Tom Palmer, alias Agent Kingfisher, alias Johnny Teatent, died in August last year. Officially, he was a troubled young man with paranoid schizophrenia who believed spies had infiltrated London\u2019s activist underworld and were watching him at every step. Unofficially, there are those who claim he was assassinated by the state. His name is still scrawled across the walls of London\u2019s squats, chanted at demos, screamed at police. But his friends, family and lovers tell me that neither account will suffice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I first began chasing the memory of Agent Kingfisher through the netherworld of London, I was seeking answers to two questions: how did the carceral mental health system fail Tom?<\/em> and What would a society look like which would enable people like Tom Palmer to live?<\/em> But these questions left much unsaid. Though Tom\u2019s life was hard and his death tragic and he was mentally ill and he abused drugs, he was no passive victim or melancholy outcast. The man I meet through the words of his friends is the semi-mythologised icon of a ramshackle counter-culture, a crack-smoking Don Quixote, a Messiah with athlete\u2019s foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I thought I pitied Tom, but he viewed the workaday world with a pity bordering on contempt. I thought people like Tom needed help, but Tom gave up his mental and physical health in solidarity with others like him. I thought a more civilised world could have saved Tom\u2019s life, but his life and death were defined by an absolute refusal of society on any terms. So perhaps a better starting point would be the questions his ex-girlfriend Ellie puts to me in a South London Wetherspoons: ‘Did he mean nothing? Was he just having a joke, was he just trying to wind us up? Or did he mean something real?’<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer to all of these, I believe, is \u2018yes\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PC Mark Palin, armed officer 2387SO, was patrolling Westminster on a motorbike late at night on 4 July 2016 when he was ‘called to attend THAMES HOUSE, 12 MILLBANK, SW1, to reports of a known male urinating on the building.’ The known male was ‘TOM PALMER, also known as agent KINGFISHER, a regular on our daily intelligence briefings’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time of his death, Tom was out on bail and awaiting trial. ‘Without lawful excuse,’ the Crown Prosecution Service charge sheet intones, Tom ‘damaged the foyer of the MI5 building by urinating<\/a>\u2026 intending to damage or destroy such property or being reckless as to whether such property would be damaged or destroyed’. In the box where Tom was supposed to put his signature, an officer has printed: ‘INCAPABLE.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom, an incapable drunk of no fixed abode, made himself a regular matter of national security. ‘He was totally fearless,’ says another girlfriend, Sylvia. ‘He didn\u2019t have any inhibitions about anything. He didn\u2019t give a fuck. He would always be the one who got arrested.’ Tom was once handcuffed on the red carpet of a James Bond premiere, and his friend Danny recounts a tale which culminates in their arrest outside Scotland Yard, Danny stark naked and Tom in drag as another alter-ego of his, Jenny Rimjob. He would carry three books with him everywhere he went in a shoulder-bag, in case he had to spend the night in a cell \u2013 spy thrillers and conspiracy theories, mostly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could have been there, also ‘smelling strongly of alcohol’ as the police report recounts, pissing onto the steely neoclassical arch, being placed into an entangled armlock by PC 2387SO. Tom and I went to the same school, a grammar in the West Midlands, and we both despised it in our separate ways. In 2014, I published an article accusing the school of institutionalising racism, sexism and homophobia in its smug, blazered students. Tom messaged me on Twitter to say he approved of the piece, and we struck up a small correspondence online. Soon he was inviting me down to MI5, to ‘protest about surveillance and infiltration and extrajudicial murder and shit, and have some drinks and that.’ I declined, as I did a subsequent invitation to join him on hunger strike. And that was the last I heard of him, until I opened the paper and saw that he was dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Tom, I felt restless and ill at ease through all my school years: like Tom, I moved down to London and swept into the world of radical politics and protest I had ogled for years from my market hometown. Like Tom, I have swerved close to death while abusing drink and drugs. Though I am perhaps \u2018healthier\u2019 and more \u2018stable\u2019 than Agent Kingfisher, news of his death rattled me. Tom wasn\u2019t pictured on his Twitter account, and I\u2019d always imagined him as a craggy wino somewhere north of fifty, but I now realised he was only a little older