I have heard their sighs and counted their tears he wrote accusing Lord Mackay of hammering

"I have heard their sighs and counted their tears," he wrote, accusing Lord Mackay of hammering another "nail into the coffin of marriage" so that holy wedlock is now "not even as important as your average hire purchase agreement". Then came the former ministers Edward Leigh and John MacGregor.The Mail kept at it. Next day, it published a series of hefty pieces by one of its star writers, Graham Turner, who announced he had interviewed "some" of the 1.6 million children of divorced British parents. John Redwood joined, bringing on board the non religious traditionalists. "By no means all the Catholic Tories agreed, though many of the others later began to feel that they have to fall in line even though the Catholic bishops announced their support for Mackay's proposals - and last week took the highly unusual step of reiterating that support." By then, however, John Patten was casting his net wider.

Others involved included Christopher Whitehouse, clerk to the All-Party Pro-Life Group in the Commons (a post funded by the anti-abortion group, SPUC) and a research assistant to the group's chairman Ann Winterton MP.By October 18 the Mail and Telegraph were able to go big with a story about a backbench rebellion on divorce noting that there were some 18 Catholic Tory MPs in the House "It was quite a small group," said one Catholic insider. They were joined from the other end of the religious spectrum by a group called Christian Action Research and Education - which, with its happy acronym CARE, was the renamed Nationwide Festival of Light, an evangelical body dedicated to "awakening the Protestant conscience of the nation" and determined that a sense of blame must be maintained if couples were to accept the moral responsibility of their divorce. In a piece for the Sunday Telegraph he predicted that, with his not impressive record, the Lord Chancellor would not remain long in office.As Mr Mears fulminated, Mr Oddie burrowed away and Mr Patten began to whip in a few fellow Catholic Tories including Julian Brazier, the MP for Canterbury who had earlier proposed, in a pamphlet for the Bow Group, a tax on childless couples. The man responsible for the reforms, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, it was becoming clear, could expect no backing from his colleagues in the legal profession. The man who wanted to deprive barristers of their sole rights of audience, make judges work longer for their generous pensions and turn legal aid into a bargain basement service, was, at the beginning of October, accused of humbug by Martin Mears, the new demonic president of the Law Society.

Every time there had been reform, he argued, it had been followed by an increase in the divorce rate. The latest would "empty the marriage contract of any meaning" and "turn a contract for life into a probationary matter." He predicted the phrase "party of the family" would turn to ashes in Tory mouths.But there was more in the air than moral majoritarianism. Towards the end of September John Patten - who as education secretary had tried to reintroduce a moral dimension into sex education but was foiled by the Department of Health - pronounced that the reforms were a bad thing. Of which, more later.But it was in the Daily Telegraph that the first signs of the current familial fundamentalism emerged. Indeed the Family Homes and Domestic Violence bill had gone through all its stages in the House of Lords, and was on its last stage in the Commons, when the article by William Oddie in the Daily Mail exploded the issue into a massive controversy. He was for many of his years as an Anglican cleric best known for the fervour and vituperation of his prose as a traditionalist scourge of his more progressive fellows before finally turning his back on them and heading for Rome.Almost everyone else had regarded the divorce and domestic violence reforms as non-controversial measures to tidy up the law.

Only the zealous Mr Oddie, it seemed, bothered to read them all the way through. Zeal is one of William Oddie's most distinct characteristics. For more than a year ministers, MPs and journalists had maintained no more than a vague awareness of two bills - to reform divorce and to extend protection against domestic violence to those who are neither spouses nor partners. With equally tedious regularity the editors have mostly turned them down But this month Mr Oddie found his time had come. According to one PR staff member, the decision to reduce rates for staff opting to work for the first time on Sundays was "enormously popular".. For years William Oddie has been pressing upon the editors of opinion pages on national newspapers article after article, all on a single theme - how the Conservative government, for all its rhetoric about the family , has presided over a raft of legislation which has systematically undermined the institution it purports to cherish. Juggling and hoola-hooping were among the suggestions, but "colleagues" objected and the idea was dropped.The GMB general union believes Asda's public relations department is "bonkers".