I really wanted to like David Icke. Why would I not? We’ve been on similar journeys, his much earlier than mine. We share similar audiences. And over the years he has done heroic service exposing the true nature of our world - and suffered greatly for it, especially in the early days when not nearly so many people were awake as they are now.

If everything had gone according to plan, our live event in Manchester would have been a mix between a party, a victory lap and one of those freewheeling pub conversations you wish would never end. On my side, I was eager to hear, straight from the horse’s mouth, all Icke’s greatest hits, from reptilian Royals through to what you’re supposed to do when you die to avoid falling into the ‘Soul Trap’. [Is it “avoid going towards the light!’ or ‘head straight for it!’, I forget.]

Icke, in turn, I imagined would be happy to find himself before an admiring audience and a sympathetic interlocutor. I almost said ‘interviewer’ except I don’t do interviews. Everyone who has ever listened to one of my podcasts knows this by now. That would certainly include Icke’s sons Jaymie and Gareth, who’ve had me on their Ickonic programme, and with whom up until the event I’d had friendly relations. And since they had given me to understand that their Dad was a fan of my stuff, I had assumed that he must have known what he was letting himself in for…

So what went wrong? My big mistake, for which I must assume full responsibility, was to have imagined Icke would be capable of being something he is not. Icke has many strengths, I’m sure: personal courage; a willingness to go against the grain; and, he’s clearly a wonderful dad, as his sons’ fierce loyalty and protectiveness attests. But I doubt even his best friend would accuse Icke of being witty, agile of mind or a warm, engaging, bantering conversationalist.

One or two wise voices had warned me beforehand: “He won’t answer your questions. You’ll have trouble interrupting him. It’ll just turn into another, giant Icke monologue.” But like an idiot, I thought I knew better. The combination of my cheeky chappy persona and the sure knowledge that (unlike the BBC’s Terry Wogan in that notorious interview!) I wasn’t out to trap him, would surely bring him out of his shell.

“Who is the real David Icke and what does he actually believe?” That’s what I wanted to find out - as you do on these occasions - and I wasn’t about to prejudice my opinions by doing too much heavy research beforehand. All right, so this is partly also because I’m a lazy arsed bastard, chaotically disorganised and with a short attention span. But this has long been my policy - and one which I think has contributed to giving the Delingpod its unique, happy-go-lucky, meandering and unpredictable flavour.

Obviously there are disadvantages to being underresearched. You can get caught out. It can even be used against you, as Icke attempted to do towards the end of our fraught encounter. “How many of my books have you read?”, he demanded. “None,” I replied. Icke harrumphed, as if this were some terrible ‘gotcha’ moment. “If you’d done any research yourself you’d have realised I don’t do research,” I was tempted to reply but didn’t.

It’s true, though. Even when I did my podcast with the late Sir Roger Scruton - a slightly more substantial and intellectually daunting figure, we can probably agree, than David Icke - I resolutely avoided boning up on any of his books. This wasn’t about disrespecting Scruton, any more than I wished to disrespect Icke. Rather, it’s about keeping the conversation fresh and flowing, rather than getting bogged down in the mire of pre-prepared talking points.

My conversations, I think, are usually all the better for it. If you don’t know where the chat is going to go it forces you to listen harder and think on your feet. This makes it a more interesting experience for you and, by extension, for your audience. It’s like watching a tightrope walker when there’s no safety net. Especially when the person you’re talking to is genuinely interested in ideas, exploring them from different angles, perhaps even reconsidering them in the light of the fresh insights which have emerged in the course of the conversation.

Icke, unfortunately, is not one of those people. Whenever I brought up a new topic it was like pressing the button on a juke box. You could almost hear the ‘Kerchunk!’. Then the whirr as the needle moved into place before settling into the long familiar groove. Then the record played the same old tune it has always played. And until it finished, interruption was more or less futile.

Now you could say it was bloody stupid of me to have expected otherwise: he has been doing this stuff for over thirty years now. But in my petulant, entitled way I still felt I had a certain right to be miffed. This had not been billed as the “David Icke faxes in his performance from the Nineties” show; it stated, quite clearly on the adverts, that this was “the Delingpod with David Icke.” Having undertaken all the financial risk for the show, and agreed with Icke a perfectly respectable speaker’s fee, I did rather feel he could have made more of an effort.

In the recriminations and backbiting that followed the event, the Icke camp did its best to blame it all on me for being a lying, double-dealing, rude, Johnny Come Lately trying to make up for lost time by dissing those of my elders and betters who’d done all the groundwork. But I think that’s just sour grapes. I was at least as frank to Icke’s face on stage as I was in the comments afterwards to the fairly small audience on my private Telegram channel. And while I do regret being bad mannered towards a guest, I find the notion that I somehow ought to have deferred to him gratefully just because he was the first to red pill lots of Awake people quite absurd.

Surely the whole point of being Awake is that we should always be prepared to question our preconceptions about everyone and everything, including our designated heroes? That’s certainly what I believe. I don’t want to be in anyone’s cult. I don’t want to be anyone’s role model or leader. I’m not interested in picking gratuitous fights with this or that figure in the truth movement just to boost traffic. But nor am I interested in indulging figureheads who may, on closer examination, turn out to be false prophets.

