A Christian former Liberal Democrat political candidate, whose human rights the party admitted breaching during his deselection in 2023, has said he faced what he termed a “Mao-style” interrogation during which he was pressured to agree with statements against his beliefs.
David Campanale was selected as the Liberal Democrats’ (commonly called the Lib Dems) candidate for Sutton and Cheam, London, in January 2022, but was subsequently deselected in August 2023. Campanale launched a legal challenge against his deselection, arguing it was religious discrimination.
After a lengthy legal battle, the Lib Dems admitted this week that his human rights were breached during the deselection process and have agreed to pay damages. Campanale, a former BBC journalist and Lib Dem councilor, is also pursuing legal costs.
The party said in a statement it would not be appropriate to say much at this stage as it is an ongoing legal dispute.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Crux Now, Campanale said he was interrogated by 30 activists on his Christian beliefs.
“The party in the legal case has admitted to mocking and abusing me because of my faith. There was an interrogation in front of 30 activists for two hours,” he said.
“I was taken to this armchair, and they didn’t quite say, ‘will the accused please take their seat in the bay window’, but it was almost like that. Row after row of them, like a Mao-style communist struggle session,” he added.
“People would stand up and read out denunciations and ask me to agree with them. But I wanted to follow my Christian faith. People started mocking me, calling me a liar, a deceiver,” he told Crux Now.
The case concerns the process that ultimately led to current MP Luke Taylor becoming the candidate for Sutton and Cheam. Taylor initially came third in the selection process, but after Campanale was removed, Taylor replaced him and won the seat.
Among the “protected beliefs” mentioned in Campanale’s legal claim are the belief that “marriage is exclusively the union of one man and one woman” and that “abortion is wrong.”
The Lib Dems initially argued that Campanale had not been forthcoming about his religious beliefs, and his previous involvement with the Christian People’s Alliance, a Christian group that has opposed same-sex marriage and abortion.
However, Campanale argued that all of this information was easily accessible and he had faced a vetting process.
“What matters is that after the event, the winning candidate is targeted because of their religious beliefs, which is what has happened. That is illegal and completely unacceptable. The twisting of the party rules to secure a deselection by illegal means is the sort of thing you associate with the Soviet Union, not liberal Britain,” Campanale told Crux Now.
Campanale also said that the Lib Dems have created a “hostile environment” for Christians in public life.
“Because what’s happening is when the Lib Dems act like this, a major political party, they’re creating a hostile environment for Christians in all of their life. We can see where this goes,” he said.
In a statement, the Lib Dems said “this is an ongoing legal case so it would not be appropriate to comment.”
“The Liberal Democrats are home to people of all faiths and none, including many Christians. Three Liberal Democrat MPs in neighbouring seats to Sutton and Cheam are practising Christians including party leader Ed Davey,” the statement added.
The full interview with Campanale is available below.
Crux Now: You have described your experience as “harrowing”. Why is that?
Campanale: The interrogation was so personal. I could be a future MP as long as I agreed to surrender my conscience. As a Christian I imagined all the good I could do in Parliament. The issues I could work on: poverty, the climate emergency, religious intolerance and discrimination, rights of life for the unborn, protection of life all the way up to natural death, so opposition to assisted suicide. But only as long as I piped down or agreed to lie or capitulate. I just couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to shipwreck my faith.
On November 1st 2022, there was a meeting at a primary school in the middle of Sutton in London, in front of 85-100 people,sim and more online. It was so hostile in that room. Witness statements of people, not even Christians, said you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. I was accompanied by the former Minister for Justice, Simon Hughes, a barrister, a Christian, a former MP for 32 years, and former party president. He stood in front of this group and told them you cannot deselect somebody because of their Christian views and that they go to church. They started shouting at him, “What are you doing here? Sit down.”
Every time I appealed to the party to intervene it was rejected. If I’d have been anybody else – let’s not speculate what kind of faith or what kind of sexuality – this would never have happened.
The party in the legal case has admitted to mocking and abusing me because of my faith. There was an interrogation in front of 30 activists for two hours. I was taken to this armchair, and they didn’t quite say, “will the accused please take their seat in the bay window”, but it was almost like that. Row after row of them, like a Mao-style communist struggle session.
People would stand up and read out denunciations and ask me to agree with them. But I wanted to follow my Christian faith. People started mocking me, calling me a liar, a deceiver.
I’m long in the tooth in politics but it hurt – not that I let them know.
You were accused of not properly disclosing your Christian beliefs. What are the implications of that?
It’s worrying. If during the selection process, every candidate had been asked about their religious views, I would have no problem with that. I don’t mind talking about my Christian views. I’ve met loads of Christians who are Lib Dem party members who were thrilled to be able to vote for me. What matters is that after the event, the winning candidate is targeted because of their religious beliefs, which is what has happened. That is illegal and completely unacceptable. The twisting of the party rules to secure a deselection by illegal means is the sort of thing you associate with the Soviet Union, not liberal Britain.
Every single panel and body of the party I tried to appeal to, instead of saying this has got to stop, went along with it. One panel even found that I’d been subject to illiberal harassment and intolerant statements by illiberals in the party. Even the outcome said that. Was any action taken about this finding? No.
The perpetrators should have been held to account, suspended from their membership, and if necessary, expelled. Yet I was the one that continued to have to take the punishment. As a Christian, we are called to pick up our cross and follow Christ, and in this world, Jesus said, we will have tribulation. So I’m not surprised by any of this, but Jesus didn’t call me to be a doormat.
Why do you think specifically there was such a negative reaction to your Christian beliefs? Why were they so offensive to people?
