Death by Conspiracy?: 2. Fleeing a Virus

0:06That's it.

0:09Marianna Spring:I'm in a well-furnished living room in a townhouse in Shrewsbury. Outside the window, spiral stairs lead down to a garden, and beyond is the River Severn. Across from me sit two men on a plush red sofa. Alongside the clock, they're surrounded by artwork, pictures of friends, and mementos of travels. trinkets from lives full of protest and rebellion. And though they're both still politically active, their days are now more tranquil and steady, like the water flowing past outside. I'm Peter Roscoe. And I'm Geoff Hardy. And we met in 1980. No, we met in 1978. We got together in 1980. This is couples.

0:52Marianna Spring:Peter and Geoff are two old friends of Gary Matthews. In January 2021, Gary caught Covid and died. In the years before his death, he'd started posting strange things online, like conspiracies about whether Covid even existed. I'm in Shrewsbury to figure out why that happened. I'm Marianna Spring from BBC Radio 4. This is Death by Conspiracy.

1:22Marianna Spring:Episode 2, Fleeing a Virus. I'm meeting Peter and Geoff to build up a picture of how Gary Matthews got drawn towards conspiracy theories Their home was a place where Gary explored politics and philosophy But before we hear about that, and once they've agreed on the date Peter and Geoff tell me how they first met It was the time in South East London when the National Front, the National Party, the fascists were very strong And so in opposition to that I was wearing a badge that said Gays Against Nazis So I was sitting on the bus going to my socialist worker or international socialist meeting, as it was then, and Geoff got on the bus, came toward me and said, Oh, I like you and I like your badge.

2:07Marianna Spring:Although they enjoyed the capital, after a few years they moved to Shrewsbury, a decision partly driven by a virus. I'd had enough of being in London, really. And also I was just getting, you know, it was the time in the 80s, it was AIDS, and it was a very, very frightening time. Yeah, I just thought, hmm, time to go, really. Yearning for a new life, worried about a disease that was rapidly killing their friends, they decamped. And a few years later, they met a young Gary Matthews in a bookshop. It was around the poetry section and he was kind of dreamy. There's only one way to describe Gary, it would be dreamy.

2:45It was almost as if he was in a bubble.

2:48Marianna Spring:Two years later, he turned up in their lives once again. this time on their doorstep. He was selling a weekly newspaper published by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's still around today. Stools decorated with the party's distinctive clenched red fist logo are a familiar sight on uni campuses and left-wing marches. Peter knew the scene, but was less red rose tinted about the politics. So my thought was, oh yes, come on in, because I had been involved with what was International Socialist. So I thought, no, I'll talk to him about this because he's a young guy and I'll tell him my experience. So, yeah, come in, have a cup of tea and OK, I'll buy it.

3:30Marianna Spring:It became a regular visit. They went on walks in the Shropshire Hills. They helped look after him when he got cancer in his 20s. Their house was a refuge of sorts, not just for people selling the socialist worker, but also for others in Shrewsbury who fell a little outside of the mainstream. So I was thinking, well, maybe we can get him to be confident enough to actually come out. I still hadn't clocked that he really wasn't. And we had a young guy living with us at the time, didn't we, called Matthew, who was very camp and very out and totally unashamedly out. And they kind of clicked. And they were kind of an odd couple because they were both sort of around us at the same time.

4:10So Matthew would be for going out on the town and he would drag Gary along with him. Matthew, very outrageous, very camp. Cross-dressing sometimes. Scared the life out of us that he'd get beaten up. And he would get blind drunk and quite aggressive when he was drunk. And Gary would just sort of hang in there and sort of make sure he got home OK and didn't get blind drunk.

4:33Marianna Spring:According to Peter and Geoff, Gary wasn't gay, but they say he suffered homophobic abuse when he was at school. One of the things we had in common was because he looked like he was gay. I think he was assumed to be gay and therefore probably, well he did, we know, took a lot of homophobic rubbish at school and as a young man. And that's horrible. He'd come along with Peter and Geoff to events in support of gay rights. Anything that we were doing around gay stuff, he'd be there. Because he got it. Because he himself had been bullied for being gay even though he wasn't. So he got it. He got difference because he was different.

5:12Marianna Spring:Gary sympathised with people on the margins and that was part of what propelled him to advocate for political causes But a few years ago, Peter and Jeff began to notice how his advocacy was starting to shade into something else like in conversations about the Middle East and Bashar al-Assad's rule in Syria I can only describe it as a mishmash of conspiracy theories My view was that Assad was just doing the most appalling things to the population but Gary was saying, well, no, actually, this is not true. Assad is not so bad. He had changed a bit and he was very convinced and almost slightly insulting, like, you're being brainwashed, can't you see?

5:55Marianna Spring:In some political groups online, conspiracy theories and misinformation about Syria are rife and Geoff began to notice how their playful conversations now had a harder edge. Gary no longer seemed to entertain much disagreement. That was sort of true of almost everything all the way through. I would say be aware of anybody who 100 % thinks they know the truth, because nobody does. And then came the pandemic. Visits for a cuppa and a chat were off the table. Lockdown did play a part, because perhaps if it had been easier for him still to pop round, he might have done. But of course, we couldn't do that anymore.

