Everett berates Harman over sex laws

Although he made much of it in his biography, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, Rupert Everett appeared to be "done" with talking about his youthful phase as a Piccadilly rent boy and habitual user of Class A narcotics. However, in the Sunday Telegraph, after a good deal of coaxing, he returned to both subjects, using them as a stick to beat the government.

After stating prostitution will never go away, Everett, now 49, said: "But try telling Harriet Harman that. The best she can come up with is fining anyone who uses a prostitute. She is a typical New Labour idiot because she is going to force prostitutes back into the parks at a time when it has become more dangerous. I don't think prostitution will ever end, just as drug-taking will never end. Both should be legalised as a way of controlling them. Cut out the middleman. Tax them. Use the money to fund clinics for the victims."

Everett, who now refers to himself as a 'Muscle Mary' (definition: a gay man who spends too much time in the gym), explores the subject of prostitution in a documentary about the maverick 19th Century orientalist Sir Richard Burton, The Victorian Sex Explorer, to be shown tonight on Channel 4. (Continued below)

Of Burton, he says: "There was something very strange about his sexuality. I sensed from the lingering way he described boys that he definitely found the male body superior to the female. But it is difficult for us to relate to that because gay sexuality hadn't really been invented then. There would have been no muscle bars with bottles of poppers."