Bowden was born in 1962 and died in March 2012 from a heart attack. I came across Jonathan Bowden’s work sometime in 2020. It was on YouTube and featured a small portly gentleman covering what felt to be forbidden subjects in talks above pubs. The footage was grainy and the sound was not always clear. Some of the ‘talks’ were a hard watch, partly due to the poor production, but many of the turns of phrase have stayed with me; 3 examples come immediately to mind, ‘clear them out .. clear them out, we need a new start’, ‘Inequality is natural and good’ and ‘Liberalism is moral syphilis’. Contemporaries say he was an electrifying speaker but it does not always come across in the online grainy videos.
The subjects Bowden covered in these lectures were wide ranging such as the meaning of Punch and Judy, talks on radical philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle and Spengler, art and coruscating critiques of the left. His lecture on Vanguardism is particulary interesting and has resonance today. He was also a prolific painter, writer of fiction and made films. I am less keen on this latter body of work but at least he was trying to make new art. He was initially active in the Conservative party but became very involved in more radical right-wing organisations, including the BNP. He was known among the American right as well as the British right and he visited the US, making very well-received speeches. There was a good discussion of his work on the Academic Agent stream on YouTube titled ‘Make Way for the Chairman’ about a year ago. This featured some who knew Bowden but this seems to be made available to stream members only now. As well as YouTube channels dedicated to Bowden there is a website www.jonathanbowden.org that provides a fairly full archive of his work.
There was no biography of Bowden until Ed Dutton’s biography released in 2025. The biography was released by Imperium Press. A good source of ‘based’ books. He said he was inspired to write it by a young journalist he met who carried a book of Bowden’s speeches and he realised that there would be an audience for a biography.
Ed Dutton is an interesting and prolific writer and YouTuber . His Monday night livestream on his ‘Jolly Heretic’ YouTube channel is a odd mix of political commentary, psychological analysis and puerile jokes. I do not think I am the target audience! His written work centres on academic studies on intelligence and the genetic origins of religion and ideology but he has also written many biographies and history books. I note that I could not find an entry for Ed on Wikipedia but his work is available through Amazon.
I think Dutton’s best work is the films he makes of the YooKay revealing deep truths about life in Britain today. The full versions are on his Jolly Heretic Substack but shorter versions are on YouTube. My favourite is the one on Clacton featuring relocated London East Enders. Dutton has that knack that posh people often have, of being able to talk to people from all walks of life without being condescending or patronising. If the BBC made documentaries like this I might even watch it.
Dutton has extensively researched Bowden’s life talking to as many people who knew him as possible. He also explains that a number of people who knew him and his family would not contribute to the biography. Bowden is revealed to have never really held down a job or had a relationship, had little money and lived in a caravan. He was also a fantasist, for example making up a pretend family. Dutton suggests Bowden’s inability to live a ‘normal’ life may be due to issues that manifested in behaviours typical of people with autism and personality disorders. He started, but never finished degree courses and attended lectures where he was not registered for study, but I am sure that this would have provided the material for his lectures. Dutton suggests that these behaviours conversely enabled Bowden to be an original and charismatic thinker and speaker, that he was a modern ‘shaman’ for the radical right. In particular Bowden was able to articulate clearly, using numerous examples, the deep radical conservative tradition of thought that was practically buried in Europe after WWII and provided philosopical grounding for the radical right.
Bowden was sensitive to criticism, but at the same time could not be anything but contrary and wanted to be at the forefront of radical right-wing organisations. This seems to me to be a recipe for mental health disaster and he eventually had a complete breakdown and was committed to hospital. Friends said that he was never the same after this, the spark had gone. He died shortly after his last speech to the London Forum that was disrupted by left-wing activists aged just 49. His family seems to have avoided telling his friends about his death and did not attend the funeral. However, some friends did manage to attend the funeral and Damian Thompson, a close friend praised him in his Telegraph column.
My thoughts about the biography is that at times it goes off on tangents reflecting Ed Dutton’s own interests and includes extraneous detail. I would have liked more analysis of the work of Bowden but it does untangle his unusual life and sets out the influence that Bowden still has on the radical right. A review of the book by Damian Thompson was published in The Spectator and, I am sure, contributed to sales. Others are not so keen on Bowden especially those on the left. An example is John Merrick on Substack calling Bowden the usual shut-up word ‘far-right’, and accuse those following him as members of an ‘execrable cult’ and publishing a hit-piece in the Jacobin. Inevitable for such a controversial figure.
Knowledge of Bowden and his work has continued to grow aided by YouTube. Ed Dutton called him a cult internet figure. In Reading there is even a Bowden Row named after him. However, I think that it is the speeches, and especially the clips, that have the emotional power. Some are even set to some banging synthwave and his speeches are eminantly quotable. Apparently on Twitter you can subscribe to Jonathan Bowden quote accounts, there is a wikiquotes page for him and there are numerous other quote sites that have a Bowden quote or two. I think the biography was interesting but exploring Bowden’s work rather than his life gives you the best of him.
© @Alurka 2026
