The Taliban fan
The Taliban fan
Miles Routledge lives the fantasy of a colonial explorer. But not everyone is impressed...
By Jack Walton
Lord Miles Routledge is sitting in a café near New Street station with a plate full of pancakes, flicking through one of the many, many articles written about him last year. He points out his favourite phrases, which have been highlighted. It seems the author isn’t a fan of his. In the piece, entitled ‘Taliban Fanboys’, she describes Miles as a “baby-faced man-child,” an “incel pinup”, and a man who appeals only to a “self-obsessed generation failed by institutionalised politics”. Then, for good measure, the author gives a whistle-stop summary of the views others hold of him: “an eejit, dunderhead, fruit loop, waste of space, first-class twerp, clueless, ignoramus, narcissistic plonker, misogynist, and oxygen thief.”
He’s giggling. “Incel pinup?” he says incredulously. “I’m not an incel”.
There are a lot of articles that describe him in such terms, though. There are a lot of social media posts too. Not to mention all the forum threads pointing out just how much of an eejit, dunderhead, fruit loop etc he is. He says these don’t bother him at all; that journalism is a business, and journalists will write what brings them that sweet nectar of clicks, just as his own business selling Taliban merchandise is also reliant on the attention brought by his headline-making stunts. That’s why — after more than two hours in his company — he tells me he’s more than happy for me to write a hit piece if I want to. After all, he’s used to it. Just so long as I link to his social media channels. It’s the clicks that count.
Well, a deal’s a deal, I guess. Lord Miles Routledge — you can find his Twitter here and his YouTube here — is a 24-year-old from Birmingham who made national news last year when he was captured by the Taliban (the Lord prefix, if you’re wondering, is there because he purchased a fake title online). This was two years after he’d first made national news, when he was simply under the threat of capture by the Taliban (which he narrowly escaped).
There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for him the first time around. He had, after all, chosen a jolly to Kabul just as the Taliban were rapidly encroaching upon the city. There was even less sympathy the second time. He had, after all, chosen a jolly to Kabul as the Taliban roamed the city, repressing its women and carrying out extrajudicial killings of former government officers. For months there was little word from Miles, until October last year, when news broke that he was heading home.
The British press perhaps expected an image of trauma to be stepping down off the plane: a dirty-beard, hollow eyes barely readjusted to sunlight, a scarred soul. Perhaps we’d seen too much Homeland. In fact, Miles emerged from captivity triumphant, full of bonhomie and kind words for his captors. “Why did some of you think I was dead?” he tweeted. “Why did anyone worry in the slightest? No faith in me! I have pull. Literally was watching the new Barbie movie with the Taliban and saw some of your comments on their phones, all of us snickering.”
When I meet Miles at New Street Station, he greets me wearing a blue suit, well-polished shoes and no tie. His accent is far more southern-sounding than his Birmingham roots suggest. The infamy he first stumbled upon three years ago in a Kubuli safehouse, when his updates on his predicament seized the attention of the online forum 4chan (and after that, the national news media) is something he clearly relishes. A favourite habit of his is saying things he knows to be outlandish in a tone that makes it sound run-of-the-mill. At one stage he tells me that mixing it up with the Taliban is as natural as “brushing [his] teeth”, and that he can’t understand what all the fuss is about.
His penchant for extraordinary understatement also extends to descriptions of the Islamic Militants themselves. I ask Miles what he actually makes of the Talbian — the men he would describe, post-release as his “Talibros” — and he concedes they are “not without flaw”. “[You] see some being kind, see some being dicks. It’s a mixed bag,” he says.
Miles’ arrest came after he was found to be travelling without a permit to a gold mine (don’t ask) in the country. He was one of three Brits reported as being held at that time. Miles’ captors interrogated him under suspicion of being a spy. Those concerns were put to rest when they realised that he was simply a buffoonish Loughborough University student — an unlikely candidate for MI6 recruiters. He was then moved into what he describes as very comfortable living conditions for eight months, with access to an Xbox, films and takeaway pizza.
A month or so after his arrest, and with many back in the UK concerned for his safety (and many more having a good laugh at his expense), Miles’ mother Susan Routledge told the Daily Mail about her distress. “It is so worrying. I just want help to find out what has happened to him and make sure he is OK,” she told the paper. "I am just desperate to know that he is safe. I don't know who is holding him or where he is”.
When I ask Miles about this interview, he says that his mother — along with most of his aunties — is an alcoholic, and alleges that she probably saw the interview as a money-making opportunity. “I had a bad childhood,” he says. “I looked after myself very early on.” Miles was an IVF child and didn’t know his father, despite his wanting to. Alongside the drinking, he also states that his mother is severely mentally ill. In his telling, it led to some bad situations. “She also tried to make me homeless some nights during my A-levels in order to make me fail so I wouldn’t go to university so I would have to continue paying rent to her,” Miles claims. “She was personally trying to sabotage her son — myself — for financial gain.”
