Every week in his profiles of leading bloggers, Norm Geras asks:
Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own?
Some people say yes. Most say no.
So, it’s nice to see this story of love across the political and national divides in Belgium, although the Belgian public’s reaction doesn’t seem to have been to conciliatory.
HE IS a senior conservative politician, she a young Socialist MP, but it is not only a political clash of allegiances that has turned the love affair between Hendrik Daems and Sophie Pécriaux into such a big scandal in Belgium.
Nor was it the announcement by Daems, 46, that he is divorcing the mother of his five-year-old daughter and having a child by Pécriaux, 38. Their greater crime — strange as it may seem in 21st-century Europe — was loving across a cultural divide between Flemings and Walloons. Daems paid for it last week with his job.
I think it’s great to see, and I can’t wait to see news of the first great love-match between a Tory and Labour MP splashed across the front page of The Times.
I doubt Daem’s soon to be ex-wife is all that thrilled with their union though.