chartwell

Irish Chronicle
11th May 2008

England’s Irish Hero?

The founder of controversial pressure group Fathers 4 Justice has upset the Scottish nation with his recent London Mayoral campaign before quitting just days before the election. So what’s next for this serial troublemaker?

“The only bad publicity is an obituary,” says Matt O’Connor quoting Irish playwright Brenda Behan as he reclines back in his red leather swivel chair and takes a swig from his cup of tea in his swanky loft apartment in the old English capital of Winchester
The bad publicity he is referring to is an attempted ‘hatchet’ job on his character in an English national newspaper but O’Connor doesn’t care. He has been long past caring about what the papers might think about his hi-jinks.
He has just polled a combined total of nearly 85,000 first and second choice votes in last weeks London Mayoral Elections where he was standing for an obscure English nationalist party and drumming up support for his personal credo about the evils of family breakdown and teen violence afflicting England’s capital city.
As ever though with O’Connor, a father of three boys whose father hailed from County Kerry, his campaign was punctuated with acts of high drama; upsetting the Scottish nation with his ‘Jock’s away’ posters and a much lauded passion-fuelled election broadcast that owed as much to the style and rhetoric of Barack Obama as it did to this half-Irish firebrand. It all ended in controversy with his resignation from the campaign that saw him spend the last 10 days of the election bizarrely campaigning against himself.
It has been 12-months since I last spoke to the now 41 year-old marketing and public relations mastermind behind the notorious international campaign group Fathers 4 Justice and yet again he is neck deep in controversy. Back then he had just published his first book ‘Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story’ and F4J was a household name in the United Kingdom.
I ask him how he managed to poll so many votes given he announced his resignation live on BBC radio and then persuaded most of his constituency to vote for a candidate standing for another party, the Christian Choice.
“Politics is about personality and personality is about being a brand,” He tells me, “Despite standing down I guess people were voting for me and not the party. It just shows what you could do with a credible campaign. I didn’t want to resign from the election but I had made it clear from day one to the party I was standing for, that my acceptance was conditional on there being a realistic marketing budget in place and that I would be allowed to run my own campaign.”
In the end he says the party was a shambles, promised funds evaporated, a telesales fund-raising campaign never materialised, the party he says was probably insolvent having borrowed tens of thousands of pounds and his plans for St George’s Day were sidelined. Worst still he tells me that he discovered early on that the ‘party’ didn’t even exist in London and consisted of just a handful of individuals who spent most of the time arguing. In time honoured O’Connor style, he stuck to his word and told them ‘to stick it.’
The party thought O’Connor wouldn’t go at such a late stage but then they wouldn’t be the first people to underestimate this forthright agent provocateur. In his book he details how he warned the Ministry of Justice how he was going to start the biggest campaign against the family courts they had ever seen. They didn’t take him seriously. Now, much of O’Connor’s activity is carefully monitored by the authorities.
“I’m a man of my word,” he tells me, “Under estimate me at your peril.” He cautions before savaging his former party.
“They are probably the best argument for moving to Scotland I have heard. Underneath the nationalism lies an insidious and virulent brand of ‘little Englander’ mentality festering away like a rancid boil on St George’s ****.”
“In the six-years of their existence, nobody had ever heard of them and now the only real PR they achieved apart from the work I generated, was for attacking their own mayoral candidate just days before an election. These guys made Fathers 4 Justice look like the SAS (the UK’s Special Air Services) and I never thought I’d ever, ever say that.”
It’s strong stuff, but is this impassioned critique fair? They did after all put up the money for him to stand. All he needed to do was to hang in for a few more days and any internal conflict could have been avoided, but O’Connor is adamant.
“Look, don’t take my word for it. To lose one mayoral candidate could be seen as unfortunate, but to lose two?” It appears that before O’Connor’s last minute arrival, a well-known journalist had stood down as mayoral candidate for the party.
From all accounts it appears he had been promised a £600,000 marketing budget which, like O’Connor’s, failed to materialise. The former candidate stood down because he knew that running for Mayor without a substantial funding would be ‘like ******* in the wind’.