As he tells it, though, he no longer has any contact with any of his family — not since he packed his bags and left the family home on the eve of his university move-in date. “I decided I’d just pack my stuff,” he says. “And then just cut off all contact.” In some senses, this was his first daring stunt. He says he hasn’t spoken to her since. Is there a link between Miles’ allegedly fractured childhood, and his seemingly ambivalent attitude towards life-threatening scares? “I believe I’m on this earth once,” he says. “I believe I want to do something great and if I die trying, I’ve got no family, so it’s worth a shot.” Personally, he adds, his strong Catholicism is a factor in his daredevil attitude.
Miles has also travelled to Brazil’s Snake Island (during which he wore a suit of armour and covered himself in garlic to fend off the threat of thousands of deadly snakes) as well as multiple journeys to South Sudan, but those Afghanistan trips have been the making of him. The first one was taken as a break from his physics degree at Loughborough University on the (pretty poor) advice that Kabul would hold out for several more months. It soon devolved into Miles running round the collapsing city, hiding in compounds and filming videos about his clogged toilet. “It was bizarrely fun,” he tells me. He insists that he did not take up a space on one of the valuable safety flights of out the city, despite social media claims to the contrary (the famous footage of desperate Afghans clinging onto the wings of planes was a one-off situation, he tells me, and the day of his own departure was very different and more organised).
That trip earned him a book deal with Antelope Hill, much to the university’s chagrin — the Southern Poverty Law Center has described the publishers as “a hate group that churns out books that idealise fascism and denigrate marginalised groups” — so Miles eventually dropped out. This has snowballed into a strange new life as an internet age-explorer, popping up in the world’s most dangerous places and walking headfirst into trouble, all to the sound of excitable keyboard-tapping from his expanding army of followers, proclaiming him a legend at every turn.
The key, he tells me, is not to be like one of those “stick up the arse journalists”, but rather to approach every topic — Taliban and the rest — by having a bloody good laugh. Perhaps the most telling part of our conversation is when he talks about one of his unpublicised trips to China. He’d learned about the scores of North Korean refugees moving into the country’s north and was interested in possibly tracking their journeys. It sounds like a potentially fascinating project, but he explains that he hasn’t made that one public yet because people are more interested in “fun stuff” — like his upcoming video in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora, in which he pretends to be a special agent tracking down Osama Bin Laden (“Hey Miles, we need you to find Bin Laden, we heard he’s back in Tora Bora,” he excitedly mimics). His videos are for people who enjoy “cool stuff”, like firing guns in an Afghan mountain range, rather than tedious bores, who care about the repression of Afghan women.
As such, it’s not difficult to see why one would draw the conclusion Miles Routledge is an eejit, dunderhead, fruit loop, waste of space etc. Take his race-baiting, for example. In one tweet that drew negative attention, he said that Brooklyn, which has a large black population, “felt more unsafe than Afghanistan by a mile.” Like so much else with Miles, the intention here appears to be to get a rise out of people. But — like so much online discourse — if you get wound up by him, then you lose. In fact, the difference between his online persona and the real man in front of me is jarring. He admits his online output is something of a construct, with the necessity to “banter things out” rather than come across as fully human, vulnerable, or whatever else. In person, he tries to be much more reasonable — making clear his opposition to the Taliban’s oppression of women, the sort of observation you’d seldom find in one of his videos.
Negative attention bounces off him. Lots of people say they don’t care, but with him you get the sense he really doesn’t. He’s managed to turn the adventures into a business, setting up a distribution network to sell “merchandise” from the various places he visits with extraordinary markups (Taliban ‘patches’ purchased for less than a dollar a pop in the bazaars of Kabul have been selling for 45 times that, he says). He tells me his business recently received a £250,000 investment from an American hedge fund.
But ‘Lord’ Miles Routledge has somehow found (or at least stumbled upon) a forum through which he can play the daring explorer. He lives a quasi-colonial fantasy, embodying the trope of the bumbling English buffoon stumbling around the Empire, and delights the bedroom-bound masses in turn. In many ways, he’s their perfect hero. “People see the videos,” he says, “[And they think] I want to go to Afghanistan but it's expensive and my parents will say no.”
That seems to sum it up nicely. He’s living the adventures of those whose own adventure-making is thwarted by obstacles like parents and bedtimes. The extent that he’s labelled an eejit, dunderhead, fruit loop for his troubles matters little. I guess that’s all part of the fun.
As a paying member, I felt compelled to read the article. What a waste of my time. Something worthwhile or uplifting would be more appropriate for the weekend.
Why is The Dispatch feeding this idiot's craving for publicity? I subscribed to read informative articles about local issues, not to a Midland version of the Daily Star.