My father is Stephen Hawking, and I have an autistic son. So it makes me sad when your ‘jokes’ about Ed Miliband mock people with disabilities
Dear Katie Hopkins, I am writing to you – not respectfully, but politely – to ask you to stop.

I read your comments about Ed Miliband and his supposed resemblance to someone “on the spectrum” just as I got home from a trip to Australia. I was there as one of the presenters of a show which featured my father, Stephen Hawking (I’m going to assume you know who he is) as a live hologram beamed into Sydney Opera House.

In my introduction to him, I said that I hoped attitudes to disability had changed since I was a child in the 1970s when having a disabled father was a rarity. We were openly and intrusively commented on when we went out together. We had many difficult moments, such as the time a restaurant manager asked us to leave while we were in the middle of lunch because we were putting the other diners off their food. In fact, it was like growing up with a whole world of people like you, everywhere, all the time.

 

 

 

The point of my story at the talk in Sydney was that I hoped that now, no disabled person would encounter this kind of behaviour – and that they would be treated with respect and dignity. It’s on YouTube; you can watch it and see how the audience responds.

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