a Parliamentary Question to Margaret Thatcher on 3 December. Labour Party leader Michael Foot responded to Wellbeloved by denouncing Tatchell's article and declared "the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party and as far as I'm concerned never will be". Tony Benn wrote in his diary that many people, including himself, thought that Foot had confused Peter Tatchell with Peter Taaffe, then the leader of the Trotskyist Militant tendency, and Michael Crick in his book on Militant agrees that the fact that Tatchell and Taaffe have similar names contributed to public confusion between the two, despite the fact that Militant opposed Tatchell's candidacy due to anti-gay feeling and political differences between the old left (Militant) and new left (Tatchell) of the party. As to whether Tatchell was a member of the Labour Party itself, Foot later clarified that he meant to say "endorsed candidate" instead of "endorsed member" in his response to Wellbeloved. At the next meeting of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, Tatchell was narrowly rejected as a candidate. Mellish was not reassured about the future direction of the Labour Party and resigned from it on 2 August 1982, a clear preliminary to resigning his seat, which he did by taking the Chiltern Hundreds on 1 November that year. The left wing of the Labour Party agreed Tatchell would be eligible for selection, and Tatchell was duly selected again in January 1983. Tabloid newspapers had begun researching his background when Foot denounced him, in particular Tatchell's activities with the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. Several stories were published which made it clear that he was gay. Other candidates At the 1981 Greater London Council election, the Liberal Party had come second in Bermondsey. They chose their GLC candidate Simon Hughes, a barrister who had moved to the constituency earlier that year, to fight the by-election. The Conservatives chose Robert Hughes (no relation), who was a Greater London Council (GLC) Councillor in Croydon. He later became the MP for Harrow West. Among those who applied for the Conservative nomination but were not chosen was Sara Keays, then having an as yet unrevealed affair with Cecil Parkinson. The right-wing former Labour leader of Southwark Borough Council, John O'Grady, who had been a target for the left-wing faction locally, also decided to stand under the banner 'Real Bermondsey Labour' with Bob Mellish's support and encouragement.