O’Connor won’t be drawn on the nature of this discussion other than he confirms the two have spoken, shared notes and both arrived at the same conclusion.
“What’s laughable about this,” he says, “Is that when he stood down they laid the blame on his ‘personal financial difficulty’ and when I stood down they tried the same trick with a different smear in an attempt to smokescreen the fact these people couldn’t run a train set let alone a ******* party.”
So what were the allegations they were making against him and had he been open with them? O’Connor says they knew exactly what they were getting.
“They say they hadn’t read my book or anything about me. Well, more fool them. I had a closet stuffed with more skeletons than Imelda Marcos had shoes, but they had all been exorcised. I’m bulletproof. When they were trying to run this line in pathetic smears I told the papers, ‘Oh yeah, and don’t forget to mention I’m a gay Johnny Vegas and I’ve just joined the Church of ******* Scientology.”
“I gave my heart and soul to trying to make an impact and to some extent I did that despite the shoestring budget. The winning candidate Boris Johnson (David Cameron’s Conservative Party) had more money than God and we had just enough loose change for a McDonald’s drive through.”
“They paid me back with lip service and then effectively clamped my mouth shut and bundled me into a straightjacket - I wasn’t only fighting a campaign, I was fighting against the very people who said they were there to support me - it was position impossible.”
O’Connor portrays a party that is beset by conflict and internal problems without clear leadership or the substantial infrastructure necessary to make any kind of political headway which he says explains their lack of progress in the last six years.
It is clear he felt stifled and oppressed by their modus operandi and he says that without the marketing budget he needed, they should have cut him loose and let him do what he does best which is creating controversy.
“All they kept saying to me,” he blasts “was ‘no this, no that and no thank you,’ and they didn’t listen to one piece of advice I gave them despite my credentials. I thought what a bunch of ******* muppets, I don’t want to hear ‘no, no, no’ - I want to hear how we can overcome insurmountable odds. I don’t want to look at Everest, I want to climb it.”
“These people were playing at politics and they had ventured out into the deep end of the political pool without their arm bands and they were sinking fast.”
O’Connor clearly isn’t interested in playing games. He takes his politics and campaigning seriously and he brushes off an apparent campaign of harassment against him and his family after his departure from the party as ‘displaying exactly why these people are not fit for purpose or office.’
Despite offering to help them manage the situation following his resignation, he was labelled a ‘traitor’, his Irish surname became a target of abuse from senior party leaders and his fiancée started receiving anonymous calls from a woman saying she was six-months pregnant with O’Connor’s baby.
He finds this the most amusing of all the flack dumped at his door given his F4J mantra about him previously living a life as a man of earthly pleasures who now specialises in personal suffering. He remains unfazed, but it’s clear from his barbed comments that O’Connor intends to bury his enemies face down and points to the fact that he’ll have hundreds of interviews in the future in which to do so.
“They could have dealt with this professionally, but instead they behaved like a jilted girlfriend and in doing so revealed a hidden underbelly of sinister, racist, right-wing politics. Underneath the ‘jam and Jerusalem’ these guys are the same as the BNP (a far-right, racist political party in the UK).”
“There are unquestionably decent people there, but the party - if that’s what you call it - is nothing less than a shambollocks - a laughing stock.”
After his resignation he tells me he was swamped with moral and financial support from Londoners wanting to join any new political party he set up.
“The response was both astonishing and overwhelming. I struck a nerve with people who understood why I stood down but wanted me to carry on spreading my own political gospel. I have had major offers of financial support to fund any future political initiative and we also saw a dramatic uplift in Fathers 4 Justice memberships during the campaign. We just need to find away of channelling this energy because England as an issue is going from slow burn to potential wildfire. We need to headhunt the talent, then fire up the engine.”
So where does Matt O’Connor go from here? He says that he is focused on ‘Fathers 4 Justice Day’ in June and there is a new book coming out later this month which he describes as the first ‘bible’ for fathers entering the family justice system. He also has advanced plans for a campaign for England which majors on English traits rather than often perceived right-wing icons and there are his plans for a political party.
