Although he led one of Britain’s largest police forces for 15 years, it is as “God’s copper” that Sir James Anderton, who has died aged 89, will be best remembered. His claims that he had divine guidance in his policing duties and his inflammatory remarks about gay people ensured that he became, for a while, the most controversial police officer in Britain.
At the height of the Aids crisis in the 1980s, Anderton, then chief constable of Greater Manchester, outraged many by describing gay people as “swirling around in a cesspit of their own making” and suggesting that “sodomy in males ought to be against the law”. He advocated castration for rapists and urged a return to corporal punishment so that offenders could be thrashed until “they repent of their sins”.
