Inquest into a Campaign by Mercia McMahon

Inquest into a Campaign is a work of creative non-fiction. The creative framing is a coroner’s presentation of internet-based research to an imaginary inquest into the international press regulation campaign fought in Lucy Meadows’ name.

Meadows had taken her own life on 19 March 2013 and became the centre of an international campaign in the week running up to her funeral. She had the misfortune to die just as the British parliament was debating the press regulation recommendations of the Leveson Report. A hasty connection was made between her death and her press harassment in December 2012 and a campaign was launched without waiting for an inquest or even time for the family to grieve.

That harassment began in the local media after it was announced by St Mary Magdalen’s School that from January 2013 she would no longer teach as a man. The news went national via the Daily Mail, an often reviled newspaper, but what sealed her media fate was a comment piece by the newspaper's resident controversialist, Richard Littlejohn.

Two days after her death the campaign kicked in on social media and two petitions between them collected 250,000 signatures calling for the Daily Mail to kick Littlejohn out of his job. Then one week after it began the campaign stopped and never resumed in earnest, but nor did it ever completely fade away. What these campaigners had not taken pause to realise was that Meadows had won a press complaint against the Littlejohn article and had it taken down from the Daily Mail website. Even after that was revealed at the May 2013 inquest campaigners chose to ignore the embarrassing fact that Meadows was an example of how the discredited regulator, the Press Complaints Commission, could succeed on behalf of transsexual complainants.

This book salutes Meadows as a victor against press intrusion and criticises the ongoing campaigning that wants to preserve her status as a victim of the press. The book also calls for a recognition that some people, like Meadows, hold a more affirming view of suicide than is generally admitted to in Britain’s Christian-dominated culture.

Twelve months from the inquest into her death this book is published to bring you the real story of Lucy Meadows and to critique the well-meaning but ill-judged campaign that presumed that a death chosen by a previous victim of press harassment must both be a terrible death and linked to that harassment. They were wrong on both counts as the inquest had revealed the truth about her death. The continued refusal to acknowledge the result of that inquest is the reason for this inquest into the campaign that remains in denial.

With the exception of the character and words of The Coroner, everything in this book is non-fiction. It includes references to the author, Mercia McMahon, who was involved in the campaign against this campaign from its outset. All of the non-fiction details about the campaign deal with facts that are or were available on the internet, or reasonable conjectures from that evidence.

To assist readers the book includes a detailed timeline of events and resource pages on the events, organisations, and people that lie behind the campaign. It is the nature of non-fiction books that some readers will only want to look at one section and to assist that the relevant portions of the timeline and resources will be appended to each chapter.