I’d stay away from London SW1 for a bit if I were you. Apparently the members of the pressure group Fathers4Justice have been told that they may be shot if they are seen protesting in the Westminster area, following the discovery of a plot to abduct the prime minister’s son Leo. It’s presumably the Metropolitan police who’ll be doing the shooting, so nobody’s safe.

Even an octogenarian spinster taking her dog for a walk down Whitehall might end up with a head full of lead followed, after a day or two’s prevaricating, by a brief statement of partial regret from the Met’s commissioner Sir Ian Blair. Frankly, I’d feel marginally safer if the security detail were to be handed over to the RNIB.

It wasn’t quite a “plot” the police discovered. The notion of kidnapping little Leo had apparently only got as far as the “chattering” stage. In other words nothing at all had actually been planned. It was just people talking. Where they were talking, and whether or not they slurred their words while doing so amid background noise of “Make mine a double, Bob — and can I have some of those worcester sauce crisps?” has not yet been revealed.

This, too, is a worry. I’ve spent quite a few evenings down the pub idly debating with similarly inebriated friends which members of the political establishment I would most like to perpetrate acts of criminal wickedness against. I’d better watch it unless I want to see a headline in The Sun the next day: “Madman’s plot to cut off Mandelson’s toes”.

As it happens, the boss of Fathers4Justice, Matt O’Connor, has announced that as a result of this Leo Blair business his group intends to throw in the towel. Which is what you or I would do if we were warned we might be shot. As a warning to potential miscreants it is the sort of ultimatum you might more reasonably expect from the local police in Haiti.

Matt O’Connor, though, has had enough. He worries that his pressure group might be “hijacked” by extremists and smells something a little fishy. Nor has he had much luck persuading the law courts and the chattering classes that it would be a good idea to observe the strictures of the 1989 Children Act, that children deserve access to their fathers just as fathers deserve access (equal access in my opinion) to their children.

There have been many high profile stunts — the same fatuous stunts that O’Connor might have used when he worked for Greenpeace. But Fathers4Justice activists are still regarded as attention-seeking nutters, while Greenpeace are brave and doughty underdogs.

Similarly, we all agree that it is a national scandal that errant fathers owe the Child Support Agency and their former wives billions of pounds in maintenance. Parliamentary questions are asked, government initiatives to redress the situation are announced and acres of newsprint are devoted to the irresponsibility of those (usually) impecunious dads.

But it is somehow far less of a scandal that about half of all contact orders — designed to ensure that the children of separated parents can still see their fathers every couple of weeks or so — are reneged upon. There is no criticism of the toothless courts or the blasé government: nobody turns a hair. Except for Fathers4Justice.

O’Connor’s problem was that, unlike Greenpeace, Fathers4Justice was never seen as a “progressive” pressure group; it is not seen as an organisation fighting for the underdog. Yet it’s hard to think of any sector of society more discriminated against than fathers.

That most inept outpost of the legal system, the family courts, are possessed of an institutional bias against fathers, both in the issue of custody and the awarding of maintenance. Quite the most explicit sexual discrimination occurs in these courts every day of the week. Polite opinion does not mind because it is taken as an article of faith that society, and the legal system in particular, is weighted against women.

So when a divorced woman takes the stand in a family court and suggests that her children might be rendered “anxious or depressed” by contact with their father, the claim is taken at face value and filial access is denied. There are very few countries in the world in which the divorced man possesses fewer rights over his own children. And fewer rights over the money he has earned, too.

Matt O’Connor is reported to have said that he does not care if he never hears about Fathers4Justice again and, having originally merely suspended the group’s activities, has now closed it down altogether. O’Connor also said, of the inquiries into the alleged plot to abduct Leo Blair: “If the police have enough information they should not only release the names of those involved but prosecute them.”

This seems to me a reasonable enough request and one hopes that the police will fill us all in on a few more details, otherwise we might smell a rat. Most of what Fathers4Justice pronounced seemed reasonable once you got beyond the abseiling exhibitionists dressed as Superman. But we never really took them to our hearts, or gave their lamentations much of a thought. Our mistake, I suspect.

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