Harman: I've been stalked for 20 years

HARRIET HARMAN, the MP, has been dogged by a stalker for the past 20 years, she is due to tell a court in London today when she gives evidence in the hope of bringing the ordeal to an end.

John Masterson, 56, who has a long criminal record, is suing the Metropolitan police for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution after doctors told Ms Harman that he had allegedly made threats to kill her in 1989.

He was arrested when Ms Harman passed on her concerns to the police but the case was dropped. Doctors declined to give evidence against him.

The matter began in 1980 after he became one of Ms Harman's clients when she was working for the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Mr Masterson, who has been treated at the Maudsley Hospital in south London, spent ten years bombarding her office with telephone calls and waiting for her outside the Commons. He became well known to Ms Harman's friends and at one time staged a hunger strike outside the Labour party offices in Walworth Road. He has written to Tony Blair, the Queen, John Major and Margaret Thatcher alleging that Ms Harman, the MP for Peckham, was corrupt.

A jury at Central London County Court heard yesterday how Mr Masterson's psychiatrist, Dr Jane Marshall, had warned Ms Harman, after he had "talked at length" about wanting to kill the MP. Dr Marshall, a senior registrar at the Maudsley hospital, recorded in her case notes, comments from Mr Masterson including: "I go to sleep at night thinking of killing her."

Under cross-examination Mr Masterson told the court: "I may have said I wanted to kill her but that doesn't mean I was going to kill her. They are two very different things."

His barrister Simon Farrell told the court that police had no evidence that he made threats to kill.

The court was told that Mr Masterson had spent most of his adult life in prison.

Ms Harman, the former Social Security Secretary, first met him when she visited two inmates at Wakefield Prison when she was a lawyer working for the NCCL. The NCCL was acting for them on the grounds that the prison regime was in breach of their rights.

The case continues.