Johann Hari

Peter Tatchell is Britain hardest, smartest gay rights warrior – the man we set on the homophobes when we’ve had enough. In his time, he has hijacked the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pulpit, performed a citizens’ arrest on homo-cidal Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and – just this year – been beaten unconscious by the Russian police. It seems that for him, suffering anywhere is an issue. He is the human rights movement made flesh.

So to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his gay rights campaigning, Attitude trudged down to the Tatch’s tiny council flat, which is buried on a concrete council estate in Lambeth. The sacrifices he has made to fight for us are immediately clear. His front door is marked with a ‘Warning: this property is guarded 24 hours a day by the police sign’ after a string of homophobic hate attacks and death threats. His windows are covered with steel bars.

Once he ushers us in, we stagger through piles of files and protest-banners. Much of his daily work – fighting for gay asylum seekers so they can stay in the country, campaigning against homophobic hate-music from Jamaica, and more – is carried out from within these tiny walls. Peter is thin – the result of cycling everywhere, he says – and talks with a slight Australian accent, a left-over from his childhood in Melbourne, Australia.

Peter is hard to draw onto his personal life – not because he’s bashful, but because he is so brimming with news about human rights abuses he wants to impart to Attitude readers. His campaigns range from the Caribbean to Africa to Australia, and he talks with effortless eloquence about them. He doesn’t have time for a boyfriend, he says: he has too many people to save. He has been incorruptible: he might go to Elton John’s wedding and be one of the most famous men in Britain, but he lives in near-penury and dedicates every waking hour to human rights work.

For twenty years, Peter was a hate-figure for the right, described as “evil” by The Sun and worse. He ran as a Labour candidate in Bermondsey in 1983 and was subject to foul homophobic smears (ironically, by the campaign for Lib Dem Simon Hughes, who was outed twenty years later.) He was mocked and derided for adopting positions that are seen as mainstream today.

But since his attempted arrest of Mugabe in 1998, Peter has become a national treasure – a status he tells Attitude he is anxious about… Today he is preparing to run as the Green Party candidate in Oxford, a seat he believes he can win because “climate change is the biggest danger in the world.” We nestle down amidst the files to hear about his mum and dad, his greatest achievement – and Mugabe’s face when Peter nicked him…

JH: You’ve been at the forefront of a huge number of human rights campaigns over the past four decades. What do you think your biggest achievement has been?

PT: You know, it’s impossible to single out just one single achievement. But I’d say that one of the most significant was the campaign against the police harassment of the lesbian gay community in the early 1990s. At that time, convictions for the totally consenting, gay-only offence of gross indecency were at a near record high. It was almost as great as in the period 1954-55, when male homosexuality was totally illegal and when the country was gripped by a McCarthyite style anti-gay witch hunt.

The police were choosing to interpret the law in the most homophobic way possible. It was a conscious choice, a deliberate targeted campaign of harassment against our community. At one cruising site the police were using army infra red cameras and binoculars to spy on people having sex. At Stew Ponds in Surrey, they actually dug a huge underground hive where there were slits at ground level for their binoculars and cameras, so they could record gay men meeting or having sex and then arrest them.

The police would choose a very young handsome officer, dress him in white tight trousers, black boots, and leather jacket and get him to go into a public toilet, or to a cruising area, and either squeeze his crotch or in some cases actually pull out his cock, and anyone who responded was arrested. It was absolutely outrageous incitement by the police to members of the public to commit crimes. The police were not arresting people who were committing crimes - they were encouraging gay men to commit crimes. And the cost to the tax payer was astronomical.

All this was happening in the wake of the AIDS panic and hysteria under the Conservative government’s ‘family values’ campaign. So Outrage! together with other gay groups tried to sit down and negotiate an end homophobic harassment with the Metropolitan Police and other local forces. We got absolutely nowhere. The police would smile, give us tea and biscuits and nod, and say they were going to change, but in fact they would just go away for another raid.

JH: So what did you decide to do?

