Matt O’Connor is the former marketing executive who founded Fathers 4 Justice - the self-styled ‘Suffragents’ - who have made waves in the national and international media in recent years: scaling Buckingham Palace and the Royal Courts of Justice dressed as Batman and Robin, storming the lobby of the Lord Chancellor’s Department en masse dressed as Father Christmas and flour-bombing the previous Prime Minister in the Chamber of the House of Commons all in the name of fathers’ rights. He has been variously described as “like Gordon Ramsay with Tourette’s” and as “a national folk hero” and recently announced that he wants to be your next mayor…

King’s Bench: Why did you start up Fathers 4 Justice?

Matt O’Connor: During a bitter divorce, I went through the family courts system and was surprised to find that it was entirely secret. It, in fact, seemed more akin to what you would expect in North Korea than in a progressive twenty-first century democracy. It is a highly abusive and damaging process to everyone concerned and most importantly to the children. The lack of accountability and scrutiny has created a muddy backwater in the British legal system which needs to be addressed and changed. My aim was to create awareness about this fundamentally flawed and abusive family justice system and to raise the wider problem of fatherlessness in society and its consequences.

KB: How and why did you decide to go about your campaigns such a unique way?

MO: I don’t believe in playing by anybody else’s rulebook and I think that humour is always important - it engages people. Also, if you use ridicule, satire or subversion against the State, well, the Government can’t argue with the sound of laughter.

KB: Don’t you think, at least to an extent, that your methods get in the way of your message?

MO: If people don’t know you, you don’t stand a chance at all. So to be effective it is important to understand how the media sees things. Clearly they have their own views on what they think is interesting and what makes a good story and their view of what constitutes a good story might be different from what we would want to get across. Particularly if you are a small group with limited funds, as we were, it is very difficult to get your voice heard. Our methods have meant that we always punch above our weight in terms of press coverage. You’ve just got to get on with it and hope that people understand what we are about - and I think that on the whole people do. We are probably the Marmite of protest groups; you either love us or hate us.

KB: Is Fathers 4 Justice just about flash-in-the-pan headlines or do you also campaign seriously on specific issues?

MO: We are campaigning right across the board to try and create a cultural change and it is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. We are trying to make fatherlessness unacceptable in the same way as slavery is now unacceptable (remember Wilberforce spent his entire life fighting it). Admittedly this issue is not as dramatic, but we need to make sure that people aware of the problems fatherlessness gives rise to and that it is understood that parents - both parents - are absolutely vital in the welfare and upbringing of their children. Even when the two birth parents are no longer in a relationship together, it is important to ensure that there is family cohesion after a family unit separates.

KB: With the amount of press coverage you expressly seek (and get), do you receive a corollary level of media intrusion into your own private life?

MO: Well… We have been monitored by button-hole cameras and parabolic directional microphones, my landline has been tapped, my car and those of people who work for me have been stopped through the number-plate recognition technology by police looking for superhero costumes and my ex-wife and press officer have been offered £25,000 each to dish the dirt on me. So not much! It’s all good stuff - fuck ‘em I say. I published a book last year that already contains anything they could want to say about me.

KB: You criticised the family courts for not being open, but the reason they are closed is to protect the best interests of the children. What is so wrong about that?

MO: Call me old-fashioned but I would actually like to see something called evidence in the legal world when people make statements like that. The fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever to support that argument. I made this challenge to Mark Potter who is the President of the Family Law Division and he asked me for evidence suggesting that the family justice system is damaging to children! Until 1964 the family courts were completely open. Indeed the original reason the courts were closed was to protect the interests of the parents, not the children.

Given that there is no empirical evidence and that there are open family courts all over world (in fact in some countries proceedings are filmed), this ‘child’s best interest’ argument is probably the most fraudulent claim in the history of British justice. Nobody has kept any records on the outcomes for children, so nobody knows what has happened to the children. These are absolutely life-shattering decisions and they are taken by a single person, in secret who is totally unscrutinised and unsackable and yet rules on these issues day-in, day-out. That is what is wrong.

KB: Some people have argued that your group is anti-women…

MO: That is an extremely ignorant claim for anybody to make. Fathers 4 Justice is run by a large number women and has been since its inception. Our membership also includes partners of fathers, mothers and grandmothers. This is not about men versus women. It is about establishing an old-fashioned principle called equality.

