On David Irving

David Irving, the UK’s most well-known Holocaust denier, is dead.

I’ve always had a horrible fascination with Irving. A few years ago I was commissioned to write a short story inspired by Sky Yen, the first recorded piece of music by Pete Shelley who went on to form Buzzcocks. I can’t remember exactly how this led to me writing a story about two brothers, one of whom is an audio engineer and the other a professional Holocaust denier, but the latter was based on Irving and I made the character a pompous ham of gargantuan proportions, talking up his work on ‘the circuit’, as he calls the world of alternative history conferences, as though it were his panto season. There was something so compelling about someone who was so straightforwardly repellant.

Now he’s dead, there are two things I keep coming back to whenever I think of David Irving, or rather two people: his mother and his twin brother.

Irving’s mother Beryl was a children’s author and illustrator. Her novel The Dawnchild still has a small but devoted following. The tells the tale of Mignonette ‘Mig’ Macarthur, a lonely orphan who has been left in the charge of her wicked aunt, Belinda. Mig is awakened by a crow tapping at her window and calling her name, an encounter which leads her to meet The Dawnchild and embark on a series of adventures culminating in an affecting reunion with her parents. The story is one of good triumphing over evil - and life triumphing over death - and, like all good childnren’s books, is coloured with humor, magic, and palpable terror.

Nicholas Irving, David’s twin brother, worked as a civil servant, eventually changing his name to avoid any association with the Irving name. He did, however, occasionally give an interview, such as this one from 2006 which I remember well as I found it (and still do find it) quietly devastating. The David Irving which emerges in this piece is simply a monster: he is vain, cruel, enthralled by scandal and notoriety, guided by pure ego and unremittingly preening. What’s heartbreaking about it though is how entirely overshadowed Nicholas, 67 at the time, clearly feels by his life to have been by his brother’s. ‘The only time I came first,’ he says, ‘was when I popped out of the womb at 5pm and David 10 minutes later. He was supposed to be first, but we shifted before the birth. When I was born I had the umbilical cord around my neck. I've often wondered if that was David trying to hold me back.’

What I find perhaps most unsettling is when his Nicholas says, ‘David never wanted the little life: he embraced the big, the exciting, the shocking’.

I find myself thinking about this quite often, about how all of that compassion - you can see, I think, a care and a gentleness in his mother’s illustrations - was paid back with its inverse, a life given over not just to cruelty but to a primping and theatrical form of cruelty. David Irving made himself a millionaire through lying about the Holocaust. His pursuit of success in the ecosystem of Nazi apologism, a future echo perhaps of what was to come, blighted the lives of those around him and polluted entirely the achievements of his mother. All of this is an aside to those who suffered the Holocaust, the millions of victims, survivors and their friends, family members and loved ones whose experiences Irving spent a long lifetime debasing.

‘David, what on earth are you doing?’ Nicholas declares at the ends the interview. ‘And what on earth would Mother think?'

This, I think, more than the Holocaust denial itself, is what disturbs me most about Irving as a phenomenon: the knowledge that there are times when it seems as though the universe, through some inexplicable aberrance, will produce personalities like Irving who appear to guided by a kind of wayward malevolence, and all the love in the world can’t prevent it from happening.