The Media Attempted A Hit Piece On Me

If Only I'd Agreed I Was "Putin's Puppet", I'd Be Famous By Now! 😭😃

First things first, on BBC Radio 4 this week, legendary comedian Alexei Sayle did a funny segment about my documentary film Theaters of War.

Here’s the clip - Nice one, Alexei!

Secondly, here’s a story about the media trying to discredit me a couple of years back.

In 2018, I made a book called Union Jackboot: What Your Media and Professors Don't Tell You About British Foreign Policy, which is a series of transcribed interviews I conducted with researcher TJ Coles.

Union Jackboot came about when I asked Coles if I he would tell me about his book Britain's Secret Wars. Coles was one of the few academics who had actually bothered to read a bunch of government policy planning documents and he’d found them shocking and sinister.

I started to record our chats and we ended up discussing everything from Sri Lanka to David Icke.

The book asks, how much influence does Britain really have in the world? Coles talks to me about ‘free trade’, modern slavery, the benefits system, Jeremy Corbyn, anti-Semitism, and the global reptilian conspiracy (which he audaciously denies!).

Union Jackboot obviously touched a nerve because a journalist approached me offering to do a lovely profile about my work. In reality, I knew his newspaper wanted to catch me overreacting by asking again and again if I was promoting conspiracy theories and if the book had been “funded by the Kremlin”.

A group of academics in my field of propaganda studies had been slapped on the front page of The Times alongside similar claims, here:-

Anyway, I noted to the journalist that I was pictured on the back cover of Union Jackboot dressed as a giant green lizard - a costume designed to make light of conspiracy theorists, not endorse them.

I doubt the journalist had even looked at the book, let alone read it.

Additionally, at the time our sales figures had looked pretty bad, so I told him that if Vladamir Putin had funded our book, it would have been his worst investment since the invasion of Ukraine.

At that point, our friendly neighbourhood journo abruptly terminated the interview.

I later emailed to ask what was happening with that lovely profile about me and - you’ll never guess what - his bosses had suddenly lost interest in him writing it!

I should add, as I did then, that I did not agree with Putin’s very provoked invasion.

I’m proud of Union Jackboot and it did end up selling okay. Coles and I share a terrible sense of humour: the book is plastered with jokes and we even released two versions - a high price colour “first world” edition, and a black & white “third world” edition. In fairness, we’d have made our satirical point better if the third world version had been so expensive it had left you in debt.

Union Jackboot also provided the inspiration for the hat I wore when campaigning for a parliamentary seat in 2024, introduced here:

Union Jackboot is on Amazon for a tenner. Maybe buy it! Either way, thanks for following this page.

Oh, my other news is that a French channel called Law Of The Empire last week made a polished and popular documentary about my work, which is here with English subtitles.

Cheers,

Matthew Alford