---
born: 1950-11-29
category: Extremism & Violent Networks
created: 2026-05-21
location: Worcestershire, United Kingdom
summary: David Myatt is a British far-right ideologue widely attributed as the founder
  of the Order of Nine Angles under the pseudonym Anton Long, whose writings directly
  influenced the 1999 London nailbomber David Copeland, yet he was never charged with
  terrorism despite decades of published incitement to murder and a three-year Scotland
  Yard investigation.
tags:
- Person
- O9A
- NeoNazi
- UK
- Occultism
- Satanism
- Accelerationism
- Islam
- AntonLong
- CombatEighteen
- IntelligenceHistory
updated: 2026-05-22
---

[David Myatt](/people/david-myatt/) is a British ideologue who spent three decades as an active participant in the neo-Nazi underground of England, serving at various points as organizer, theorist, and instigator across multiple violent far-right groups before converting to Islam in 1998 and subsequently claiming to have renounced all extremism. He is widely attributed by scholars as the primary author of the [Order of Nine Angles](/organizations/order-of-nine-angles/) (O9A) under the pseudonym Anton Long, though he has denied this identification throughout his life. His written output, produced under both his own name and the Long pseudonym, has been found in the possession of perpetrators of mass violence, cited in terrorism trials, and classified as a terrorist manual by the British government.

### Early Life and Introduction to the Far Right

David Wulstan Myatt was born in 1950. He grew up partly in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where his father worked as a civil servant for the British colonial administration. The family also spent time in the Far East, where Myatt studied martial arts and, by his own account, developed an early interest in Greek, Sanskrit, logic, astronomy, and philosophy.

Returning to England, Myatt became involved in neo-Nazi politics while still in secondary school. By the late 1960s he was a member of Colin Jordan's British Movement, one of the leading neo-Nazi organizations in Britain at the time. He remained in the British Movement until approximately 1974, when he broke with Jordan and co-founded a splinter organization.

### Criminal Record: 1970s Convictions

The earliest documented criminal record for Myatt relates to violent racial attacks in the early 1970s while he was active in the neo-Nazi movement in Leeds, England. Two separate terms of imprisonment have been documented from this period.

The first arose from a "Paki-bashing" incident in which Myatt led a gang of skinheads in a racially motivated violent attack. He was identified as the gang leader and sentenced to imprisonment. The second term followed from activities connected to his co-founding of the National Democratic Freedom Movement (NDFM) with Eddy Morrison in late 1973 or early 1974. Police from the Yorkshire Regional Crime Squad raided Myatt's attic flat in Leeds and arrested him along with three other gang members. Myatt and Morrison were held on remand because investigators believed they would intimidate witnesses. The NDFM is described in published accounts as a "notoriously violent group" whose activities ended when Myatt was jailed. No BAILII entry for these cases has been located in open-source search, consistent with the fact that Crown Court records from the early 1970s predate BAILII's systematic coverage.[^1]

### Combat 18 and the National Socialist Movement

After a period of reduced public visibility, Myatt re-emerged in the British neo-Nazi scene in the early 1990s, becoming active in paramilitary and neo-Nazi circles including Column 88 and [Combat 18](/organizations/combat-18/). The Observer newspaper later identified him as the "ideological heavyweight" behind Combat 18, a neo-Nazi group with documented links to murders and serious violence in Britain and continental Europe.[^2] Nick Lowles characterises him in *White Riot* as "one of Britain's foremost post-war national socialist thinkers."[^3]

The split that created the National Socialist Movement (UK, 1997) emerged directly from the [Charlie Sargent](/people/charlie-sargent/) murder crisis. In early 1997, ITV's World in Action programme claimed that Sargent, then on remand for murder, had acted as a paid informant for the police. While Sargent was disowned by part of the C18 rank and file, his brother Steve Sargent remained loyal and, together with Myatt, led approximately fifty like-minded members away from C18 to found the NSM in June 1997. Steve Sargent served as the NSM's propaganda director and produced its magazine, *White Dragon*. David Myatt was the NSM's first leader.[^3]

Myatt resigned as NSM leader in March 1998 following his Metropolitan Police Service SO12 counter-terrorism arrest (see below). He was succeeded by Tony Williams, a former member of the International Third Position. Under Williams's leadership, the NSM recruited David Copeland in early 1999. Copeland, then living in Fleet, Hampshire, was appointed NSM Southern Regional Organiser. A letter from Williams welcomed him "into leadership, responsibility and accountability to your comrades."[^4]

In 1998, while serving as NSM leader, Myatt called publicly for "the creation of racial terror with bombs," a statement documented by the BBC's *Panorama* programme.[^5] During this period, Myatt wrote "A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution," a text the British government subsequently classified as a terrorist manual.

