MATTHEW PARRIS, the award-winning Times columnist who has written extensively about his sexuality, has entered into a civil partnership with his long-time companion, Julian Glover.

Only a handful of the couple’s closest friends were told about the ceremony at Bakewell Town Hall near the weekend home in the Peak District they share with their Peruvian llamas.

The decision by Mr Parris, 57, and Mr Glover, 35, a political journalist on The Guardian, to make their 11-year relationship legally binding has taken even some of their oldest friends by surprise.

Mr Parris, who prefers the word “partnership” to “marriage”, welcomed the change in the law last December to give same-sex unions legal status. But he wrote that the change brought one or two distinct disadvantages.

“Civil partnership ceremonies. Aargh! One of the joys of being gay and having lots of gay friends was the knowledge that at least half our acquaintances would never encumber us with wedding lists at Peter Jones or the social obligation to spend the better part of a Saturday in enforced merriment in the company of a crew of people we didn’t know, and in a cause — a marriage — whose prospects we secretly knew to be patchy at best .”

He argued that at the mid-point of one’s life the understanding dawned that there were only a finite number of Saturdays left. “A marriage can be dissolved. A bachelorhood can be regained. A lost Saturday never can.”

The couple declared their vows on a Thursday.

Mr Parris, who is on holiday with Mr Glover and some friends in Bogotá in Colombia, said last night: “We wanted to put it on a formal basis. I would have preferred no fuss and just to sign the papers with Julian. But then we realised we needed two witnesses.”

Then Mr Glover’s parents, Ian and Emily, and his brother, Adrian, asked to attend and they joined a few of the couple’s friends for the ceremony and a glass of champagne afterwards at a friend’s home.

Mr Parris then whisked Mr Glover to his mother Theresa’s home in Spain where she was celebrating her 80th birthday.

“I have always been rather rude about people’s weddings and did not want to inflict any forced celebration on our friends,” Mr Parris said.

“We will have a party at some point. We are not on honeymoon, we are here with friends, who are not feeling at all gooseberry.”

The couple will continue to live in their own London flats during the week and together in their Derbyshire home at weekends.

Mr Glover achieved a starred first at Oxford; Mr Parris was educated at Cambridge. He worked for Margaret Thatcher when she was Opposition leader and became an MP in 1979. He came out as a homosexual in a late-night debate in the Commons in 1984 but, by his own admission, nobody noticed. When he unwittingly outed Peter Mandelson, the former Labour Cabinet minister, during a debate on Newsnight on BBC Two in 1998 everyone noticed.

Parris knew that he was homosexual from a young age, but he lost his virginity to a woman. “There had been nothing to it,” he wrote in his autobiography Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics.

“It could have been a goat as far as I was concerned. I was left without any strong desire to do it again, or any particular disinclination to.”

Mr Parris quit Westminster having failed to secure ministerial office under Mrs Thatcher. He then presented a politics programme on television, which earned him mixed reviews, before joining The Times in 1988 as a sketchwriter.

He has since established a reputation as one of the most authoritative political commentators of his generation, has written a series of books, and is an accomplished broadcaster.

It could all have been different had London Transport not rejected his application to become a diesel-fitter.

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