvie as absurd.

Mr Hargreaves, a former public schoolboy whose family is from Trinidad and Tobago, still earns thousands of pounds each month in royalties from So Macho.

His aim as leader of the Scottish Christian Party is to put faith at the forefront of politics. The party’s slogan: “At last, a party that will stand up for the Lord.”

It is a stance that he manages to reconcile with surprising ease with his years of “spiritual wilderness” in the Eighties, during which he worked as a DJ and shared a house in London with his gay songwriting partner, who later died of an Aids-related illness.

“I would say I was somewhat different then. If I was now writing So Macho, the musical, to promote the gay scene, then you might say I was being hypocritical. But at the time, my Biblical understanding was not the one I have now.”

Similarly, he claims that there are no double standards regarding the deal he has just signed with Hallmark, allowing the company to use “So Macho” on its greeting cards. Lest he be accused of hypocrisy, he adds that he insisted on one condition — that all well-wishing should remain resolutely heterosexual.

“It says in the Bible that so long as Earth remains there shall be seed time and harvest. You could say that So Macho was the seed I sowed and now I’m reaping the harvest.

“That money allows me to do the work that needs to be done to advance Christianity.

“What would they prefer me to do? Flush the money down the toilet? That would be ungodly.”

So Macho reached No 2 in the charts and became one of the bestselling singles of 1986. Mr Hargreaves’s spiritual conversion came several years later, while he was living as a tax exile in the Isle of Man. Though he once wrote lyrics such as “he’s got to be big and strong, enough to turn me on”, the born-again evangelist and theology scholar now prefers to quote scriptures on his party banners. Favourites include “Righteousness exalteth a nation” and “Ye shall know them by their fruits”.

He offers a surprisingly revisionist view of his famous song’s success. According to Mr Hargreaves, it was not the gay fans who made So Macho a chart-topper; it was all the straight Sinitta fans north of the Border.

“Without the Scots, it would not have been a big hit. It was because of all the Karens and Kevins” — he pauses to correct himself, mindful of the constituents in his sight — “and Calums and Morags, who went out and made the record a Top 40 hit. The gay support is a myth.”

The Greens and the Scottish Christian Party are among 13 political parties and three independents who are chasing the regional list vote in Scotland’s largest city.

Mr Hargreaves, a father of two who now lives in St Andrews, won 7 per cent of the vote when he stood as a candidate in the Western Isles in 2005. This time his party will be fielding 70 candidates in the hope of winning its first seat in Holyrood on May 3.

Mr Harvie, however, is not expecting a surge of support for Christian fundamentalism in Glasgow, where he has served as the city’s first Green MSP for the past four years.

While dismissing the personal criticism as “old-school homophobia”, he said that he was concerned by the attempt to represent an entire religion through one extremist political party.

“On one level, I’m grateful to George Hargreaves for spending his time and money drawing attention to the work that I have done,” said Mr Harvie, who is also a member of Greenpeace, Amnesty International and the Equality Network.

“But on another level, there is a real danger for both religious people and non-religious people like me, if Christianity comes to be represented by parties like this rather than by all the positive contributions that religious communities make to Scotland every day.

“We threw religious fundamentalism out with John Knox 300 years ago, and we’re not about to go back to it now.”

Mr Harvie sympathised, nevertheless, with his rival’s attempts to distance himself from the gay anthem.

“There’s no accounting for taste,” he smiled. “I’d be racked with guilt if I wrote that song too.”

Gay anthem

The song was originally intended for “women to dance round their handbags to and for the gay scene to go mad to on poppers”

It sold two million copies

Mr Hargreaves also wrote for Yazz and Five Star

He says he turned to God after realising that he was a “hedonistic sinner”

Source: Times archive

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