PT: We embarked on a high profile direct action campaign. We started doing things like interrupting the press conferences of the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Condon, invading and occupying police stations that were organising raids, and busting undercover police entrapment operations.

In a several cases we put up warning signs for gay people in parks and public toilets, and on a number of occasions we photographed pretty police who were waving their willies. We appealed for wider support too. We researched the number of officers involved, and the amount of time they were spending, and then gave that to the local papers, arguing this is a gross waste of police time and public money. Particularly when the police were at the same moment claiming that they didn’t have enough resources to deal with domestic violence, burglaries, racial incidents and queer bashing attacks.

JH: How would the police react?

PT: The police went absolutely ape shit. They were used to having the gay community under their thumbs. This was the first time they were really seriously changed over their blatant homophobia.

Within three months of beginning that campaign, the police called us in to New Scotland Yard to begin seriously negotiations with the gay community, for the first time. Within a year they had agreed to eight of our twelve demands for non-homophobic policing policy. Within three years the number of gay and bisexual men arrested for the offence of gross indecency fell by two thirds, the biggest, fastest fall ever recorded. Direct action works. It got results when polite negotiations had failed. It created a huge change in the mind set of the police, it brought home to them that we were no longer prepared to be passive victims of their homophobia, and out of that position came initially grudging respect and increasingly nowadays a fair degree of acceptance.

JH: Here in Britain, you also led a campaign against the homophobia of the Church of England. You famously interrupted the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Sunday sermon…

PT: For eight years, Outrage! and the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement had sought a meeting with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey. He refused to meet anyone, the door was slammed in our face, so after eight years, we felt something had to be done. This Archbishop was openly not only saying that homosexuality was wrong and sinful, but - much worse - he was publicly endorsing and agitating for laws to discriminate against gay people. He backed the unequal age of consent, said that discrimination against gay people in employment was justified in circumstance, certain circumstances, opposed any form of recognition of same sex partnerships, he campaigned actively to oppose same sex couples being allowed to foster or adopt children

We felt that he had to be challenged, so seven of us went to Canterbury Cathedral on Easter Sunday in 1998, we sat quietly our pews, we didn’t disrupt the sacred parts of the service, but when the Archbishop began his political sermon, we got up out of our seats, walked into the pulpit displaying placards criticising his support for homophobic discrimination, and I delivered a short alternative sermon criticising the Archbishop’s homophobia.

JH: What was the Archbishop’s reaction?

PT: He was completely stunned, shocked. He had this look of disbelief on his face but when I stood beside him he just stood aside and let me have the microphone. Contrary to the way it was portrayed by a lot of MPs and newspapers we didn’t push him aside, we didn’t use bad language and we didn’t attack the Christian faith. It was a targeted, considered, measured criticism of the Archbishop’s support for legal discrimination against gay and lesbian people.

The upshot of that protest is that I was charged and eventually convicted under the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act, 1860, formerly part of the Brawling Act, 1551. Under that law any form of dissent in a church is a criminal offence. When I went to trial the magistrate acknowledged that the protest was brief and peaceful, but he said that under the law there were no exonerating circumstances. If you dissent in a church, interrupting the preacher, that’s a crime under British law. The Church is the only institution that has that blanket ban on protest, so it’s a privileging of religious authority. Not even Buckingham Palace, the House of Parliament, or No. 10 Downing Street have that protection.

JH: What was the punishment?

PT: I could have been fined up to £5000 and sent to jail for up to six months. The magistrate, having heard what actually happened as opposed to the florid, inflammatory accounts in some of the media, obviously concluded that this was a very minor offence so he fined me the princely sum of £18.60. It was comical, perverse allusion to the 1860 Act under which I was charged and convicted.

The positive effect of that protest was that it massively raised Christian and public awareness about the Archbishop’s homophobia, it generated a huge debate in congregations all over the country, and lots of Anglicans contacted us, congratulating us on what we had done, saying it was about time, Dr Carey himself was obviously so embarrassed at being exposed as a bigot, that thereafter he dramatically reduced his public denunciations of gay people and his public advocacy of homophobic discrimination in law. He didn’t stop it, but it was dramatically reduced. A number of bishops issued their own statements affirming their belief that gay people should not face discrimination and. About three months later, Dr Carey met with the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement for the first time and a bit after that the House of Bishops issued a statement critical of homophobic discrimination. I don’t think any of those positive outcomes would have if we hadn’t confronted the Archbishop and put him on the spot.

