‘It was like living through a civil war’

Decades of abuse won’t quell Peter Tatchell’s battle for justice, he tells Simon Heffer

Peter Tatchell still occupies the same modest Herbert Morrison-era London County Council flat, a stone’s throw from the Elephant and Castle, where he lived during the Bermondsey by-election campaign that brought him national recognition 35 years ago. It was the dirtiest by-election in living memory.

“I never expected the scale of violence and intimidation that I was subjected to,” he tells me as we sit facing each other in his sitting room

“All the others used really dirty, underhand tactics. There was a leaflet put round the constituency entitled ‘Which Queen would you vote for?’,” an allusion to Tatchell’s homosexuality. “I have since been told by a Liberal Democrat that it was the Liberals who did that.”

“And it said, ‘If you feel angry, tell Peter Tatchell what you think’, and gave my home address and phone number. Between my selection as a candidate until the by-election 15 months later, I was violently assaulted in the constituency over 150 times. I was punched in the face while canvassing, there were two attempts to run me down in a car, I was attacked with bricks and bottles. Some of it was far-Right organisations, some were just members of the public. I had over 50 attacks on this flat, three arson attempts and a bullet through the front door. It was like living through a low-level civil war.”

Tatchell, 66, now heads a foundation bearing his name that fights oppression all over the world. As his past suggests, he does not lack physical courage. In 2001, when protesting against Robert Mugabe in Brussels, Mugabe’s bodyguards beat him so badly that he sustained brain damage and has defective vision in his right eye. He is focused now on the Commonwealth summit, which starts in London on April 16, where he intends to highlight the treatment of homosexuals in many member nations. “Astonishingly, 37 out of 53 Commonwealth states still criminalise same-sex relations. Nine have a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and in parts of two, Pakistan and Nigeria, gay people can be executed. That’s in complete defiance of the Commonwealth charter.”

Some countries have liberalised in recent years, he says, “but progress is painfully slow. Our big push at the summit is to get LGBT issues discussed, because for six decades Commonwealth leaders have refused even to talk about them.”

He points out that “abuse of LGBT rights is not the only human rights abuse in the Commonwealth. A majority of states have restrictions on freedom of the press, the right to