The guy who came last in the selection explained to me that his members couldn’t imagine that somebody like me, who has been a trade union leader in BBC News, representing thousands of journalists; director of one of Britain’s leading climate and development and disaster relief charities, Tearfund; somebody who’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist exposing the rape and torture of Muslim women in Xinjiang in China, could also be a Christian who holds to orthodox Christian beliefs. That don’t compute, as the saying goes.
They couldn’t work out that you could be a Christian and campaign with the whole totality of what the Bible teaches and church social teaching. I’m grateful for the gift of Catholic social thought that’s inspired me and which I lean upon. I’m one of those odd members of the Church of England who has regard for the teaching authority of the pope and has high regard for the contributions of Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope John Paul II.
But the illiberals in Sutton and in the Lib Dems nationally couldn’t work out that the very beliefs that have shaped the modern trade union movement, or the anti-slavery campaign, even the abolition of putting boys up chimneys, were Christian. The Christian worldview underpins the whole, it provides the very foundation of our liberal democracy. There is a clear Christian dimension in the English and British Constitution. It needs to be respected, protected, and celebrated, not undermined, and not for its advocates to be punished for holding mainstream Christian views.
Have you heard from any Christian Lib Dem voters about your case?
In the past few days I’ve been contacted by members who are Christians, who’ve been thrilled by the outcome of this litigation against their own party. I’ve been involved in legal exchanges for four years now and finally after the parties submitted a legal defence, and stood behind it for a year and a half together with a statement of truth to the court, now they’ve completely capitulated and admitted everything.
I’m encouraged by members of the public who’ve reached out to me saying that they would love to have been able to vote for me, which is great. I think it’s unlikely the Lib Dems will ever forgive me for what they did to me. They’re angry that I’m a Christian who respects the whole of Bible teaching in relation to social questions, including on the climate crisis. They just couldn’t plot that that means that I would also follow my conscience about the rights of the unborn and old people to be defended from euthanasia.
Sir William Gladstone, the former liberal Prime Minister, talked about the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture. He wrote a whole book called that, about how the foundation of Britain and civilization is the Bible. I’m not going to apologize for it. Let’s celebrate it, advocate for it, mobilize around that vision which is the hope of the gospel for a needy world.
Do you think it’s become more difficult to be a Christian in public life in the UK?
We have to follow the evidence. The evidence tells us that if you’re a magistrate in a court, a Christian teacher, a Christian health worker, a nurse, a doctor who’s pro-life, a member of parliament, the secular system and advocates of a secular totalitarian worldview will see you as the enemy and will try to attack you.
We have to recognize that this has a spiritual dimension. It’s what former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about when he says the diabolical is at work in politics at the moment. He refers to the demonic in public life that does not value truthfulness. That suggests that it is difficult. In my own party, Tim Farron, who was our former leader, resigned in 2017, saying that for him, he could no longer be a leader of the party and hold on to his Bible-based beliefs. He said he felt it was impossible to do that.
In a speech he made in 2017, to Theos, the think tank, he said Christians are no longer regarded as offensive – we’re regarded as dangerous. In a way, that’s true. I think that Christians who are faithful to their conscience, to their calling, guided by God’s grace and the Holy Spirit, informed by Scripture and the tradition, taught by the church, are going to be dangerous to vested interest.
We’re going to be dangerous to the owners of capital who want to exploit their workers and accumulate wealth. We’re going to be dangerous to those who exploit the most vulnerable in our society. We’re going to be dangerous to the principalities and powers that the Apostle Paul taught us are at work in the world. Our job, though, is not to seek wealthy success, but to seek to be faithful in the gifts that God has entrusted to us. And we apply them in a humble way, with an open hand, as a gift in return back to the world that God has made and for which Christ died.
What advice would you give to young Christians who wish to become politicians?
I would say have all the wisdom that you can obtain. Study scripture, live in it. Take counsel from those who are godly men and women in your life. Guard your heart because after it comes the things of life. Run from temptation. Flee to Christ and be held in His arms. Rely upon Him as the advocate before the Father on your behalf. Continue to resist the devil because he’ll flee.
The key thing is always to trust. The Apostle Paul in the book of Romans warns that we should never do a little evil that some good may follow. Don’t harden your heart, don’t compromise in your conscience. Stick to it, don’t second-guess God, and trust that His purpose is good for you and the world in which He’s put you in. So if that means having to go down for the sake of the faith, we have to go down, because God promises that even when little mustard seeds fall, from out of those can grow great things.
Are you expecting the Lib Dems to formally apologise to you?
It’d be nice if they apologise to the members who were lied to in Sutton and Cheam, the members who voted for me, who were deceived. That’s where the apology should go, and there should be an apology too to Christians in public life. Because what’s happening is when the Lib Dems act like this, a major political party, they’re creating a hostile environment for Christians in all of their life. We can see where this goes.
When the government and the police have allowed a hostile environment to be created in Britain for the Jewish community, it’s turned into acts of religiously aggravated violence and hate. Jews are being murdered, synagogues are being attacked, the community facilities are being firebombed, synagogues are being assaulted, and men and women are being stabbed on the streets of Britain because of the intolerance of the so-called liberal society.
I want to put what I’ve been through in that perspective. The Jews have suffered religiously, have suffered violence. I’ve suffered discrimination. God forbid that anyone, regardless of their religion, should go through what I’ve been through and certainly not what the Jews of our nation are experiencing at the moment. I’m just glad to have got through my experience and that is enough. I wait now in prayer as to what I should be doing next in public life.
Was there much personal strain throughout this period?
My health has been impacted. I’ve been called by the GP for multiple appointments because of blood pressure and other things, due to the stress. I’ve lost a lot of sleep. I’ve lost my job. I got sacked because the company I was working for said this deflection is a distraction to my business, and I couldn’t argue with that because it was true. And every step along the way, it’s been hurtful and painful, but it’s been a privilege to suffer for Christ.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
