Stray Ferret Focus: How we reported historic homophobic posts of Harrogate election candidate

Some articles can be written quickly. Others take time — sometimes rather a lot of time.

Welcome to our monthly look at what goes on behind the scenes when we are working on articles at the Stray Ferret.

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One example of this was my story about a Conservative candidate for the Harrogate Town Council election making historic homophobic posts. 

Ordinarily, a candidate list for a town council election would not throw up much in the way of news stories.

However, one would-be councillor on the list for the Harrogate Town Council election that took place on Thursday (May 1) did provoke interest.

A source tipped us off about claims that Anthony Murphy, the Conservative candidate for the Duchy ward, had a history of homophobic posts on social media.

It’s not unusual for newsdesks to be sent information containing allegations against individuals, but many news organisations lack the will to tackle such difficult and vexed questions.

The Stray Ferret has previously published articles containing allegations against other political parties after extensive investigations.

With Mr Murphy standing for public office, we began researching the claims, including whether the quotes we were alerted to were posted by him or by organisations founded by him.

Mr Murphy had made some of these posts more than a decade ago when he was running the Lumen Fidei Institute — a not-for-profit organisation in Ireland which describes itself as “an association of Catholic lay people engaged in cultural and educational matters”.

Some of the posts were made at the height of the debate over same-sex marriage and his comments appeared to be based on discussion over the issue in the context of his Catholic faith.

These issues had to be factored into our research. But what also had to be considered was that Mr Murphy was running for election for the Conservative Party, and the views expressed in these posts appeared to contradict the party’s own stated values.

We made numerous enquiries to check the varacity of the posts, check who Mr Murphy was and ascertain details about his background. 

We also took a closer look at articles authored by Mr Murphy on the Lumen Fidei Institute website to assess whether his views were consistent around the time — some of those articles are still available today.

As a result, we put these posts, plus a list of questions, to the Harrogate and Knaresborough Conservative Association — through whom Mr Murphy opted to respond.

The result was an article which is an example of local journalism holding local politicians accountable. You can read it in full here.

As Mr Murphy was running for election, we felt it was the public's right to know what views had been made by a potential elected representative in Harrogate. 

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