Kate Bush's disassociation with the Tories shows how out of touch they’ve become in the last two years

2016 was, it could be argued, not a great year. With Brexit and Trump counted amongst the years horrors, not to mention a seemingly unending parade of high profile deaths, it truly was an annus horribilis. Just as it looked like we might be through the worst of it, an interview appeared in Canadian Magazine Maclean’s with musician Kate Bush.

The interview was to promote a live album Bush had released to accompany her 2014 sell out run at Hammersmith Apollo. In it, she was asked about her 1985 track “Waking the Witch” which appeared in the live show and its centring on “the fear of women’s power”.

In answering, Bush stated: “We have a female prime minister here in the UK. I actually really like her and think she’s wonderful. I think it’s the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time. She’s a very intelligent woman but I don’t see much to fear. I will say it’s great to have a woman in charge of the country.”

Her endorsement of Theresa May, and seemingly her politics, caused uproar. For young queer kids like me, who’d spent an inordinate amount of my late teens watching and rewatching the “Wuthering Heights” video, fantasizing about running across moors and peering eerily through windows I’d sketched out with my hands, it was a betrayal and a dagger to the heart.

Her music, before a place of fun and adventure, felt sullied and broken by her attachment to a government I saw as callous and barbaric. One of a party that had voted throughout my childhood to curtail my rights.

Just over two years later, and Kate Bush is back in the headlines. Her digitally remastered back catalogue and lyric book were released in December but the interview still hung heavy around her neck. In a statement released on her website, Bush sought to clarify her 2016 remarks, stating that, though the interview “could make it appear I am a Tory supporter… I want to make it clear I am not”.

And with that, we can head into the second weekend of 2019 resting easy. Though we can now all run, guilt free, up the nearest hill (to make a deal with god), it does rather beg the question – why now? Bush’s aversion to any association with the Tories was not clearly not strong enough to issue a clarifying statement at the time, so what changed?

We are two and a half years into May’s premiership. Launched into power amidst the post-EU Referendum carnage, her time in office has been fraught, played out against the looming spectre of Brexit.

During her office we’ve had national tragedy with Grenfell and the Manchester and London terror attacks. There have been scandals in the form of Windrush and declarations by the UN that her government, and the one in which she was previously home secretary, “inflicted misery” on the citizens of the UK through political choice rather than economic necessity.

Her stewardship of the country through its departure from the European Union has been almost universally panned and she stands today, white knuckling it at the dispatch box as her government becomes the first to lose an amendment to a finance bill in 40 years – as well as being the first ever to be held in contempt just before Christmas.

The thing about all of these incidents, as time has peeled itself away, it has also stripped away whatever veneer David Cameron’s compassionate conservatism was able to attach to the Tory party. Bit by bit, the callousness at the core of the party has been re-exposed.

Such is the toxicity that is now so endemic within this government and its actions, that now, unlike two years ago, the mere mention of an association with it is enough for people like Bush to scramble to release a clarifying statement.

Unquestionably, Bush should have known all this before. However, her statement seems to have been shaped by the barbarity of the May government and is surely a harbinger of its imminent demise.

When I woke up on new year's day, I thought that signal would come in the shape of a red rosette – that it is a floating red dress makes it all the sweeter.