Lord Bethell (Image: Humphrey Nemar)
When James Bethell was just nine, his mother drowned in the bath. A long-term alcoholic and drug-user, weakened by post-natal depression, she was living alone, divorced from her husband and alienated from her two young boys. To this day, he isn’t sure whether the tragedy was suicide or an accident.
“The trauma I had when I was a child lives with me every day of my life,” says this Conservative politician, now Lord Bethell, 55, and a hereditary peer in the House of Lords. “I think about my mother, and the gap I had in my life, every day.”
Reflecting on that dark period of his youth, Bethell says it was his mother’s constant deceit that scarred him most deeply.
“Like many addicts, my mother was a big liar,” he tells the Daily Express. “She lied about her drinking, she lied about her drugs, and she lied about her money. That deceit was actually the thing that created some of the longest-lasting damage.”
Failing to hold down a job, his mother was constantly broke. Bethell says she drank so much she was eventually banned from seeing him or his younger brother Will on her own.
A court order meant their nanny always had to be present. Thanks to what he calls “industrial quantities of therapy”, Bethell is now happily married with four children and a successful career, but he is aware the psychological anguish of childhood might easily have damaged him beyond repair.
“I landed on my feet and, in certain ways, that trauma made me stronger,” says this peer who inherited his title when his father died 16 years ago. “But it’s a close-run thing I’m not living in a homeless centre with alcohol and drug addictions like my mother. It could have easily nudged me into a completely different outcome.”
The death of his mother, Cecilia Honeyman, he says, has encouraged him to be more protective over society, especially when it comes to online safety for children.
He is seeking an amendment to the Government’s new Online Safety Bill, currently being debated in the House of Lords, pressing for stricter access to online pornography. “A lot of the porn being watched is horrible and violent,” he warns. “It’s not like Joy of Sex. It’s horrific scenes of borderline rape. It’s having a huge impact on our kids.
“Childhood is very, very fragile and we are mad if we load our children, with their partly formed minds, with these kinds of images and experiences. It will have profound long-term effects on their lives.”
James with his mother Cecilia (Image: )
Bethell himself has four children, two boys and two girls, between the ages of eight and 16, with his wife, Melissa.
In a speech to the House of Lords earlier this month, he revealed his concerns that online pornography escapes the rules governing other age-restricted activities.
“If a child goes to the Windmill Club, the most famous strip club in Soho, the bouncers will rightly turn them away, no ifs, no buts: no entry, full stop,” he told peers.
“If a child tries to buy a knife on Amazon or to place a bet on Bet365.com, it will be the same story: you need proof of age. But every day, millions of children in this country watch pornography in their homes, at schools, on the bus, on devices of all kinds, without any hindrance at all.”
James with his father (Image: )
Studies into this area make for grim reading. According to the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, children as young as nine are being exposed to violent pornography online.
“Depictions of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression, and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted against teenage girls,” she wrote in the Daily Express in January.
Nearly half of the young people she surveyed for her 2022 report assumed that, “Girls expect or enjoy sex which involves physical aggression”.
Bethell says the age-verification technology now available for websites is much more effective than it used to be. But he’s not naive. He recognises there will be under-age children so tech-savvy that they are able to circumvent restrictions. Or parents who do not enforce them.
At the very least he wants to create a “culture change” whereby kids know it’s wrong to view this kind of material.
“At the moment what we’re essentially saying to our kids is it’s fine for you to sit on the back of the school bus watching horrible pornography,” he says.
It angers him that big tech companies refuse to take responsibility, and he knows nothing will change until the regulators start enforcing hefty fines. “My experience as a minister is that nothing changes until the first enforcement notice arrives.”
The Government bill being debated could grant Ofcom the power to impose fines of up to £18million, or 10 percent of worldwide revenue for breaches. In severe cases, the senior employees of offending websites might receive jail terms.
Despite his obvious passion for this cause, Bethell comes across as calm and measured in his campaigning – all the more surprising given his turbulent upbringing.
His parents divorced when he was just 4-years-old, and Bethell and his brother lived with their father Nicholas.