JH: You have also spoken out against Islamic fundamentalist homophobia.

PT: Yes. We first targeted Hizb-ut-Tahir back in 1994 when they were holding a mass rally at Wembley Arena, where they were openly advocating the murder of Muslims who turned away from their faith, Jews, unchaste women and gay people.

JH: It makes even the Church of England’s homophobia look like a tea party.

PT: No one apart from Outrage! had the guts to go there and challenge them. Even amongst our own membership people were too scared. In the end six of us went to Wembley and confronted a baying mob of 6,000… The police allowed the Hizb-ut-Tahrir followers to openly say we would be tracked down, and killed and then arrested us for breaching public order, for simply criticising these fanatics wanted to kill us. I was eventually convicted and had to fight through various appeals to get the conviction overturned. I hadn’t insulted the Islamic faith or Muslim people, I had merely criticised Muslim fundamentalists like Hamas and the Iranian regime who advocate violence and murder against lesbian and gay people.

A couple of years later, we challenged Sheikh Omar Bakri, who broke away from Hizbul Tahir, because in his view it wasn’t extreme enough. He issued a fatwa against gay people, so we issued a counter-fatwa sentencing him to 1000 years of sodomitical torment and delivered it to him in the midst of his mass rallies. Again we were very, very lucky to escape with our bodies intact. But we live charmed lives it seems.

JH: More recently, you’ve challenged London mayor Ken Livingstone for embracing Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a hardline Islamist preacher.

PT: Sheikh Al-Qaradawi is a prominent Islamic theologian. He broadcasts all over the Arab and Muslim world, sermons of pure bigotry. But the website which he supervises as the chief scholar, Islam Online, includes fatwas advocating the execution of lesbian and gay people. He isn’t just homophobic, he’s also anti-Semitic and misogynistic as well. I was absolutely astonished that Ken Livingstone invited him to City Hall as his “honoured guest”.

JH: Ken has been an ally of yours in the past, hasn’t he?

PT: Yes. Qaradawi says that Islamic states are right to execute lesbian and gay people. He advocates female genital mutilation, he argues that woman should be compelled to wear the hijab, that husbands are justified to hit their wives, strike their wives, if they are disobedient, that suicide bombing against innocent civilians can be justified, and he blames women who are raped, if they dress immodestly.

Outrage! was part of the coalition of community groups including the gay Muslim group, Imam, various gay student women’s rights, and Hindu and Sikh organisations, we all came together to oppose for varying reasons, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi being invited to London. We believe it’s quite right the Mayor should have a dialogue with the Muslim community, but we think it’s more appropriate that a progressive Mayor dialogues with progressive and liberal Muslims. The sad fact is that Ken Livingstone has never thrown open the doors of City Hall to liberal and progressive Muslims, he always seems to be dialoguing and associating with extreme fundamentalists.

JH: How did you feel when he called you Islamophobic in response?

PT: It was pretty despicable, low blow. Anybody who knows me, including Ken, will understand that that is an absurd, ludicrous accusation. I’ve been involved in anti-racism, including defending Muslim people for thirty years, I was in campaigns against the National Front and later the BNP, involved in the Anti-Nazi League. When I joined the Labour Party in Bermondsey in the late 70s as far as I am aware there were not any Asian or Muslim members. I recruited over 50 in my ward alone, and gave them a voice in the Labour party for the first time. About half of the individual prisoners and asylum claimants that I’m helping are Muslim, gay and straight. If I’m an Islamophobe, it’s a pretty weird form of Islampohobia.

