HOME Secretary David Blunkett has this week begun to unpick the mess of laws that were created amid a fuss whipped up by The Northern Echo's most famous editor.

That editor was WT Stead, who perished on the Titanic. Stead, from Alnwick, established his reputation as a campaigning journalist on the Echo before moving to London in 1880 where he got wrapped up in the movement against child prostitution.

So wrapped up, in fact, that he bought a 13-year-old girl from her mother for £5 and set her to work in a brothel. On July 6, 1885, he published his first sensational story about what he had done. It sold 1.5 million copies and the country was so angered by what it read that the Government feared a riot.

It immediately introduced the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill which was debated in Parliament on July 9. It raised the age of consent for females from 13 to 16 and regulated brothels - it was effectively the first legislation to realise that paedophilia was a problem.

But Stead had some curious bedfellows in his campaign, who wanted all sexual behaviour regulated in the name of 'purity'. To this end, Stead seems to have passed a dossier on homosexuality to the MP Henry Labouchre who "moved in the middle of the night" an amendment which made all homosexual acts between men punishable by two years in prison. It passed through Parliament unnoticed and undebated.

(Lesbianism isn't mentioned in the Bill. There are two theories why not. One is that when a peer tried to mention it, he was told to shut up because he would only advertise its existence and women would rush out and try it. The other is that Queen Victoria, when she came to sign the Act, could not believe that such a thing existed and so struck it out.)

Stead's motivation in changing the law on homosexuality was probably honourable. Sodomy, and bestiality, were made illegal in 1533 but were punishable by life in prison - and juries were refusing to convict men of crimes because they felt spending life in prison forever was too severe a penalty. A couple of years, Stead thought, was a far more fitting punishment.

He was right in that in 1889, because of the new law, police uncovered the extraordinary Cleveland Street Scandal. In a brothel in the West End of London, Post Office telegram delivery boys were selling their bodies for four shillings a time.

But when police investigated they found that Lord Arthur Somerset, the head of the Prince of Wales' stables, and Lord Euston were frequent customers, along with the Prince of Wales' son, Prince Eddy. When the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury heard that two peers and a member of the Royal family were about to be arrested, he tipped them off.

So the brothel in Cleveland Street was empty when police raided it and Somerset had mysteriously fled the country. Euston was done for minor charges and, as subsequent court cases showed, Prince Eddy was brushed under the carpet.

Although there have been reforms to Britain's sex laws since 1885 - homosexuality in private was decriminalised in 1967 - most of them still date back to the law that Stead and his bedfellows pushed through Parliament in, as Mr Blunkett said on Tuesday, "an age before the light bulb or motor car".