Police complaint over Gately article

Police have received a complaint about an article written by newspaper columnist Jan Moir about the death of singer Stephen Gately, Scotland Yard said today.

The article, published in yesterday’s Daily Mail, has also prompted more than 1,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

A Met police spokesman said: “We have received a complaint from a member of the public.”

Moir yesterday defended the opinion piece which ignited a huge debate on networking sites such as Twitter.

She issued a response in which she branded suggestions of homophobia as “mischievous” and claimed the backlash was a “heavily orchestrated internet campaign”.

In the column about the gay singer’s death, she wrote: “Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again. Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.”

And she signed off: “For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.”

Stephen Fry was among those using his Twitter feed to mobilise opinion about the article.

At one stage he wrote: “The Press Complaints Commission website is down. Sheer volume of traffic. That says something about the strength of feeling I think.”

A spokesman for the PCC said of the 1,000 complaints received, many were relating to questions of accuracy, intrusion and discrimination.

He said the PCC had already established links with Gately’s family in case they had wanted to express an opinion about the coverage of his death.

Moir questioned how many of those who had complained had read her column.

She said: “Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article, was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

“However, the point of my column – which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read – was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at any time of anything.

“However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

“The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned. On this subject, one very important point.

“When I wrote that ’he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine’, I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality.

“In writing that ’it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’, I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

“In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

The newspaper said it had withdrawn online adverts that appeared alongside her article, “of its own volition” after advertisers’ telephone numbers were published “by the heavily orchestrated campaign” attacking the column.