JH: Some of these critics – disgustingly, in my view – say ‘Why interfere with other cultures and communities’?
PT: It used to be axiomatic for people on the left to act in solidarity with oppressed and victimised peoples. The whole global anti-apartheid campaign was in solidarity with black South Africans, struggling for their freedom. Nowadays, some on the left seem to take the view that if you show solidarity with non-white people in faraway places you must be a racist, an Islamophobe, a neocon or an imperialist. They’ve turned progressive politics on its head- it’s no longer progressive, it’s reactionary. Their basic attitude is let them hang.

Ken Livingstone has done a lot of good things for the lesbian and gay community, but he has made a monumental misjudgement in backing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. It’s an immense insult to the LGBT community of London and of Britain. What is even more shameful is the way Ken keeps falsely claiming that this is all Israeli propaganda and that anybody who criticises Qaradawi is a Zionist or a neocon. It’s a mind-boggling denial and distortion of the facts. Cynics say that Ken has made a calculation, given his long history of supporting lesbian and gay rights, he can afford in this case to side with Muslim fanatics. His calculation is that Muslim organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain can deliver him more votes, and that the gay community will support him anyway, so he can do what he likes. It’s cynical realpolitik.

JH: It’s interesting that you are such a passionate and committed opponent of religious fanaticism, because your family were evangelical Christians.

PT: Yeah, my parents were veering towards fundamentalists – indeed, they are veering towards fundamentalist Christianity. They take a pretty literalist interpretation of the Bible, I was brought up in a family where sexual ‘sins’ were deemed some of the most serious. My mother was a housewife, and my father was a lathe operator in an engineering factory, and we were growing up in Melbourne, Australia.

JH: Did you believe it as a child?

PT: Absolutely. I didn’t have any other reference point.

JH: When did you begin to realise that there was something not quite right there?

PT: Well, long before the term liberation theology had ever been invented I began to develop my own form of it, at about the very precocious age of 12. I can remember as young, around the age of 10 or 11, watching the nightly TV news showing black civil rights marchers in the United States being baton-charged and having dogs set upon them. In particular the racist bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama, where three young girls were killed, had a profound impact on me. From that moment I connected that Christianity wasn’t just as abstract idea, but something of practical relevance, in terms of my life, and the life of other people in the world. The fact that Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister also helped me make that connection. To me, he was putting Christian ideals into practice. That it wasn’t just pious prayers on Sunday but the way you actually lived your life. So I reread the Bible, and saw Jesus as a sort of insurrectionist against Roman tyranny.

JH: And your parents didn’t think that way?

PT: No. For them Christianity revolved around your individual personal beliefs and that was it.

JH: And was that the wider view in Australia?

PT: Well, I looked around at Australia’s own black people, the Aborigines, and I soon realised that they were being horribly mistreated. Australia in the 1950s was like an unofficial form of Apartheid. Aborigines were out on reservations. There were a few living in inner city Sydney, but none in Melbourne that I ever came across. I never saw a black person on the street in Melbourne until I was about 18 or 19, and that was one. Up into the late sixties, aboriginal people, the original Australians, were not classified as citizens of their own country and were not allowed to vote. They had, and to some extent still have, third world rates of disease, third world rates of ill health, illiteracy, and life expectancy.

It was a very ugly place to live in those days. It was illegal to distribute political leaflets in the street. Abortion, divorce and homosexuality were all illegal. There was blanket censorship of books and plays. It wasn't a police state but it wasn't a free society either.

When I realised I was gay, it was a time in Melbourne, Australia, when male homosexuality was totally illegal and could be punished with several years imprisonment, including enforced psychiatric treatment, such as shock aversion therapy, there were no gay org... [interrupts himself], gay bashing was rife, including by the police, officers in uniform or plain clothes would go and beat up gay men who were out cruising and they would get away with it, there was no redress whatsoever. At the time there were no gay organizations in Melbourne. Not even any help-lines or advice centres. There were only two seedy gay bars, and no gay cafés, restaurants or clubs. It was a queer desert.

