Working at The Spectator brings you into contact with intriguing people. One who stands out is John R. Bradley. He started writing for this magazine in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, having accurately predicted the Egyptian uprising three years earlier in his 2008 book Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution.
If the West had assumed that democracy would follow the revolution, John believed otherwise, and instead suggested that Islamism would triumph across the Middle East. He quickly became an invaluable contributor to The Spectator. “The situation has developed almost exactly along the lines that John R. Bradley predicted,” wrote the editor, Fraser Nelson, in 2011.
John’s knowledge of the Middle East was impressive. He was fluent in Arabic and seemed prepared to write on matters others might feel were best avoided. In 2010, he published Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East, challenging the post-9/11 narrative that sexual repression was fueling Islamist extremism. “I offer a more nuanced account than is usually presented of the social world that shapes Arabs’ sex lives,” John wrote. “Rent boys are to be found everywhere in the Middle East, and homosexuality and prostitution are very much two sides of the same coin,” he told Salon magazine in 2010. “Gay sex is as ubiquitous as the call to prayer, and for many men, of course, bedding a boy is a far more appealing prospect than bending over in the mosque.”
His insights into Saudi Arabia were particularly sharp. From June 2001, he worked for the English-language daily newspaper Arab News and was one of the few western journalists with access to the kingdom. His experience culminated in his 2005 book Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis, which offered a comprehensive look into the nation’s internal dynamics. The book is dedicated to a man called Nicolas Buchele, who had also worked at Arab News. It was well received. The New York Times called it “a highly informed, temperate, and understanding account of a country,” in which Bradley mapped “the regional tensions and cultural distinctions that make Saudi Arabia much more diverse and complicated than the smooth propaganda of its government would allow.” Bradley was explicit in his criticism of the ruling elite.
That criticism came to a head in 2018, following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi on October 2. A week later, John wrote the cover piece for The Spectator: “Kingdom of blood: the truth about Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia.” In it, he wrote: “The Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife… Would the Saudis dare to cause him harm? It turns out that the answer to that question was ‘You betcha.’”
John had taken over from Khashoggi as managing editor at Arab News, so knew him well. He argued that Khashoggi, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a political Islamist until the end. The Saudi regime, seeing the Brotherhood as its greatest existential threat, had acted decisively. John’s piece was among the first to blame the Saudi leadership explicitly, but he also suggested that Khashoggi was no angel.
In it he asked: “How now to overlook what seems to be a brazen Mafia-style murder? ‘I don’t like hearing about it,’ said Donald Trump. ‘Nobody knows anything about it, but there’s some pretty bad stories going around.’ Well, there are plenty more stories where that came from, stories about a ruthless prince whose opponents have a habit of disappearing. The West has been fawning over [Prince Mohammed] bin Salman… The fate of Khashoggi is the latest sign of what’s really happening inside Saudi Arabia. For how much longer will our leaders look the other way?”
In early 2019, John’s email address became defunct, as did his phone number, and he seemed to go off the radar until he contacted us from two new email addresses. “Have been bogged down with problems with my son and all was quiet on the Middle Eastern front,” he wrote. When it was suggested somewhat in jest that we were concerned he might have ended up like Khashoggi, he wrote back: “They gave up on that plan about ten years ago.”
In one of John’s last articles for The Spectator, published on January 25, 2020, he reiterated his belief that the Arab Spring had benefited only the Islamists, but his tone seemed to have softened. “Ongoing calls for cultural and economic sanctions over the killing of Muslim Brotherhood operative Jamal Khashoggi are an abomination… Amid widespread regional despair, bin Salman is the last great Arab hope. In his bold modernization drive he has the support of an overwhelming majority of the Saudi population. It’s high time we gave him ours too.” John wrote a few more times for us until May 2020. Then we heard no more.
On November 27, 2020, our deputy editor, Freddy Gray, and I received an unexpected email from a man in Mexico called Adolfo, who rented a house to John. He was writing to inform us that John had died. Adolfo explained that John had fallen ill in early 2020 with dengue fever. He had lost weight and, by June, had developed kidney problems. His death was recorded as a heart attack.