David Icke, for better or worse, has established himself as a red-pilled guru. He has written twenty books. He tours regularly, speaking to audiences of acolytes who hang on his every word. He has a family TV channel, Iconic. He addresses freedom rallies. He has more than half a million followers on Twitter. It is not good enough, as some of his fans seem determined to do, simply to go: “Oh come on! Give him a break. He’s a lovely old bloke who has paid his dues…”

Nope. If there’s one single lesson everyone has gone down the rabbit hole has learned it is - or ought to be - this: no one gets a free pass. After all, it’s giving a free pass to authority figures - scientists, politicians, teachers, whoever - which is one of the main things that has got us into this mess. We’ve trusted too much and questioned too little. Keeping an open mind is what separates us from those ‘Normies’ whose gullibility on everything from vaccines to Ukraine we find so frustrating. Why should Icke be exempt just because he’s David Icke?

Before I met him I was more than keen to give him the benefit of the doubt. So much so, that I made a point of avoiding reading up on any stuff which might make me think ill of him. There are rumours, you may be aware, that Icke is a freemason - perhaps even as high as 33rd degree. There are sites explaining that his worldview is essentially Luciferian. But to invite him to address these claims on stage, I thought, would be unfair. Generally, I find, you get more out of someone if they feel you are on side - as indeed I was, at first. It was only during the course of our conversation that my doubts started to set in.

One of the bigger disappointments, for me, was his habit of quoting ‘scientists’ to support his point of view about the nature of the world (which he thinks is a giant simulation, in which everything we think we see is just an illusion). At one point, on the subject of the moon and whether or not we’ve landed on it, he even cited a NASA scientist. “Hang on, David, this won’t wash!” I thought. “You know, as does everyone here in the audience, that nameless scientists, especially ones from Not A Space Agency, are hardly a go-to source of unimpeachable truth. So why are you insulting us - and undermining your case - by pretending otherwise?”

Icke has a reputation for being intelligent and fiendishly well-read, at least where ‘conspiracy theories’ are concerned. One woman on my Telegram channel claimed that a friend who had had lunch with him described himself as the ‘cleverest person she had ever met.’ But this definitely wasn’t my impression. If you’re going to propound a contentious belief system, as Icke does, then it’s not enough merely to state it, Ex Cathedra, as though anyone who disagrees with you is basically just a know-nothing moron. You need to make a persuasive intellectual case for it.

This I found Icke incapable of doing on stage. Perhaps he does so in his books but that’s no excuse: if he’s written twenty books on the subject, he surely ought to be capable by now of defending his position in a few sentences. But either he couldn’t or he wouldn’t. The impression I got was of someone who has downloaded lots of information which he has learned by rote but has never really analysed, or sifted, or even properly understood.

On the subject of Israel’s true religion, for example, he claimed it was a perversion of Judaism. But while he was able to give us a clunky version of the history of Sabbatean Frankism, he could explain only the hows, not the whys and wherefores. To listen to Icke’s bald account, you’d think that some random bloke called Sabbatai Zevi and another random bloke called Jacob Frank randomly formulated this crazy cult which believed some weird shit. What was missing was any sense of the religious dimension - its origins, for example, with the Babylonian Mystery Religions and Luciferianism; Frank’s quasi-Gnostic philosophical position that the world is controlled by a ‘false God’ whose hegemony can be broken partly through enacting evil deeds.

He was similarly evasive on the subject of this simulation we’re all living in. If the world really is a giant computer game - and I’m listening: anything is possible - then what I’d like to know is who the game programmer is. What are his motives? What’s he trying to achieve? And why - if everything we think and do is just an illusion, and kind of pointless - did this game designer imbue us with all these qualities which make us so much more impressive and complex than NPCs [non-player characters]. Why do we have a moral compass, which enables us to differentiate from right and wrong? Why are we drawn towards love, truth and beauty?

For me the most satisfying explanation for this thus far is the Christian one: that we have been blessed with these divine impulses because we are made in God’s image. But I’m open to persuasion. If Icke can come up with a better answer, I’m all ears. Even if he’d just said: “Well the reason that the Creator gave humans all these qualities is because he’s a sadist who likes to torture us with possibilities we can never fulfil,” I would have respected the intellectual consistency of his position. Or if he’d said: “I’m a Gnostic and I believe that this world is run by an evil Demiurge who just loves to mess with us,” I would have said: “Well thanks for explaining.” Or if he’d said: “You know James, I really haven’t a clue. Guess it’s just one of those mysteries”, I would have thought, “Fair play, David. We are all looking through a glass darkly.”

But he didn’t do any of this. Instead - playing to the gallery of all the diehard Ickeistas in the audience - he chose to characterise it as a conflict between my hidebound dogma and his enlightenment. He referred with a sneer in his voice to my ‘religion’ - I think he may even have called it my ‘frickin’” religion - which I thought was not just underhand and needlessly provocative but also ignorant. As ought to have been obvious from the way I asked my question, I’m not one of those happy clappy, ‘trust the plan’ Christians who believes everything he is told to do by the church authorities. I’m no more a helpless ideological prisoner of my ‘religion’ [it derives from ‘religio’ meaning ‘I bind’] than Icke is of his one. The more meaningful difference between us here is that I can argue and defend my position. Icke, I fear, cannot argue and defend his.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Soon I shall be releasing - initially for subscribers only - the video of the event so that you can judge for yourself whether you are Team Icke or Team James. It’s a shame that such a divide should have arisen, for it was never my intention. And I know that there are lots of people in the truth movement who’d like to be on both teams and are horrified to see a split in our ranks when really we should all be pulling together to defeat the common enemy.

Unfortunately, that particular argument isn’t going to wash with me. As I intend to explain in part two of this essay…