Anyway, I was outraged that the churches were not speaking out against the blatant racism against the Aboriginal people. In fact, I began to learn that the Christian church was complicit. They stole children from Aboriginal parents, they forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their parents, and put them into white homes with the aim of quote “civilizing them”. It began to shake my faith. A lot of the churches were at least initially backing the Australian-American war against the people of Vietnam, not speaking out against the mass indiscriminate bombing of villages.

JH: How old were you when you realised you were gay?

PT: 17. It was another ratcheting down of my faith. I can remember lying back on the bed the first time I ever had gay sex and thinking to myself if this is what it is to be gay, then I'm gay and it's fabulous. I didn't have a moment of doubt, shame or guilt.

JH: When did it go altogether?

PT: Around about the age of 19 or 20.

JH: Was that a relief, when you realised you were an atheist?

PT: Not a relief, it was just a logical conclusion to a rational inquiry into what actually makes the world go round, i.e. a scientific understanding of the world as opposed to a superstitious one. I immediately concluded the church and religion had got this one completely wrong, it's another example of why one should doubt these age-old dogmas.

JH: When did you tell your parents?

PT: Because my parents were so devout and religious I knew that it would be very, very distressing for them to deal with if I simply came out with it. I don't believe coming out should be an act of revenge or should hurt people, it should be a moment of candour and honesty which in which you hopefully bring people with you. So I hit on the idea of dropping hints to my parents, to enable them to slowly, gradually, and less painfully come to the realisation that I was gay. So I mentioned about having a gay friend at work, there was an item on the news about a gay person being arrested, I was saying why should they be being arrested for being gay. They didn't really know how to handle it or what to say, so they just said nothing, and then when I mentioned it again they wanted to know, and they’d say “be careful of this gay friend” and blah, blah, blah, and I'd say don't worry, it's nothing to panic about. So it was an education process for them.

JH: What do they think of the work you do now?

PT: It's very interesting, my parents still take the traditional evangelical view that homosexuality is wrong, because that's what it says in the Bible, and they believe the Bible. But they also now say that it's not a major sin, and that people are judged by the totality of their lives not by one particular aspect of it. Most interestingly of all, they've now come to a position where they actually say that, although homosexuality is wrong, it's a choice between the individual and God, there's nothing in the Bible that justifies looking down, discrimination against gay people, so they are very supportive of my human rights campaigns.

JH: What made you decide to come to Britain at first?

PT: I've always wanted to travel and planned to do the typical Australian thing of hitch-hiking around Europe, but what made it a sudden imperative was the fact that I was against the war in Vietnam and was not prepared to register for national service. If I had continued to maintain that stance I would, or I could have ended up being sentenced to two years imprisonment. Rightly or wrongly, I decided to skip the country until the war was over. But when I came here, I fell in love, got a good job, got very involved in the newly formed Gay Liberation Front, and the next thing I knew a temporary stay became permanent.

JH: What was the first political campaign you actually got involved in?

PT: It was against the death penalty. An escaped prisoner, Ronald Ryan, was due to be hanged. It was alleged that he shot dead a warder during a prison escape, a prison break-out. In one newspaper report I read a small aside which said that the autopsy which said that the bullet had entered the warder's upper back shoulder, and exited through his lower front chest. At the age of 15, I worked out that it would be impossible for a warder chasing an escaped prisoner with a gun, I worked out that it would have been impossible for the prisoner to have fired that bullet with that trajectory. So almost certainly the warder had been accidentally shot by another warder on a watch tower.

Anyway, despite this quite compelling evidence that the man was innocent, he was hanged. It was part of a big law and order campaign by the right wing Conservative government, they cynically sent a man to the gallows in order to get a few more votes in the upcoming election. That destroyed my faith in the government, the police and the judicial system. I wasn't saying this man was absolutely innocent, but the evidence pointed towards serious doubt about his guilt.

Thirty years later there was an inquiry into the case, which came to the same conclusion. It would be almost physically impossible for Ronald Ryan to have fired the fatal shot, that it probably came from another warder, who fired a shot, just when the fatal shot was fired, the warder moved into the firing line, and was accidentally shot. I had been brought up in a family that taught us the government was there, ordained by God, was doing good for the community. My own grandfather was the Chief of Police in Melbourne in the 1930s. Suddenly this one incident shattered all my safe, secure illusions.