What had happened in those final years of John’s life? At the time we were told of his death, with the world caught up in the turmoil of the pandemic, I hesitated to probe into the affairs of a man I had only ever known by email. He had cut contact with his family and was clearly very private.
John had, however, mentioned a paranoia about the enemies he might have made. In November 2015, he emailed me: “Sincere apologies for troubling you yesterday out of office hours. I have been saying that the moderates are not moderates for five years and in my paranoia feared my enemies were about to pounce!”
I have thought about John in the years since his death and the mystery that surrounds his life. Seeking clarity, I wrote to Adolfo. I also contacted Nicolas Buchele, to whom John had dedicated his book.
John arrived in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, a town near Guadalajara in western Mexico, sometime around 2016. Adolfo, who ran a shop selling cleaning supplies, recalled their first encounter: “John came in, asking if I knew of anywhere discreet to rent.”
John gave no indication as to where he had been before Mexico, although Nicolas suggested it was Medellín in Colombia. John’s Mexican visa for permanent residency was dated October 24, 2014. “The one good thing about my life is that I can avoid absolutely everyone, all of the time, which given my now complete lack of tolerance for absolutely everything is, I’ve decided, even preferable to the crushing loneliness it results in,” John wrote to Nicolas in 2014. Nicolas says that at the time John was also considering legally changing his name.
John lived a life of solitude in Mexico with his two dogs, Patch and Goldie. He would occasionally message Adolfo. “He was a good guy,” Adolfo says. “He was quiet about his business, though he would sometimes mention writing for The Spectator. He told me he had been in Saudi Arabia, and I don’t know what happened, but he said he didn’t want anyone to know where he was. I guess he was quite concerned. He was very reserved, very conservative. All the doors in his house were always closed. The house itself was secure, but he also built a fence at the entrance. He was always alone.”
John was alone when he died, and it was at least a week before his body was discovered. On October 8, 2020, authorities found him locked in a bathroom. The last reported sighting of him had been in mid-September. “The neighbors had been complaining about the smell. The police and firefighters had to break the door down. The dogs were found in a separate room, still alive,” Adolfo recounted.
The certificate from San Pedro crematorium confirms that John was cremated on November 13, 2020. Adolfo arranged a small funeral at a local church, attended by only a handful of people. “I know John was not religious, but I am, so I wanted to hold a ceremony for him,” Adolfo said.
None of John’s family could attend due to pandemic travel restrictions. British embassy officials contacted them, seeking authorization for the cremation. Adolfo recorded a video of the ceremony for John’s family.
Despite the family’s request for a postmortem examination, none was conducted. The British embassy facilitated the paperwork, and according to Adolfo, officials took possession of John’s laptop and phone. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office confirmed it had “assisted the family of a British man who died in Mexico in 2020 and were in contact with local authorities,” but declined to comment on the absence of a postmortem or whether some of John’s belongings were removed from the house.
Adolfo wrote to us at The Spectator because it was one of the few details John had shared. Adolfo’s son tracked down John’s family through a YouTube video, where a former schoolmate had left a comment: “I went to school with John — nice guy. He was always interesting as a young man, quite cool too.”
John’s older brother (whom Adolfo introduced me to) is Phil Bradley KC, a barrister, who specializes in homicide and serious crime. Phil had made repeated efforts to contact John over the years. “I attempted to get in touch and never succeeded. Then, out of nowhere, I was told John had died. We were told it was a heart attack, and we just couldn’t believe it… He was about fifty. I was really surprised to hear that John was in Mexico, because I thought he was based in the Middle East, though I didn’t know where.” On reflection, Phil wonders whether John’s work may have made him enemies but adds: “I don’t know if that would be strong enough for someone to want to kill him. But it did strike me as a strange way for him to die.”
Despite years of separation, Phil read much of his brother’s reporting on the Middle East. “He was an immensely talented man from a humble background who had done brilliantly well. We were so close as kids. I just thought it would be lovely to see him again and share our successes, given how difficult things were when we were young.” The brothers, along with three other siblings, had grown up in public housing in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Family life had been tough at times. After school, John had become estranged.
