Matthew Norman: Funny how liberalism's enemies embrace it when they need it

Every now and then comes news of a relationship so joyously unexpected that, once the initial shock abates and if only for a moment, the metaphorical sun creeps out from behind the rain clouds, melodious birdsong fills the ears, and life seems almost worth living once again.

The return to Gordon Brown's right hand of Peter Mandelson was such a case, as were those knock-me-down-with-a-feather liaisons between David Blunkett and Kimberley Quinn, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson, and John Major and Edwina Currie. In terms of ecstatic amazement, however, nothing for me has ever matched this week's marriage of minds between Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, and the Sun columnist and erstwhile radio talk show host Jon Gaunt.

While Ms Chakrabarti will be familiar to you as a fearsomely effective advocate on behalf of human rights and much the most gifted lobbyist of her generation, Gaunty, if he'll forgive the familiarity, may be less so. Regular readers of this newspaper's media diary will be wearily aware of his status as an archetype of prolier-than-thou, far right-wing bigotry of a retrograde silliness that by and large vacated the driver's seat of the London black cab long ago. But such readers are scarce, so a little background seems indicated about the man fired by TalkSport radio last week after addressing an interviewee from Redbridge Council, on to defend a ban imposed on smokers fostering children, as "a Nazi" (later softened to "health Nazi") and "ignorant pig".

Gaunty, as befits even the resting shock jock, is a tremendous hater of many things, but few with more rabid, makes-me-puke intensity than the concept of human rights. Hence his epithet for Ms Chakrabarti is "the most dangerous woman in Britain". But hark at the sloppiness of my tenses. Such is the transformative power of the old tin-tack that this hatred has been consigned to ancient history, should this Monday qualify as antiquity. For on Tuesday, in the style of the convert at a Billy Graham meeting, Jon Gaunt saw the light.

He hasn't yet shrieked "Hallelujah", it's true, and perhaps he never will. Certainly this portly son of Coventry will offer his Sun audience no mea culpa for his relentless assaults on the quaint belief that a crucial quality of any civilised society is how it defends those it finds repulsive. When I took issue on this page with the efforts of opinion-formers like himself to drive Gary Glitter to suicide, or goad readers into physically attacking the ousted leader of the gang, for example, I was rewarded with a bespoke Gaunty epithet of my own (the drolly alliterative "Norman the Nonce's Mate").

And yet, implicitly but unquestionably, he has now lined up alongside us skinny latte-sipping, woolly minded, bleeding-heart buffoons on the barricades of leftie liberalism, by lionising the very human rights he has long made a very nice living from deriding. The right for convicted sex offenders not to be hunted like vermin by the tabloid press he has not embraced, it must be admitted. But the right to free speech, as codified in the Human Rights Act 1998, which turned 10 a fortnight ago, he clasps so warmly to his capacious bosom that it vies with Shami herself for the prized title of Gaunty's New BF.

"We must remind you that any court must read Mr Gaunt's contract in the light of his right to free expression under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act," writes Ms Chakrabarti to his former employers at TalkSport. "As someone who has been on the receiving end of his blunt polemic ... I believe that the airwaves of a great democracy would be the poorer for his absence. I urge you to reinstate Mr Gaunt's programme without delay, and have offered him support in the unlikely and unfortunate event that recourse to the Human Rights Act proves necessary." You will find the full text at www.gaunty.com, alongside a neo-Voltarian defence of Gaunty's right to revolt from the impeccably liberal pen of Mark Lawson.

The exquisiteness of the irony at play here needs no underlining. Albeit the cutest of its kind yet witnessed, it is no more than a variant on an old theme. A year or so ago, the Police Federation – a body whose members take a more laissez-faire attitude to the rights of foreign nationals to travel lawfully on Tube trains without being pumped full of lead – foreshadowed it by adducing that same legislation in support of its members' human right to strike over pay. Only last week, BNP members bemoaned the breach of their human right to privacy when their identities were leaked.

Heaven loveth nothing like a sinner that repenteth, of course, and at this time of year our thoughts turn naturally to Jesus and his central message about the limitless potential for redemption. We see this teaching resurrected whenever those not previously noted as slavish admirers of the EU swing behind legislation written in Europe long ago, but enshrined in domestic law just a decade ago.

Before taking that well-trodden rightward path along Paul Johnson Boulevard, only stopping to refuel at the Melanie Phillips Welcome Break, Gaunty was quite the leftie himself. Back in the early 1980s, as his home city became the Ghost Town of his beloved Specials' majestic single, his feelings towards Mrs Thatcher made Ben Elton sound like Kenny Everett. So fatten that baby cow and set the oven to gas mark seven as the prodigal son returns to the fold.

If, on the other hand, this rediscovered passion for human rights proves to be targeted solely at regaining his radio berth, it is unclear whether he grasps the implications of his alliance with Liberty. By invoking a concept he built a career on bludgeoning, he has made a volte face beyond the dreams of the slimiest political turncoat, and lost whatever credibility he had with his fan base. So it could yet be that the more apt repentance quote here is the one that begins, "Marry at haste..."

Even if so, we will not hold this against him because Jon Gaunt has done a wonderful thing, wittingly or not, by jumping the human rights broom with Shami Chakrabarti. He has reminded us that liberalism, that imbecilic cuss word in the mouths of tabloid tub-thumpers, shock jocks and New Labour cabinet ministers who would blithely send small children with HIV back to Malawi to die alone, is the truest representation of Christian thinking we know.

The essence of that has nothing to do with God or other fantasy figures that go bump in the night, or even proto-Marxism, and everything to do with kindness, charity, pity and tolerance, a small but indivisible portion of which is the simple wisdom to accept the ignorant pig's right to belong to legal if absurd political parties with impunity, and even to be witlessly offensive on the radio.

Gaunty, bless his muddled old heart, has given the Human Rights Act a more lavish 10th birthday present than it could have imagined possible. So let us all join with him, the BNP and the Police Federation in wishing it infinite happy returns.

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