F4J The Inside Story

The definitive account of perhaps the most controversial campaign group of modern times: Fathers 4 Justice, the group which established the phrase “fathers’ rights” as part of the political lexicon. This searingly honest, brutally irreverent and inflammatory portrayal explores the genesis of the Fathers Revolution, the lasting legacy it has left in it’s wake, and unmasks for the first time the turbulent story behind the groups founding father, Matt O’Connor in his own words.
His demons, his divorce, his struggle to see his children and how he began the Herculean battle for equal parenting by taking on the British Government and the Family Legal System with a handful of dads, a ladder and an awful lot of lycra. Started as a vehicle for social change, F4J became the high-wire act of protest groups whether powder-bombing the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, scaling the balcony at Buckingham Palace in a Batman costume or invading the Pulpit at York Minster during a General Synod Service.
Now for the first time O’Connor tells how the stunts were planned, how national security was repeatedly breached and exposes for the first time the truth behind the alleged plot to kidnap the Prime Minister’s five year old son. This honest and compelling account humorously chronicles the highs and lows of the campaign and of O’Connor’s own personal struggle, and the lasting legacy it has left in its wake. Most importantly of all though, it is a story about the Herculean struggle of ordinary fathers who battled Solicitors, Judges, Archbishops, MP’s, Undercover Journalists, Special Branch Officers, MI5 and even the FBI in an effort to see the children they had been denied access to by the Family Courts and the British Government. A story which has resulted in the take-up of copy-cat groups throughout the First World.
FATHERS 4 JUSTICE - THE INSIDE STORY - BOOK REVIEW It's a scary thought, but the only thing standing between us and the complete melt-down of the nuclear family could be this foul-mouthed, Jack Daniels-boozing terror of the Family Courts and his rogues' gallery of bony-kneed, lycra-clad super heroes. This is the story of the most extraordinary protest movement of modern times, and it¹s remarkably well told.
It's the almost archetypal story of a man who rose from the darkest pit of despair to become a beacon for thousands of disenfranchised parents, turning grief and anger into a positive force for change. O'Connor has a gift for funny, pacy, economical writing and page-turning cliff-hangers, and can delineate a character in a handful of well-chosen words.
The book carries the reader on a breathless dash through the campaign's iconic stunts: from the Blair powder-bombing to the scaling of Buck House. Turn the page, and there are unexpected surprises such as a recipe for the perfect Martini, or how to wear your lycra without losing the family jewels. It's not all glamorous being a super-hero though, and O'Connor also guides us down into the hell of the family courts, and shows the deep, sometimes reckless despair of bereaved dads, but without dwelling long enough to become sentimental - he has a deft touch. It is in these passages that a less familiar O'Connor emerges: human and vulnerable: the profanity, we learn, is compensation for a childhood stutter.
O'Connor is a man of grand gestures and emotions, and of huge compassion, and perhaps this is his flaw: always available on his mobile to desperate dads when there is campaigning to be done. He's a deeply, though not conventionally, religious man too, with an irrepressible belief in forgiveness and redemption.
The Inside Story is very much "the story so far" and there is clearly much more still to come from F4J and its founder, and much more still to do before family law is fit for the 21st Century. The book leaves the reader with this message, you can take away a father's home, his health and his livelihood; you can take his children, but you cannot deny him his love for them. By Nick Langford