Nicolas provided more detail about John’s life thereafter. As well as working together at Arab News, they were fellow undergraduates at University College London. “John was always carrying round a huge stack of books… He had found some kind of benefactor, a middle-aged, middle-class lady. During his time at UCL, John lived in an all-male hall in Russell Square, which was said to be “haunted by homosexuals.” On his interest in the Middle East, Nicolas believes John was inspired by “a very gay tradition where all the stately queens of England in the twentieth century went to Marrakech.” John moved to Oxford to undertake a PhD on Henry James but “threw it in in a fit of rage. He fell out with everyone.”
John’s talent did not go unnoticed, however. Karl Miller, The Spectator’s former literary editor, founder of the London Review of Books and a professor at UCL, mentioned him in his literary memoir Dark Horses. The two met when John, as Miller put it, “submitted himself for a scholarship interview with the air of a man about to make a citizen’s arrest… More will be heard, I think, of the arresting John Bradley from Samuel Johnson’s Lichfield.”
As it turns out, John also played a pivotal role in encouraging Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s late Low Life columnist, to take up writing. In 2014, Jeremy recalled: “I used to sneak into English lectures at UCL. One day, an English student called John Bradley asked me to contribute to the London Review — a student literary magazine. I chose to review a handbook of ferret husbandry by the artisan hunter D. Brian Plummer… I’d never written anything other than school or college essays before, let alone had anything printed.” John told Jeremy that a UCL professor had enjoyed his piece and wanted to meet him. “Don’t be intimidated by his dour Scot persona,” John advised. “He’s actually quite funny.” John arranged the meeting, and the professor turned out to be Karl Miller himself, who, like John, encouraged Jeremy to write.
Miller, in turn, had encouraged John’s own writing. In his late twenties, John wrote the preface to a collection of essays on Henry James and homoerotic desire. “It should be made clear at the outset that there is no intention to claim James as a ‘gay novelist’ or to see his fiction as ‘gay fiction’,” he wrote. “Nor is there any suggestion that James was psychologically distressed about his homosexuality… he understandably did not wish to be compartmentalized.”
Similarly, I do not wish to compartmentalize John. However, elements of his life and his writing suggest that he was gay and, perhaps counterintuitively, found greater acceptance of his sexuality in the Middle and Far East. At one point, he was in a long-term relationship with a Singaporean man. In Saudi Arabia, he lived in the compound of a local Saudi man in a building that, as Nicolas puts it, “had the feeling of a knocking shop or where one took one’s mistresses… He had one friend, a very boring man called Samir, who would sometimes come round to his house. He liked the fact that in Saudi Arabia, there were ‘no women, no women.’” The revelation that John may have had a son was unexpected news for Adolfo. “It’s highly implausible,” says Nicolas. “Perhaps he adopted a young lad, in the way that gay men sometimes do.”
John also severed communication with Nicolas. In one of their last emails from 2014, John wrote that “people grow to hate you in direct proportion to the accolades you receive or the wisdom you spout. That’s the one eternal universal truth.” Nicolas, much like Phil, continued to read John’s writing for The Spectator, and noticed a shift in John’s tone on the Saudi elite in his final pieces. “He wasn’t the kind of man who felt he needed to personally apologize, unless either he changed his mind or had other reasons… maybe they got to him.”
There are a few details that suggest John was still looking to the future around the time of his death. In July 2020, he discussed rent payments with Adolfo: “Shall I pay you six months’ rent next week and we sign another one-year contract from July? That would be good for me, but if you want to wait until February [2021], that is also fine.”
He also revealed to Adolfo that he planned to go to Thailand once the dogs had died. The dogs now live with Adolfo, who has also kept John’s collection of books intact. “Everything else was destroyed by the authorities.” Among the books are Edward Gibbon’s The Christians and the Fall of Rome, On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Why I Am So Wise, of which the first line on the cover reads: “I know my fate.”
Whether John was aware of the direction his own fate was taking, we may never know. The Wikipedia page about John R. Bradley gives the impression that he is still alive. It feels important to note here that he is not. We miss his contributions to The Spectator. As for his enemies, are they relieved he is no longer writing? You betcha.
This article was originally published inThe Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.