Soon after, the following year, I went on m first protest march against the war in Vietnam, on the 4th of July, it was a march on the Treasury Gardens, to the US Consulate. I couldn't believe my eyes. As we were assembling an entirely peaceful crowd was subject to what can only be described as Cossack style attacks by mounted police, wielding gigantic truncheons, and police driving cars and vans straight into crowd in a bid to disperse us. Lots of people were injured. We eventually regrouped, and marched through the centre of Melbourne, out to the US Consulate. It was like a paramilitary zone, and we got boxed into a small area, with dozens of police mounted on horseback started charging in, bashing people left, right and centre. I wasn't hit, but a guy standing right next to me had his whole, part of his scalp lifted off his head by a police baton. He wasn't breaking the law, he was holding up a placard, “Get out of Vietnam”, “US get out of Vietnam”. That was another radicalising influence.

JH: You very strongly opposed the racist white supremacist government in Rhodesia. When did you begin to realise something had gone wrong with its successor, Robert Mugabe?

PT: Around about the early 1990s was the first time I heard about the massacres in Matabele-Land, where Robert Mugabe’s Fifth brigade was on the rampage and massacred an estimated 20,000 civilians. At that stage I only heard vague allegations about this, nothing that I’d seen could corroborated it an a very clear way, I didn’t get that information until the mid 1990s. Mugabe is a former liberation hero who has turned into a tyrant. He is now oppressing his own people in even worse ways even than the former white racist regime of Ian Smith. His government is using, withholding food aid as a deliberate ploy to starve and decimate supporters of the opposition. One of his key henchmen has said it doesn’t matter if six million people die because they will all be our political opponents, the country will be better off without them.

Mugabe is on record as saying that gay people are worse than dogs and pigs, that they don’t have any human rights at all. His police have been harassing and victimising gay people for many years. His government enforces the old British Colonial law of 10 years hard labour for sex between men.

JH: When did the idea of trying to arrest Mugabe come to you?

PT: I had helped organise a number of protests against Mugabe’s tyranny. They were nearly all vigils outside the Zimbabwe High Commission. Sadly they didn’t make any impact. We got lots of people, good, lots of people there, but no media impact whatsoever, and no pressure on the Zimbabwe government to change its policy. In one of my random brain storms, probably in the shower, I devised the idea of using international human rights law to bring him to justice. I looked at the different human rights laws, and found the UN Convention Against Torture had been incorporated into British domestic law. It allows the arrest and trial, in Britain of anyone who has committed, condoned or authorised acts of torture anywhere in the world. I then got from Amnesty International a dossier of torture cases in Zimbabwe and chose one that involved the arrest and torture of two black journalists, Ray Choto and Mark Chavunduka – and then it was just a matter of laying in wait until he came to Britain.

One Thursday evening in late October 1999 I got an anonymous call at about midnight which told me Mugabe was on a private visit to Britain, he was staying at the St James Court Hotel until 6 pm Saturday night, when he would fly back to Zimbabwe. Before I could ask ‘who are you, how do you know this information?’ the caller hung up, hanged up. I was left with a dilemma, was this a wind-up, was it genuine? I decided to assume it was genuine information and quickly got together a group of other Outrage! activists to devise a plan to try and arrest him.

In the end we could only get myself and three other volunteers because people were too afraid that his bodyguards might be armed and could shoot us, or that our planned ambush of his motorcade might result in him running us down.

JH: For most people the fear would be too great – so how could you overcome that fear?

PT: I felt that there was a danger of arrest and serious injury, perhaps even an outside chance of being killed. To me it was a risk worth taking for the greater good of being able to do something that would alert the world to Mugabe’s crimes and also perhaps get him brought to justice. I knew that it was unlikely that the British government would have the guts to enforce it own laws against torture because of the huge diplomatic row that it would create, but I thought that it was worth a try. Even if they allowed him to go, my calculation was it would still get a lot of publicity which would raise public awareness about the human rights abuses inside Zimbabwe.

