The Bermondsey by-election of 1983 is widely regarded as one of the nastiest, most scurrilous election campaigns in British history. Peter Tatchell, queer-rights activist and bona fide national treasure, stood for the Labour Party against Simon Hughes, who stood for the Liberals.
Tatchell was the target of a ceaseless campaign of smears, innuendo, hatred and homophobia. It came from all sides: the tabloids, the hard right, Liberals themselves. Of all the tactics used against Tatchell, perhaps the lowest, the most awful, was the attempt to depict him as a paedophile, or at least a friend of paedophiles.
Incredibly, the tabloid press sent young boys to Tatchell’s apartment, presumably in the hope that he would invite them in. They wanted to expose him as at the very least a fellow traveller of child rapists, in order to destroy his political career and potentially his life.
I liked to think that the politicisation of such a dreadful crime as child rape to the end of damaging an electoral candidate was a thing of the past, a relic of the dirty politics of 1980s Britain.
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