A “mini-fortress” is how the human rights activist Peter Tatchell describes his south London flat. Looking at the window bars, the steel-reinforced door and the sign warning of CCTV surveillance, it is hard to demur.
An observer could be mistaken for thinking that Tatchell, an Australian by birth but a British citizen since 1989, has taken that well-known adage “an Englishman’s home is his castle” too literally. But the precautions are necessary. Tatchell’s campaigns for gay rights, racial equality, civil liberties and democracy have attracted death threats, bullets and bombs from an unsavoury mixture of homophobes, neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists.
“The bricks now bounce off the windows,” Tatchell jokes, “although I can’t walk outside and feel totally relaxed.” Nonetheless, the man who made front pages around the world in 1999 by attempting a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe remains an indomitable campaigner. He has just returned from addressing the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, which is the kind of “tent city” protest that he proposed three decades ago.