Former UKIP deputy leader: Art exhibition is a ‘death threat’ against me
Former UKIP deputy leader Lord Monckton, who previously claimed gay people sleep with “as many as 20,000” people, has said an art exhibition featuring a tombstone with his name on it is “a death threat”.
The installation by third year BA fine art student Ian Wolter at Anglia Ruskin University names Viscount Monckton of Brenchley among other prominent climate change sceptics, alongside the words “Lest We Forget Those Who Denied.”
Others featured include journalist James Delingpole, former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson and Lord Lawson, and the installation is constantly under a stream of engine oil.
Lord Monckton, who last year suggested HIV was the “wages” of gay promiscuity, expressed his dissatisfaction on the right-wing WorldNetDaily website, saying they amounted to “death threats”.
Describing the university as a “jumped-up polytechnic”, he said he had visited the exhibition “to gather evidence for the courts”.
He continued: “To put one’s name on a tombstone while one is still alive is to make a death threat, the nastiest and most repellent form of hate speech. The implication was that, if we were not already dead, the ‘artist’ and the ‘university’ that promoted his ‘work’ would very soon see to it that we were.”
Going on, he compared the exhibition to Naziism, writing: “A death threat is a death threat. It is no laughing matter… It is plain that the long, relentless campaign of intimidation by the Nazis of their opponents, with name-calling and death threats very similar to that perpetrated by the ‘university’, was an essential part of the process,” he continued.
As well as claiming the exhibition was a threat against him, Lord Monckton also said he is not a climate change “denier”, saying: “It mattered not to the vice-chancellor, nor to the ‘artist’, that I do not deny the existence of climate change… I do not even deny that man may have some as yet unquantified but probably insignificant and even net-beneficial influence on the climate,” he said.
Speaking to the Independent, Wolter said the reaction by Lord Monckton was “nonsense”.
“I don’t think any reasonable person would think of my plywood sculpture as a death threat,” he said, adding: “His extreme reaction is a great example of the power of political art.”
Writing for right-wing site WorldNetDaily last November Lord Monckton said: “Official survey after official survey had shown that homosexuals had an average of 500-1,000 partners in their sexually active lifetime, and that some had as many as 20,000. One wonders how they found time for anything else.
He left the party last December, after reported ‘in-fighting’.
As the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, the politician has a hereditary peerage – and was engaged in a long-running dispute over the House of Lords Act 1999, that he claims deprived him of a seat in the Lords.
He stood unsuccessfully in a number of by-elections for the House, and claims to be “a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote” – but the Clerk of the Parliaments insists he is not and never has been in the House of Lords.