“You have to be pragmatic about politics,” O’Connor cautions as I begin to probe him about his political ambitions, “You need both the machine and the money. You can’t do it without these two ingredients.” He goes on to praise Nadine, his fiancée and mother to his two-and-a-half year old boy Archie, and says she could also move into politics at any time.
“Very talented, very feisty and very intelligent. They should watch out in Hampshire.” he tells me proudly.
But he is also enthusing about yet another project, this time in the Ice Cream business. O’Connor has just started a collaboration with a long-term client to develop new and exciting ice cream brands.
“It’s the best job in the world,” he tells me. “I was working on a plan to launch my own ice cream brand and I mentioned this to a great client of mine and he said come and work with me. It wasn’t in the masterplan, but I thought this guy is the Don Corleone of ice cream so maybe I should accept.”
O’Connor is now neck deep in designs and ideas for new brands and yet again seems to relish another challenge. This time to give the corporate leviathans of the food industry ‘a good kicking’.
“You know, ice cream should be the sexiest, funkiest food on God’s earth. It’s so good it should be illegal and apart from alcohol is the world’s greatest socialising agent so why has it become so dull and formulaic? It’s ice cream by numbers out there and I want to turn it into the new rock and roll.”
His plans for his ‘own baby’ involve giving a percentage of profits back to a kids charity, thereby squaring the circle between his campaigning and his professional work.
So does he have any regrets about the last few months?
“None. I learnt a lot about politics, about myself and about other people. The experience has been a reaffirmation that whatever I do I must remain true to myself and my values. The learning curve was steep but what did surprise me was the realisation that British politics is as ****** at the bottom as it is at the top.”
So does he have any answers? Does O’Connor think he can change the face of politics or is it in his words an ‘impossible mission’.
“There is no such thing. But it is a question of balance, commitment and sacrifice. Just reading our bible on family law reminded me of the biblical scale of that issue, let alone delving into civil liberties and the prickly matter of the union of the United Kingdom.”
He gazes out of the window and begins to bristle with frustration at the injustice he sees around him.
“See people in the media don’t understand my brand of politics,” he complains, “It’s outside the box, its not left or right or black or white, but it has liberty, justice and equality at it’s very core. England needs to re-establish its identity and re-discover the liberties that our country was built on and it can’t do that with the immature, bigoted and unprofessional proliferation of groups out there that proclaim to represent our country.”
But wasn’t it odd I ask him, that a half-Irish campaigner was taking on such an issue? “You are joking?” he counters, “Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Governor of California and he’s half-Austrian. Many of the greatest Englishman that ever lived weren’t even English. We are a mongrel race and just about every ****** has trampled through our fields from the Danes and the French through to the Italians.”
Englishness he tells me is a paradox, an intangible that can’t be easily defined except through the national character and collective history. It’s clear that he has an expert grasp of the issues and once he explains his position, it all makes perfect sense.
“What is vitally important is that people have a right to self-determination. It happened in Ireland and now it needs to happen in Scotland and England. The political aristocracy should yield to the demands of the people and let them have their say.”
For all his bravado, O’Connor weaves a certain charm and passion beneath the designer exterior. He lists his real ‘heroes’ as the people who have helped him through dark periods in his life and is he says, eternally grateful to them. And there in lies his problem. He doesn’t fit any box apart he says, from the one he’ll be buried in.
“I can’t switch off. My mind is running 24/7. I have more imagination than hours on this mortal coil. To some extent it’s an affliction, but I know what I have to do.”
It’s all part of ‘God’s great joke’ he says. “Taking a fundamentally irresponsible man and making him responsible for some pretty hefty issues. I make mistakes, I **** up and I’m always neck deep in ****, but somehow I always come through.”
The interview concludes as he rushed off to complete plans for the launch of a new ice cream later this year. His mind restlessly flits from subject to subject but that is the beast that is Matt O’Connor.
A man overrun with ideas and conviction who recognises that the odds are stacked against him. “I like it that way,” He says smiling, “I like that and the word ‘no’.”

ENDS