Mary Lorimer Beatrix Campbell, OBE (née Barnes; born 3 February 1947[1]) is an English writer and activist who has written for a number of publications since the early 1970s.

Her books include Wigan Pier Revisited (1984), Goliath: Britain's Dangerous Places (1993) and Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy (1998).

[citation needed] Geoff Andrews wrote of her opinions in his book End Games and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964–1991[6] feminism now "became a priority, not subordinate to some higher goal.

After the appointment of Tony Chater as editor in 1976 Campbell felt the struggle to reform the Star had been lost, and resigned, joining[citation needed] the journal Marxism Today and the Gramscian New Times.

She set off on a six-month journey around England and wrote a polemical critique of George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and what she saw as the myopia of sexist socialism.

The alleged perpetrators were workers at the nursery, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, who had already been cleared of multiple charges in a criminal trial in 1994.

They subsequently successfully sued the Council, the "Independent Review Team" who produced the report, and the local Evening Chronicle newspaper for libel.

[8] Awarding Reed and Lillie the maximum possible damages of £200,000 each, the judge in the case made a "very rare" finding of "malice" on the part of the Independent Review Team, in that "they included in their report a number of fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue and which cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness."

On 9 February 1991 Campbell appeared on television discussion programme After Dark[10] together with the then deputy director of Nottinghamshire social services Andy Croall and others.

Writing in The Guardian, she self-defined herself as a "republican with politics rooted in Marxism and feminism" and explained the apparent contradiction in accepting the award as: By clinging to symbols and rituals that belong to a cruel imperial order the government compromises the gonged.

And yet, getting gonged confers recognition of "citizens" contributions' to a good society – in my case equality – and the gesture affirms our necessity; the radicals – not the royalists – are the best of the British.