No modern author has travelled further from where he started. Born in Leicester in 1952, David Icke was a goalkeeper first, in Coventry City’s youth ranks and then at Hereford United, until rheumatoid arthritis ended his playing career at twenty-one. Journalism followed, then the BBC, where through the 1980s he presented sport on Grandstand and Breakfast Time and became one of the more recognisable faces on national television. He also served as a national spokesman for the Green Party.
Everything changed at the start of the 1990s. Icke left the party, announced a spiritual awakening on prime-time television and was widely ridiculed for it. He has spent the three decades since writing and lecturing on what he presents as a hidden structure behind world events, an outlook that mainstream commentators describe as conspiracy theory and that has drawn sustained criticism, including accusations of antisemitism which he rejects.
Mainstream publishers stopped taking his work in the 1990s. He has self-published ever since, building a substantial independent audience through his own imprints and platforms.