Nice party (Shame about the 'drag queen')

Eight o'clock on Friday at the RAF Club, Piccadilly, and it's a tense moment for the leadership of the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality. Thirty or so of its 400-strong membership have gathered for the Campaign's annual dinner. Thirty earnest young gentlemen in black tie are impatiently downing gin and tonics in the club's gloomy bar; 30 starters of melon with ginger ice cream are slowly melting in the kitchen; and the star guest, Theresa May, is still stuck on the M4 from Maidenhead, where she has been switching on her constituency's Christmas lights. The campaign's chairman, James Davenport, nervously hands out more aperitifs and dashes outside to answer his mobile phone. "That's probably Theresa," he keeps saying, with some satisfaction. "Please excuse me."

This is an important night for the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality - or Torch, as it is known, for now. It's the first dinner since it was formally recognised last December by the Conservatives' board - under May's chairmanship - and officially affiliated to the party. After nearly 30 years of struggling to be taken seriously, James and the committee see this as cause for fresh optimism for the group; new status, a new constitution and, according to James, a new name.

"We were originally called CCHE," explains James, a baby-faced communications guy with a firm handshake and a profoundly irritating sprout of facial hair protruding from under his bottom lip. The name was changed to "Torche" in 1990 by the group's then chairman, Dr David Starkey, who regarded it as a "naughty pun" on the Tory emblem, which they were forbidden to use. But James impatiently waves his well-manicured hand. "That was years ago," he says. "We dropped the 'e' on 'Torche' because it didn't really mean anything, and nobody knew how to pronounce it." I had rather fancied it ought to be "Torché", but James rebuffs this campness. "I remember someone once referring to us as Torshhh," he snorts. "Anyway, the Tory party says you mustn't use the word 'Tory', and we don't like the word 'homosexual' - and it's about more than just equality. From now on, we're going to be Gay Conservatives. Some of them," he adds, gesturing towards his colleagues at the bar, "still talk about 'Torch', but everything's done under the new name now."

So what exactly does Torch do? A committee member has told me that he once offered Torch £1,000 if it would formulate a policy - any policy - but that James refused. "Parliament has more or less resolved all issues regarding sexuality," says James, airily. Not according to the campaigning group Outrage!, it hasn't. But then, an Outrage! spokesman tells me that Torch is seen as a toothless and "irrelevant" organisation "with a schizophrenic problem about whether it is more important to be Tory or to be gay".

James thinks that there is at least a communicative role he can play. "Whether Mike Penning [the Tories' incredibly scary deputy head of news and media] would be any good at dealing with The Voice or The Pink Paper..." he sniffs. "Well, actually, I have enough problems myself dealing with The Pink Paper." He tuts, grimly, and I am none the wiser. A few days later, I call Central Office and receive bad news. "They have no function; [affiliation] doesn't really mean anything," I'm told. "They have no advisory role or anything like that."

As James scampers out to check on Theresa's progress ("It doesn't look good for the Government to have the shadow Minister for Transport and the Environment stuck in traffic, ha ha!"), I begin to get the impression that not everyone shares his out-with-the-old approach. After all, they don't call themselves "Conservative" for nothing. In the wood-panelled bar, surrounded by dusty paintings of fighter planes, some insurgents are not happy about James's unilateral approach to changing the group's name, and there are rumblings about a hardcore group organising a breakaway "Torch" dinner for another night. As word gets out that a journalist is present (it doesn't take genius - there's only one other woman and she's not clutching a reporter's notebook and being schmoozed by the chairman), a space grows around me like a two-yard nuclear exclusion zone. One guest - a handsome young Asian man - asks not to be photographed because "my parents read The Independent". Do they not know that he's a Conservative?

But, one by one, braver souls breach the unspoken contract of suspicion and shuffle towards me. "They wouldn't want you to talk to me," chuckles one. "I consider myself the only genuine Tory in the country. I sit at breakfast with my Daily Telegraph. I'm economically right wing and socially liberal. And I'm the biggest critic of the party." This is dangerous stuff. In August 2000, Gavin French was forced to resign as chairman of Torche, after telling The Pink Paper that the party was "misguided over Section 28, and misunderstood the principles behind the call for its repeal". At the time, Peter Tatchell called Torche "a bunch of unprincipled toadies", and several (notably, anonymous) Torche members contacted newspapers to call the party "intolerant and narrow-minded".

I'm surprised anyone is willing to rattle the lion's cage again, just when the party seems finally to have found some fragile unity. And when James has just spent so long patiently explaining to me that Michael Howard really is gay-friendly, in spite of the impression that he may have given when he was Home Secretary by opposing gay adoption and contributing significantly towards the introduction of Section 28 and the party's stubborn opposition to its abolition.

"Tebbit is a twot, isn't he?" says my informant, cheerfully. "He was all right in his time, but things have moved on. He was responsible for getting millions of working-class people to vote Tory. We need another one. It could be David Davis, he's from a working-class background, but I fear he's socially illiberal. They should ask him to address a Torch dinner. Ask him to defend his views, see what he has to say. Go on, ask James if they'll be asking him."