### The SO12 Investigation and Non-Prosecution

In February 1998, detectives from the Metropolitan Police Service's SO12 counter-terrorism branch raided Myatt's home in Worcestershire and removed computers and files. He was arrested on suspicion of incitement to murder and incitement to racial hatred in connection with his posting of "A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution" on a website operated by Bernard Klatt in British Columbia, Canada, in November 1997. The case was referred to Interpol, the FBI, and Canadian police services for a three-year international investigation. It was eventually dropped because the evidence supplied by the Canadian authorities was assessed as insufficient to secure a conviction.[^4]

The question of why Myatt was never prosecuted for terrorism is not fully answered in the public record. The documented facts are: (a) he published texts classified as terrorism manuals; (b) one of those texts was found in the possession of a man who killed three people; (c) he was investigated for incitement to murder and incitement to racial hatred in 1998 but the case was dropped; (d) he published explicit calls for "racial terror with bombs" while NSM leader; (e) his former organisation, Combat 18, was proscribed in 2020 under S.I. 2020/200; (f) O9A, attributed to him as Anton Long, was not proscribed in the UK as of mid-2026 despite members being convicted of terrorism offences. No official explanation for the absence of terrorism prosecution has been published.[^6]

### David Copeland and the "Practical Guide"

Copeland obtained and studied Myatt's "A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution," which he had downloaded from the internet. A copy was found in his flat by police after the bombings. The document contained chapter headings including "Assassination," "Terror Bombing," and "Racial War" and, according to Michael Whine of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, "provided a detailed step-by-step guide for terrorist insurrection with advice on assassination targets, rationale for bombing and sabotage campaigns, and rules of engagement."[^7]

Copeland detonated three nail bombs in London between 17 and 30 April 1999, targeting the Brixton Black community market, Brick Lane's Bangladeshi community, and the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho. Three people died at the Admiral Duncan: John Light, Nick Moore, and Andrea Dykes together with her unborn child. 139 people were injured across the three attacks. Copeland was convicted on 30 June 2000 at the Old Bailey of three counts of murder and three charges of planting bombs and sentenced to six life terms. In March 2007, the High Court set his minimum tariff at 50 years.[^8]

[Searchlight Magazine](/organizations/searchlight-magazine/) and BBC *Panorama* conducted a joint investigation that documented the links between Copeland and the NSM and the extent to which he had been influenced by Myatt's writings. Despite this documented chain from Myatt's published text to Copeland's stated motivation to three deaths, no charges against Myatt arose from the Copeland case. His February 1998 investigation had already been dropped by the time the bombs were placed in April 1999.[^4]

### The Order of Nine Angles and Anton Long

Scholars who have studied O9A in depth almost uniformly attribute the Anton Long pseudonym to Myatt. The argument rests on several independent lines of evidence. First, the anti-fascist magazine [Searchlight Magazine](/organizations/searchlight-magazine/) identified Myatt as Anton Long in 1998, at a point when no sophisticated counter-narrative had been constructed. Second, the philosophical concepts shared between Myatt's neo-Nazi writings and O9A texts are highly specific and numerous, including the concept of an "acausal" realm, a theory of history organized into distinct "aeons," advocacy for space colonization as a long-term racial project, and the design and rules of "the Star Game." Third, both bodies of work emerged from the same West Midlands and Welsh Marches neo-Nazi milieu in the 1970s, the documented time and place of O9A's formation. Fourth, Myatt's writing style under his own name is consistent with the long prose of Anton Long's O9A texts in ways that stylometric analysis has reinforced.[^9]

The scholarly consensus as of 2026 is that Myatt authored the O9A corpus under the pseudonym Anton Long, though this has not been established in a legal proceeding. The evidentiary trajectory is significant: early attributions (Searchlight, April 1998) were dismissed as unsubstantiated; mid-period scholarly work by Jacob C. Senholt (thesis, 2013) contributed the most rigorous stylometric and biographical evidence; and in 2016, sociologist of religion Massimo Introvigne noted that in the face of Senholt's and others' evidence, O9A itself had "more or less acknowledged that 'Anton Long' was a 'nom de plume' of Myatt."[^9] That quasi-admission from the organisation itself is the strongest available piece of evidence short of a direct confession, since it is the one concession O9A had persistently refused to make for decades.

Scholars Introvigne, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Clive Henry, Senholt, and Andrew G. Palella all conclude Myatt is Long. Jeffrey Kaplan's 1998 position (separate individuals) was softened in his 2000 writing and has not been the majority scholarly view for some time.[^9]

The detailed ideological content of O9A, including the Seven Fold Way, Insight Roles, and the nexion structure, is documented in the [Order of Nine Angles](/organizations/order-of-nine-angles/) vault entry.

