In a white, cramped bedroom in Clapham, south London, one of the Scottish National Party’s most trusted senior political advisers is pursing his lips to sweep dark rouge up his cheekbone. He smears eyeshadow next, in multicoloured arches over his brow, but leaves the eyelashes bare.



“I’m a drag queen in trainers – why should I wear falsies?” he says.

Nathan Sparling is 26, 6’5”, and not ungenerously proportioned. “I have an overactive knife and fork,” he quips.

His voice is cavernous and meaty, bellowing out his Fife accent with such tuba-like brio that should his career in politics and drag implode he might sensibly consider a job as a town crier.

On a shelf to his right sits a dark wig, a huge beige bra, and an epic vodka and Coke. The air is so thick with hairspray you can taste it.

A week ago, his backroom strategising and campaigning helped secure a major victory for the SNP in the House of Commons: a vote 138–1 in favour of a bill introduced by one of their MPs to ratify the Istanbul Convention, which imposes a minimum requirement on countries to tackle violence against women.

“History – signed, sealed, delivered,” he tweeted from his politics account @nathansparkling. “Proud to have made a small part in making #ICBill a reality.”

This evening, as a laptop perches on his bed playing a Pet Shop Boys gig, Sparling is preparing to become Nancy Clench, host of the weekly karaoke night at one of Soho’s most famous institutions: the Admiral Duncan pub. She also has a regular spot at Heaven, London’s biggest LGBT club. And her own Twitter account. Nancy Clench is a star.

When BuzzFeed News first met her, in the street last June, at the Soho vigil for the victims of the Orlando massacre, she stood head and bosom above the crowds, giving us an impassioned interview live on Facebook while standing in the gutter.

At the time, BuzzFeed News was entirely unaware that the righteous diva of Old Compton Street was the same person who crops up on Twitter, besuited and bespectacled, as the earnest adviser of leading Scottish politicians.

This is not exactly a well-beaten career path.

There have been drag queens in other countries loosely involved in party politics. Last month, Germany’s Olivia Jones (real name Oliver Knobel) revealed her ambition to one day be president at a Green Party candidate selection vote. And politicians have on occasion donned drag: the mayor of Reykjavik, Jón Gnarr, for example, at the city’s Pride parade in 2010.

But no one else is known to be employed simultaneously in both worlds, switching between the two like Superman in a phone box.

But then few other parties have changed so dramatically regarding LGBT rights as the SNP. The party that once championed anti-gay campaigner and businessman Brian Souter now has the highest proportion of LGBT parliamentarians in the world. And Scotland, once neck-deep in whisky and machismo, is now a leader, socially and politically, in LGBT rights.

Straddling both worlds, Nathan Sparling is its most in-your-face symbol.

The name Nancy Clench, he explains, is a play on Judi Dench, but as the evening moves from his bedroom to the bar – a chance for BuzzFeed News to regard the butterfly leaving the chrysalis – what begins to emerge is that he is not playing a part at all.

The first clue to this comes in a look he gives himself while applying makeup in the mirror – one of both cheekiness and recognition: a light switching on. It is the amused look of someone catching their own reflection while being buggered at an orgy. It says, “Hello Nancy, my dear, shall we cause some unholy mischief?”

The connection between these two characters would be altogether simpler were it not for what surfaced a few days earlier in his office in Westminster, when he had invited BuzzFeed News to meet him in his political guise.

The divide in Sparling’s life, it transpires, is not between politics and drag, Nathan and Nancy. It lies somewhere else entirely.