6:37so maybe we would have had more sensible discussions.

6:42Marianna Spring:Gary was already developing fringe beliefs before the pandemic hit but lockdown meant he spent much more time online. Close friends recall that he was constantly on social media sometimes posting dozens of times a day. One family member says that he seemed possessed by the idea that the pandemic was a conspiracy and that it didn't exist. And the change that Peter and Geoff had observed in their friend now seemed to accelerate. Within months of Covid, it was only a flu. And to some extent, maybe I said that kind of thing at first, except suddenly I kind of woke up as, yes, I have questions around vaccination, but I've had all the vaccinations.

7:23I started picking up in little snippets of who he was, that there was something going on that was going to be even more rigid.

7:34Marianna Spring:And, Peter and Geoff say, Gary's beliefs clearly affected his behaviour. That might not seem so much of a big deal now that most people are vaccinated and when deaths linked to Covid-19 have really dropped. But think back to earlier lockdowns, when the death toll was steep and rising. I don't ever remember seeing him in a mask, whether he was with friends who were all masked or not. He will always not be wearing a mask. But he was attending protests. What were the protests? Well, the big ones in London. There were big ones around COVID in London where they would COVID deny. And I know he was going because I remember him saying that.

8:15And that was just like, what? I mean, that's like deciding to positively have unsafe sex when you're a gay man in the 80s and you knew there was no chance. Yeah, because that was the whole COVID thing for us, of course had a resonance of, you know, as I say, leaving London because of AIDS at that time. The need not just to protect yourself, but to protect other people, whatever you think. So therefore wear a bloody mask, wear a condom. That seemed like a logical connection to me, but he wouldn't buy that, I don't think, would he? No.

8:51Marianna Spring:They'd known Gary for a long time, and they had an idea of why he might seek out a Facebook group filled with these ideas. I mean, this is always the thing about Gary, is he knew who he wasn't, but he wasn't quite sure what he was or who he was. And therefore, because he distrusted rigid paths, although he always chose kind of cultish groups, so he's always looking for connection. Gary sounds loved and accepted by the people that were around him. Why did he keep seeking belonging? Because I suppose the scar was so deep. Hard to get inside that world. He lived in a bell jar just like Sylvia Plath.

9:39Marianna Spring:Much like Lorraine, who we heard from in the first episode, Peter and Geoff felt like they began to drift from Gary towards the end of his life. In December 2020, for the first time since they'd been friends, they didn't send Gary a Christmas card. And then, a few weeks later, in the middle of January 2021, Peter got a message. Somebody contacted me via messenger to say Gary had died. I mean, I could have drawn a line round my chest of the heaviness that I felt when I heard that he had died. Death is so hard if it's sudden anyway. Just imagine that the person who was so alive or so much here isn't here anymore.

10:21That's hard for us as human beings. But with Gary I had this real heavy, watery chest, and also angry, because it didn't have to happen, and yet it had.

10:33Marianna Spring:And on top of the grief, there was something else. But his end sounded so sad as well, didn't it? Because apparently he was feeling ill, walked from that flat where he lived, and I think he went to the Shire Hall for some reason, like not the hospital. Shire Hall is the headquarters for the Shropshire Council, and a place where you can get Covid tests. So it must have been incredible pain. And I think he was told at the shower hall, no, what you need to do is get, you know, medical attention. And I think almost certainly it was just still believing that however awful it was, he was going to come through because it wasn't true that people died from it.

11:15Marianna Spring:We'll get into this moment in more detail later in the series. The truth of Gary's beliefs before he died is a little more complicated than that. But one thing is clear, that we haven't been able to find evidence that he sought any medical help once he tested positive for COVID. It's not common to die of COVID-19 in your 40s, but it does happen. And when Peter got the news, he looked at Gary's account on Facebook. There, he saw people he didn't know writing strange messages. All these posts that were appearing from people just saying stuff that I thought was so awful and so completely not about Gary, using his death as some sort of rallying point to stand on.

12:02Because I only later learnt that he was still saying and posting stuff right to the end, that it was all a hoax. And so, you know, brave guy, even with death staring you in the face, you stood your ground, mate.

12:18Marianna Spring:How did it feel seeing those posts? Oh, I felt sick. I just felt really sick because, you know, I knew Gary. And, all right, towards the end of his life, as it turned out, didn't agree with him at all on some serious issues. But, you know, I just remember the guy whose head I shaved when his hair started to fall out. So, no, that was horrible to see him, I felt, being used by people who I assumed knew nothing about him. There's a side of Gary, though, I think, himself would have been upset by that. It's more about the people who knew Gary and his close family. How dare you put stuff on there that is going to be just so poisonous for them?

13:02To me, it beggars belief that anybody would not, at least to some extent, bear in mind that people are really grieving here.

13:11Marianna Spring:And who were the people posting on his account? Some came from a particular Facebook group, the Shropshire Corona Resilience Network, a forum for Shrewsbury's Covid denial movement. So who makes up the conspiracy underground in this pretty medieval town? Total vegan takeover of the food chain. World population reduced to a state of abject poverty and slavery to the high-tech masters of the long-predicted New World Order. And what do they want? I'm Marianna Spring, and that was episode two of Death by Conspiracy from BBC Radio 4. Next time, I go to the protest.