### Conversion to Islam: Documented Details

Myatt converted to Islam at Jamia Masjid Ghousia in Worcester on 6 September 1998, with his Shahadah witnessed by Hafiz Mohammad Tufail and Qadi Abdur Sa'ouf. He subsequently attended prayers at mosques in Worcestershire for many years. As a Muslim he operated under two documented pseudonyms: Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt and Abdul al-Qari. He travelled and spoke in Arab countries and wrote what is characterised as one of the most detailed defences in the English language of Islamic suicide operations. He expressed support for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, described the Holocaust as a "hoax," and argued that the jihadist distinction between Muslims and unbelievers superseded racial categories.[^10]

At a UNESCO conference on antisemitism in Paris in 2003, researchers stated that Myatt "has converted to Islam, praises bin Laden and al Qaeda, calls the 9/11 attacks 'acts of heroism,' and urges the killing of Jews."[^10] He continued contact with former neo-Nazi associates during this period and advocated ideological alliances between neo-Nazis and Islamists, a position consistent with both his Nazi and Islamist frameworks.

British intelligence monitored Myatt during the Islamic period, according to multiple secondary accounts, but no prosecution or restriction order arose from that monitoring.[^2]

### The "Numinous Way" and Claimed Renunciation

Myatt's departure from Islam and extremism is best characterised as gradual. His July 2010 autobiography *Myngath* contained content that did not clearly renounce his Muslim identity. A post on his Islamist weblog in September 2010 re-affirmed Muslim identity even while doubts were developing. By 2011, he had fully articulated what he called the "Numinous Way" (or *pathei-mathos* philosophy), an apolitical personal framework centred on empathy, humility, and what he terms the "numinous." He has lived as a private individual in rural England since approximately 2010-2011 and maintains an active personal blog at davidmyatt.wordpress.com, with posts documented as recently as March 2026.[^11]

Researchers and law enforcement officials have treated this claimed renunciation with skepticism, noting that O9A texts continued to circulate under the Anton Long name during and after this period, and that Myatt offered no explanation for the O9A authorship question consistent with an innocent reading. The Counter Extremism Project listed Myatt as one of the twenty most dangerous extremists in the world as of 2021, on the basis that his published writings continue to circulate and influence violent actors.[^12]

### Documented Influence

Regardless of whether Myatt authored the O9A corpus, his documented writings under his own name have been found in the possession of perpetrators of political violence across multiple countries and decades. The specific mechanisms of influence include: direct circulation of his neo-Nazi essays through Combat 18 and NSM channels; the distribution of "A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution"; and, if the attribution to Anton Long is accepted, the entire O9A theological and initiatory structure, including the Insight Roles doctrine, that subsequently shaped [Atomwaffen Division](/organizations/atomwaffen-division/), [Tempel ov Blood](/organizations/tempel-ov-blood/), and the broader radicalization pipeline running through Terrorgram into the [764](/organizations/764-network/) ecosystem.

[^1]: Notes From The Borderland (Larry O'Hara). "Combat 18 and MI5: Some Background Notes." borderland.co.uk. Confirmed: Darren Wells (McKenzie) as the documented Special Branch informant; the NDFM period and Myatt's imprisonment confirmed in Eddy Morrison obituary, Heritage and Destiny, 2020.
[^2]: The Observer (UK). Referenced in: Counter Extremism Project. "Order of Nine Angles." https://www.counterextremism.com/supremacy/order-nine-angles
[^3]: Lowles, Nick. *White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18.* Milo Books, 2001.
[^4]: Searchlight Magazine. "25 years on: The hunt for the London nailbomber," April 2024. https://searchlightmagazine.com/2024/04/25-years-on-the-hunt-for-the-london-nailbomber/; Internet Archive, "A Short Biography of David Myatt," ia600102.us.archive.org.
[^5]: BBC *Panorama*. 1998 broadcast. Referenced in: Religion Media Centre. "Factsheet: The Order of Nine Angles." https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/factsheets/factsheet-nine-angles/
[^6]: Hansard, HC Deb, 13 July 2021, "Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism." https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-07-13/debates/673D4D8F-D90C-450B-B7E8-26B63018E5D3/PreventionAndSuppressionOfTerrorism
[^7]: Whine, Michael, Board of Deputies of British Jews. Quoted in multiple secondary accounts of the 1998 arrest.
[^8]: 1999 London nail bombings sentencing; High Court minimum tariff March 2007. PinkNews, "Soho bomber David Copeland loses appeal over sentence," July 2011. https://www.thepinknews.com/2011/07/01/soho-bomber-david-copeland-loses-appeal-over-sentence/
[^9]: Introvigne, Massimo. *Satanism: A Social History.* Brill, 2016; Tandfonline. "David Myatt's Imagined Emotionology, his Striving for Authentic Aryan Emotional Communities, and the Dishonourable Wulstan Tedder." 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14631180.2024.2319484
[^10]: UNESCO Paris conference 2003 statement; "Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt" conversion details. en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/9913622 (used as roadmap; primary source cited therein is UNESCO conference record).
[^11]: David Myatt blog, davidmyatt.wordpress.com. Most recent post retrieved: March 2026.
[^12]: Counter Extremism Project. "Order of Nine Angles." https://www.counterextremism.com/supremacy/order-nine-angles