I do, and James taps his nose, conspiratorially. "You may have heard that rumour, but I couldn't possibly comment," he smirks. "Yes, we will be asking him. He'd be very good."

My mole is not impressed. "You know what his views on gays are, don't you?" he sneers. "He'd roast them on a spit!"

So far, so disunited. And James's rosy view is only further clouded when we go into dinner ("Theresa's so nearly here!" someone whispers. "She just has to stop at her Pimlico flat and get changed.") An elder statesman of the Gay Conservatives, or whatever he calls them, must have seen me talking to the black sheep of the organisation, because he has dragged over a stooge. "This man has just joined the party because he's so pleased that Michael Howard is leader," he announces, slapping his nervous young colleague on the back. "You should talk to him."

I'm intrigued. What made a young, gay-friendly man sign up to a party headed by Michael Howard? "Well, I thought Iain Duncan Smith was rubbish," he offers. "You know, rubbish on TV, that sort of thing." So, is he just hoping Howard will change his mind about gay rights? "Um, yes," he begins, and then seems to sense that that's not what he has been brought here to say. "I mean, I think he's already changing it. Politicians are quite nimble - they change their minds as society changes." Another pause. "But that doesn't mean to say they're hypocrites." As we are seated, he looks grateful to be led away.

By now, the extra hour's drinking has had its effect, and dissenters are popping up all over the place. The main course is finished and the mood around the long, white-swathed table is becoming restless. Mark is picking apart the wax drips from the true Tory-blue candles, and heckling the toastmaster. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Queen!" hurrahs the speaker. "Which one?" mutters Mark. Mark is delightful. He is arch and wicked and fidgets like a trapped insect, as if he's so waspish he's actually becoming a wasp. Mark is an old-fashioned, laissez-faire Tory. He started hunting two years ago when he heard that the Government planned to ban it, and says that he will break the law "with great pride" when it is outlawed. "It takes guts to stand up to authority when you believe that authority is wrong," he says. What about drag hunting, asks some helpful straight-man. "Nah," replies Mark, curling his nose, Kenneth Williams-like. "I prefer to do it in normal clothes."

All this levity is causing indignation further down the table. Mark's heckles ("Ladies and gentlemen, Theresa May!" "Ooh! May what?") are being shushed and tutted by some of the older members, for whom politics is clearly a serious business. To my horror, the conversation is turning inexorably towards asylum-seekers, and some of my fellow-guests are beginning to foam at the mouth. "In the days when Michael Howard's father moved to Britain, they were willing to work for a living, that's the difference!" bellows a dangerously red-faced gentleman across the table.

When someone starts up about the good old days of the British Empire, I feel I have to intervene, but I'm savaged by a surprisingly impassioned man to whom I have not yet been introduced, who angrily puts me straight. Then, Mark reveals that he is from South Africa. What really made him sick, he says, was that his gay friends couldn't empathise with the discrimination suffered by the black population. The man who is so against asylum joins in to condemn "the hypocrisy of the gay community in being racist". I wonder whether you couldn't say the same about gay men who cannot sympathise with those who seek asylum, but am shouted down.

Just as I think I might not get out of here alive, my knight in shining armour appears in the form of Esmond, a softly spoken Northern Irishman who quietly, intelligently, defends my outrageously liberal interpolations. I am stunned. Esmond started life fairly left-wing, he explains. Then, like most people, he started swinging towards the right. What surprises him now is that he has found himself becoming more left-wing again. I'll say. He's liberal in his attitude to asylum, frighteningly knowledgeable about the political history of the Armenians, and thinks that we probably shouldn't have invaded Iraq. So, what's a nice boy like him doing in a party like this?

I don't have time to ask, because Theresa May - a vision in rainbow-striped kitten heels and an orange, fur-trimmed sweater - is on her feet. Theresa was instrumental in getting Torch accepted by the party, and she is something of a heroine around here. Granted, that's not much of a compliment, since a previous Torch chairman once claimed that Ann Widdecombe "has a camp following. A lot of Tory men think she's wonderful... though not in the class of Thatcher, a true icon". But Torch's members are grateful. At least, some of them are.

As May gets ready to speak, a stage whisper is heard from somewhere down the table. "Ooh, I didn't know we'd hired a drag queen," bitches a man whose Moss Bros label is sticking out of his suit. "I mean, the shoes are one thing, but a feather boa...?" May persists, valiantly. She throws in a few footwear gags. She smiles indulgently as James brings up her namesake, the porn-star Teresa May. She ends with a morale-boosting fanfare and is roundly applauded. In a voice dripping venom, Moss Bros pipes up: "Just stick to wearing the shoes, dear."

As we file out, someone I haven't noticed before taps me on the shoulder. He glances towards his colleague - the man who was so explosive about asylum. "We're not all mad, right-wing nutters, you know," he says, and melts into the crowd.

Back in the bar, the faithful are discussing Theresa's speech. "We all know that what she said that time about our being the 'nasty party' isn't true," says one. "We know what she was trying to say: in recent years, we have been rather nasty to each other. But I hope that now, that's all changed."

Based on the evidence of this evening, there's still a long way to go.