ONE September afternoon, a painter and decorator from Cheltenham in an ill-fitting nylon Batman suit climbed on to the façade of Buckingham Palace, demanding that the courts enforce his rights to see two children he had not seen for five years. Nine months later, Jason Hatch won regular access to the children. Today he believes that the stunt, which prompted a royal security review and established Fathers 4 Justice as one of the oddest protest movements of modern times, paid off.

“For 4½ years I had been getting nowhere at all. When I climbed Buckingham Palace judges were starting to come round to us,” he said. “They are beginning to understand we have feelings too and love the children as much as the mothers do.”

Fathers 4 Justice, which disbanded this week after extremist members reportedly plotted to kidnap Tony Blair’s five-year-old son, were amateurish, angry and extremely annoying. But when historians look back on British society at the start of the third millennium they will accord a small but important chapter to the men in tights: Spiderman climbed Tower Bridge causing gridlock below, Santa Claus closed the Severn crossing, and two men hurled a powder-filled condom at Mr Blair in the Commons.

The caped crusaders succeeded in turning the issue of fathers’ rights from a lost cause into the mother of all battles. Whether this has ultimately benefited divorced and separated fathers is another matter.

Fathers 4 Justice followed the trajectory of many radical, direct-action protest groups. Not for nothing did they call themselves the Suffragents. The cause was not comparable, but like the suffrage campaigners of a century ago, F 4 J used modern shock tactics, provoked widespread public disapproval and suffered bitter internal divisions while drawing attention to genuine injustice.

Superman, Batman and the others were not superheroes. Many were embroiled in ugly custody battles; some of F 4 J’s antics were more aggressive than amusing. Some members had unsavoury pasts and a few had criminal records. Yet to some extent, F 4 J caught the spirit of the times: they reflected the Zeitgeist, and they changed it.

There is widespread recognition that F 4 J has put fatherhood firmly at the top of the media, legislative and political agenda, but it is also clear that they did not achieve the legal reforms they wanted.

The group was founded three years ago and clambered on to the battlements of public awareness at precisely the moment that modern fatherhood was emerging as a big cultural concern. Mr Blair had become the first new dad in Downing Street since Lord John Russell in the 1850s. Not to be outdone, Gordon Brown will raise the stakes by producing a second bairn in office. David Cameron will shortly become a father for the third time.

Then there was the spectacle of David Blunkett, resigning not over an adulterous affair but over his right to care for the child it had produced. This was not merely a population blip with politicians, like other professionals, having children later. Something had shifted. Fathers were already becoming increasingly involved with their children’s lives and demanding that they be listened to, in what will come to be seen as one of the biggest transformations in contemporary society.

Politicians were becoming fathers at an unprecedented rate, but the issue of fatherhood itself lacked a political voice. Into this vacuum stepped F 4 J, ready to take up the cause on the public stage by pulling a series of attention-grabbing stunts, ranging from the merely irritating to the reckless. In October 2003, Dave Chick (who was not a member of F 4 J, but was supported by the group) clambered up a crane next to Tower Bridge while dressed as Spiderman to highlight his battle to get court orders enforced granting him access to his daughter. He spent six days 145ft up the crane and was accused of costing the taxpayer £5 million in snarled traffic and policing. In December 2004 contact with his daughter was resumed after 21 months.

“It has taken me risking my life and limb to get something done,” he said.

But as one might expect of an issue so fraught with emotion and conflict, the F 4 J story offers few simple happy endings. Ron Davis was one of two fathers who pelted the Prime Minister with purple flour bombs during Prime Minister’s Questions in May 2004, sparking a national security outcry. Mr Davis, from Worthing, West Sussex, was charged with a public order offence and fined. He has still not seen his daughter since 1998 and has had two brief meetings with his son in the past five years.

“Fathers 4 Justice may not have achieved all it wanted to but there aren’t many people in the country now who don’t know or haven’t heard of Fathers 4 Justice or what we campaign about,” he said.

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