Philip Hensher: You didn't do anything wrong, Miriam

Miriam Margolyes, that wonderful actor, had a sad story to tell to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs last week. Forty years ago, in her early twenties, she told her mother that she was a lesbian. "I spoke to her about an affair with a woman and three days later she had this stroke. I realised it was a mistake on my behalf. It was an indulgence of me to tell her that."

Miss Margolyes may have been surprised at the amount of media coverage which her comments on a long-ago private sadness called forth. All of the press were very interested indeed by a lesbian in public life saying that, in one respect, it could have been better to have remained silent on the matter. Whether anyone could correctly extrapolate a general truth from a particular situation – whether, indeed, this sequence of events could provide any kind of general conclusions about sexuality and openness – was not the subject of the media interest.

A confession of sexual difference to a conservative-minded parent led, 40 years ago, to a stroke. I don't know how medically plausible that is; but Miss Margolyes clearly believes it, and knows for certain that her openness caused her mother immense grief and suffering. Perhaps we might say that the grief and the suffering are excessive and unreasonable reactions; but I don't think we would see it like that if it were a parent of our own. It would just be extremely sad and frightening.

I have a lot of sympathy of Miss Margolyes, though not to the point where I think it preferable or respectful to go on lying to and deceiving a parent. Most gay people, now, have found that their relationships with their parents actually improve over time, once they have been open with them. If that was not the case 40 years ago, it has become the case because of those brave people who were willing to take the step into honesty. In Miss Margolyes's case, the tragic interpretation which she has put on that sequence of events led her back into secrecy for some years. But openness was bound to come in the end.

A psychotherapist would say that a parent, now, who responds with horror and grief to this news from a child had made a definite and rather negative choice; there is no need to think of it in that light. That clearly wasn't true 40 years ago, and Miss Margolyes's mother would have been an unusual woman to have greeted it cheerfully. That doesn't mean, however, that it was wrong to be open, even then; nobody could reasonably have seen the consequences, if, indeed, they were consequences at all.

What is odd about the whole thing is the immense public interest the sad case has created. You don't have to be a very subtle reader to work out what is behind the coverage. A well-known actor, a lesbian, says in public that perhaps, in that particular case, it might have been best to have shielded a parent of nervous sensibility from something which would upset them. The gloss on this seems to be "Woman says she wishes she never mentioned it at all – and we say so do we."

Newspapers adore "I wish I'd never come out" stories because it allows them to assert that yes, indeed, they too wish lesbians and gay men would shut up about it, or, in the approved terminology, "stop ramming it down our throats." At the same time, it allows them to go on about the fascinating fact without rest. It is ugly to see Miss Margolyes's delicately nuanced and humane position pushed into ramifications of such gross hypocrisy.

Wifely delusions of Churchillian grandeur

What will we do for amusement once Cherie Blair wanders off the world stage? Talking to Vanity Fair in a publicity interview to promote the US publication of her memoirs, she pondered the question of how good a prime minister her husband had been. "He was fantastic," she said. "I'm sure history will judge him very well. I think he'll be up there with Churchill."

American politicians are of the unbreakable habit of mentioning Churchill's name whenever they fall into the public company of their British counterparts. But there is a hideous, car-crash quality to a British ex-premiere's spouse making a direct comparison of this sort. The claim doesn't even need rebutting, so ludicrous is the idea of any kind of similarity between the two.

Blair was a competent manager and a very skilful political operator, prone to some horrible misjudgements and one catastrophic one over Iraq. "Fantastic" is truly the word for much of his foreign policy, and that is what history will really remember him for.

He stayed as long as he did because there was really no plausible alternative leader within his party – just how implausible the main alternative was, we are now painfully discovering. Nothing he did could be compared even to Attlee or Thatcher in vision, scope or novelty. He wasn't a disaster as prime minister, but the apt comparison, really, is that of Harold Wilson.

And as for his wife – as Attlee wrote to Harold Laski just at the end of the war, "a period of silence on your part would be welcome".

Obese banks that could lose some weight

I went to Syria for 10 days – thank you, I had a lovely time – and after a period without much access to news, returned to find that the Bradford & Bingley was being nationalised with, apparently, the minimum of amazed or horrified comment.

Something very peculiar to the national mindset must have happened in the meantime. I felt like one of those time travellers in fiction who treads on a mosquito in the Jurassic period and returns to the present day to discover that the world is consequently ruled by giant hamsters.

A very good article by James Buchan, that most far-seeing of commentators on money, points out unarguably that banking, far from being undercapitalised, has long been "overcapitalised to the point of obesity", and, he says, a short walk down any high street will demonstrate that. And he's right. When we were all complaining about the sheer number of coffee shops, say, in our high streets, why did we not notice the enormous proliferation of banks? Why did we not wonder how they all got there, and what they were all doing?

If there were only some way to diminish the immense, unnatural excess in the sector without the creation of considerable human misery. But there isn't.

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