KB: Others have said that this is all just some kind of ego trip for you…

MO: If this was an ego trip I would have stuck to designing bars and hotels and the stuff I was doing beforehand. It would have infinitely more rewarding: more women, more money and more booze! I do have an ego, as most politicians do - you need one to be able to run a group like this one. But when you have been through what we have and have the battle scars to prove it, things do get cut down to size.

KB: Do you think that you have made a difference?

MO: Absolutely. We are now a household name and have gotten people talking about the issues. We have had great media exposure and have even become a part of popular culture and are regularly pastiched by the likes of Catherine Tate. In addition we have been international for while now and have operations in the United States, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. As far as the legal ramifications go, the shockwaves are still running through the legal industry. I have been to many conferences and we have certainly overturned the views of the status quo in the justice system. Our main stumbling block, however, is finding the political will to change things.

KB: What is the truth behind the alleged plot to kidnap Leo Blair?

MO: The story came about interestingly. Before you get a story published about you, you usually get a call from the publication the evening before saying something like ‘We’re going to be running this story. Would you like to comment?’ However, there was no such call from The Sun prior to their front page splash. At 10.20 I got a call from Newsnight saying that we were on the front cover of The Sun newspaper and asking for a response. There was no substance to the story at all. What happened, as far as we can establish, is that at a demonstration a few weeks earlier, just in the run-up to Christmas, there were Special Branch people swimming around with their parabolic directional microphones (as there often were). They were probably listening to a couple of people chattering away casually when someone said something like, ‘God could you imagine if we could steal that Tony Blair’s son?’ The Sun story had no names and there were no arrests - that is how tissue-thin the whole thing was.

In my opinion, there was a bit of criminal malfeasance on the part of Scotland Yard. The story certainly went to Downing Street who together with Scotland Yard must have leaked it to The Sun. The Sun would only have run a story with a picture of the Prime Minister and his son on the front page with the agreement of the Blairs, who are close friends of Rebecca Wade, the editor. The Blairs managed to keep virtually every story about their children out of the press, including some which arguably had a public interest element. This makes you wonder why this particular story was put out. I can understand why he would want to protect the privacy of his family, but what I cannot stand is the hypocrisy. He was either that desperate to get us banned or perhaps he was just getting back at us for powder-bombing him a couple of years prior. It was a stitch up and a brilliant one at that. I certainly take my hat off to the PR people who pulled it off. If I had been trying to stitch us up, that is exactly how I would have done it.

KB: If there was nothing to the story then why did you subsequently break the group up?

MO: I think we all got quite nervous after that. We were getting bombed to bits in the press at that particular time and there was quite a lot of undercover stuff going on. The level of intrusion was relentless so we felt that we needed to pack up for a while which we did until we took the National Lottery off air live on BBC1. We rebuilt the organisation and created something that would have longevity rather than just being flash-in-the-pan. We all felt that it was really important to make sure that Fathers 4 Justice prevailed in the long term.

KB: Are the rumours true that there might be a Fathers 4 Justice film in the offing?

MO: Yes. We have a film lined up with the producers of Calendar Girls. We are hoping to begin production on that this year with a view to releasing it in 2009. We also have a musical lined up. It will be a tragic comedy a kind of Monty Python meets Billy Elliot. The music is currently being worked on by the producer of Jerry Springer the Opera. So there are all sorts of weird and wonderful things going on.

KB: What does the future hold for Matt O’Connor?

MO: Today I announced that I will be standing in the London mayoral election (for the English Democrats). I am launching both in Edinburgh and London. This reflects one of our central themes which is the flow of taxes from London to Scotland. I will be campaigning on three main issues: greater local democracy, civil liberties, and strong families and communities. The deaths of 27 teenagers last year on the streets of London indicate the systemic failure of the London Assembly to deal with the social effects of what is actually driving young offending, teenage pregnancies, abortions, violent crime and gang culture. These issues are all linked in with the social disease of family breakdown and we have recently been doing a lot of community work campaigning for more power to be given at the local level to deal with these issues. We are building a really fantastic case and have a very controversial advertising campaign.

We are aiming to create a bit of a splash and get more people engaged in politics. It is really important to get people who really do care to play a positive role in our democracy and to break the paralysis that grips the political discourse in this country. We need to challenge the status quo of our three main party leaders - Mr Brown, Mr Beige and Mr Bland - and turn this Parliament of cross-dressers into a dynamic one with people of new ideas, new vision and fresh thinking,

Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story, by Matt O’Connor, is published by Orion, price £18.99