So we lay in wait outside his hotel. When he drove out of the car park I was by the entrance and signalled to the other three Outrage! comrades up the road that it was him in the car. The signal was me scratching the top of my head. (laughs). They allowed the car to get quite close then just ran straight out in front of it. It was an incredibly heroic act, the car could easily have just kept on going and they would have been knocked down and possibly killed. Fortunately the car did screech to a halt. I ran from behind, opened the car door - amazingly it was unlocked - and reached inside. I grabbed Mugabe by the arm and then stretched out my other hand to show I didn’t have a weapon. Even so he and his bodyguard thought it was curtains. Mugabe just shrank back into his seat, he looked like this tiny frightened boy, his jaw dropped, his eyes popped, I think he really thought this is it. Then I simply said “President Mugabe, you are under arrest on charges of torture. Torture is a crime under international law, I am now summonsing the police.” He was just completely gob smacked and paralyzed, his bodyguard next to him was useless. He too just froze, both of them just froze there.

We did then summons the police, they came, we explained what we were doing, and presented them with the evidence that he was guilty of acquiescence and acts of torture, contrary to British international law. The police just knocked him out of our hands, and proceded to very roughly drag us away. We clung onto the underside of his car, clung onto the tyres, we were grimly determined to make our point, and we kept shouting out “Arrest him, he’s a torturer,” and the police would just stomp us. The Metropolitan Police were there protecting a torturer and a mass murderer and abusing, physically abusing, people who were trying to bring him to justice in accordance with British law.

We ended up being detained for nearly seven hours in Belgravia police station, while Mugabe was given a police escort to go Christmas shopping in Harrods. An absolutely outrageous abuse of police power. In the end the Attorney General, the Foreign Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner failed to enforce the law, they let a torturer and a mass murderer walk free. I just think to myself if they had only listened and enforced the law as we had requested, Zimbabwe might have been spared many of the horrors of the last eight years. Many, many lives might have been saved, because if Mugabe had been under arrest, and taken to the Hague, and put on trial, like Slobodan Milosevic, with a regime decapitated, things would have very quickly unravelled. Zimbabwe might have soon, not long afterwards have begun a transition back to democracy and human rights.

JH: I know it wasn’t why you did it, but that incident really changed the public perception of you as well. Was there part of you that was quite uncomfortable about being praised by so many people who had been so horrible about you in the past? Suddenly you were seen as a national treasure.

PT: I was furious that people thought what I did against Mugabe was right, but thought everything I had done before it was wrong. To me all these campaigns are part of the same seamless objective which is universal human rights and the challenging of human rights abuses. About the ‘national treasure’. My immediate reaction when I, for the first time, was being described as a national treasure was “Oh, no!” national treasures end up being put in museums in a glass box. That’s not what I’m about.

JH: In terms of future campaigns, what do you see as being the next big issue on your agenda?

PT: It’s very important that some time soon we get an international human rights convention that explicitly and specifically acknowledges that lesbian and gay rights are human rights. No existing convention does that. That would be a really big breakthrough. It wouldn’t end all homophobic oppression, but it would set down a new benchmark that could give people all over the world a legal instrument that they could use to argue, to challenge homophobia.

And I’m working on a big future campaign around the corruption of the voting system. When I was little, in British history we were taught about the horrors of the rotten boroughs, of the 18th and 19th centuries. The voting system in Britain today is just as bad. For more than half a century we’ve never had a government that represents a majority of public opinion, it represents the majority of the voters, it always minority governments. Labour won only 21% of the eligible voters. At the last election only 21% of eligible voters voted Labour, but Labour ended up with 55% of the seats. That is political corruption on a monumental scale, no wonder people are disillusioned with Parliament because people have nobody to represent them, because the electoral system is rigged by the three main parties.

JH: Thanks Peter. Here’s to another forty years!

You can donate to - or volunteer to join - Peter's human rights campaigns here.

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