This was the 1970s, and he remembers being the only child at school whose parents were divorced. As a youngster he tried desperately hard to have a working relationship with his mother but her behaviour placed a barrier between them.
“Sometimes she didn’t turn up to our appointments and it would be explained later she had some illness,” he remembers. “But of course I knew it was her drinking.”
He recalls visiting her in hospital after a particularly disturbing drink and drugs episode. He now realises her death, in 1977, has defined his entire personality and still affects him to this day.
“Where the addiction caused a real problem was in breaking down the trust between us,” he says. “That’s what I’m really sad about – not having a mother I could trust. Long term, that has led to me really struggling to trust. I married quite late, because I found trust difficult. I’m 55 years old and I have four children and I still have trust problems from things that happened to me when I was 8-years-old.”
The scourge of online porn by Lord Bethell
Universally misogynistic, mostly violent and often paedophile, there is nothing raucous or entertaining about modern pornography. Much of it includes videos of men hitting women, throttling their necks and subjecting them to serious sexual assault. Porn sites hook users with the soft stuff.
Like with other attention grabbing online content, the algorithms do their trick of taking users down increasingly extreme material to reward the brain with a dopamine kick. It’s a short step to sado-masochism, incest and kiddie porn. We are now reaping the results of a disastrous 30-year experiment of letting schoolkids freely watch this muck in schoolyards, playgrounds and bedrooms up and down the country.
The Children’s Commissioner says most children have watched violent porn, with horrible effects on their relationships and, increasingly, sexual behaviours that lead to jail. That’s why we need tough age verification measures to keep kids off porn sites, and porn out of public sites such as Twitter. I hope the Government is listening and doesn’t fudge it like it did last time.
James Nicholas Bethell, the 5th Baron Bethell, is a Conservative hereditary peer.
Equally troubling, Bethell says, were his feelings when his mother finally died.
“Of course, I would have loved to have had her back,” he explains, struggling to find the right words. “But [her death] didn’t come as a huge surprise.
“There was a bit of me that was kind of relieved for her because her life was so painful and she was suffering so much. She loved us so much and wanted the best for us but was so destroyed by her illness.”
After school at Harrow and the University of Edinburgh, Bethell worked as a journalist, even dabbling in politics at the European Commission and the US Senate. Then, in the early 1990s, he joined the south London start-up company behind the famous nightclub Ministry of Sound.
“It was a very informal setting. It was a start-up before start-ups were invented,” he remembers of this venture that eventually became one of the best-known nightclubs in the UK, and spawned a vast entertainment business.
“We were innovating all the time and there was a huge premium on doing new things, beating the market, sticking it to the man. It was a much more competitive, unorthodox, rule-breaking environment where your creativity and energy were rewarded in a big way. It was really exciting.” Bethell describes that period as a bit like “running away to the circus”. In many ways, he says, it saved him from the childhood trauma that still haunted him.
“We were in the party business and everyone had a great time. But in my heart I wasn’t particularly happy,” he admits.
“I didn’t sleep well, I had poor relationships and I was still recovering from my childhood. So I made a commitment to try to straighten myself out, do therapy and get serious about my life.”
Bethell was with Ministry of Sound for ten years, eventually becoming one of its managing directors. Then, in his middle age, he returned to politics.
In 2005, he ran unsuccessfully as MP for south London constituency Tooting, beaten by the future Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. In 2018 he entered the House of Lords. During the Covid pandemic, he worked for the Department of Health.
Now that he’s a parent himself, he worries about his own children’s access to online pornography.
And like so many other parents, he struggles to ensure they can’t view harmful material. That’s why he so zealously wants age-verification software introduced across all online pornography.
“We can’t protect everyone from everything,” he admits. “And we have to expect children to be resilient.”
But free access for all to violent online pornography, he insists, “is a step too far”.
“We are playing with fire with this stuff. We are putting our kids through the experience of watching horrible, disgusting images that are going to severely affect their relationships for years to come.
“We are storing up problems for the future.”