than I was. Though I had no memory of him, we\u2019d been at school together for a year. Grubby, translucent, his Daily Mail<\/em> mugshot<\/a> stared back at me like my own unwashed ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I meet Tom\u2019s friends for the first time at a drunken vigil outside Thames House, it does not seem appropriate to intrude, or even speak. Members of his squatting crew ANAL, the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians, mill around drinking and playing guitar and obstructing the police in their inquiries. A tearful girl with a bawling baby on her hip seals tea-lights to the doorstep with their own liquid wax, and a sole can of Polish beer in the centre of the shrine catches and reflects their light. Urine runs down the walls. I continue to pad quietly around the fringes of Tom\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pigs are trying to place the shrine in an evidence bag. They seem uncertain, on edge, and retreat several times to confer before demanding ANAL clean up and clear out. Wild-eyed, an anarchist named Tank swallow-dives into the litter of shoplifted beer-cans. ‘I\u2019m tidying up, officer!’ he cries. Rain squalls in across the blackened river, and breakbeat resounds from a boombox lashed to a pushchair. ANAL dragged the same sound system up to Tom\u2019s funeral in Staffordshire, and very nearly brought into his inquest. Certain noises are best drowned out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As ANAL shamble into retreat, Tank catches the condescending eye of a community liaison officer. ‘MI5 killed Tom Palmer!’ he howls. Then he drops his head and mutters, sotto voce: ‘actually, it was drugs.’ This is the playfulness which the coroner failed to grasp, and which was totally effaced by the reprehensible Daily Mail<\/em> article<\/a>, which uses every sordid trick in the hack\u2019s toolbox to imply there was something suspicious about Tom\u2019s simple overdose. (Tom\u2019s friends say he would have found the article hilarious, with its coy references to an ‘unexplained death’ and ‘run-ins with real and fictional spooks’.) Death is a black sun which blinds the direct gaze, and in part the MI5 patter is a way for Tom\u2019s friends to sublimate their rage and grief into a steaming jet of urine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But there are deeper concerns at play here. In a communiqu\u00e9<\/a> published after Tom\u2019s death, ANAL assert: ‘The state effectively kills democracy by killing the opposition. We don\u2019t know how he died, but we do know who killed him\u2026 The STATE\/ aka M15.’ These words are not a mere mechanism of psychological defence. Without taking the ‘delusional belief system’ of Agent Kingfisher seriously, you cannot understand the importance of that shoplifted bacchanal as the rain pissed down on slate-grey Millbank, and you cannot really understand why Tom Palmer died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom was first referred to the mental health services aged 10, for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and was prescribed lithium soon after. His home-spun midlands mother, Judy, tells the coroner her son was ‘always very chaotic and very active,’ that he was ‘extremely intelligent’ but ‘struggled to get his thoughts in order’, that his handwriting was terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though he made a couple of tilts at university, Tom dropped out both times, and by 2011 he had moved into the Occupy encampment<\/a> outside St. Pauls\u2019 cathedral. ‘He was a leading light,’ Judy says in court, pulling her lilac shrug around herself and smiling a little. ‘He took responsibility with the food. He always enjoyed feeding people\u2026’ her voice tails off. ‘I\u2019m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I\u2019m a little nervous.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n Isobel Williams, who was there with Tom at Occupy, wrote in her diary<\/a>: ‘[Tom] has built a barricade out of inner-city detritus, aspiring to a glorious last stand against the bailiffs. I think of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys without a Wendy.’ Former girlfriend Ellie recalls seeing Tom rampage through this ‘giant fort’ at Finsbury Square<\/a>, which she says grew so unruly it was the only site disowned by the wider Occupy movement in the UK. ‘Establishing rules within a fucking revolt,’ she says with a grimace. ‘What the fuck. So British.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the fort could not withstand the sweeping tides of global capital, and Occupy was swept aside in a tumult of acrimony, arrests and missed opportunities. ‘Tom went and lived in a tent for months, and actually expected the revolution to happen,’ Sylvia tells me as we drink in another squat elsewhere in the city. Formerly a high-fashion model, she has now hacked her hair down close to her pallid skin, and wears a billowing Sea Shepherd hoodie emblazoned with a peeling skull-and-crossbones. ‘In his analysis, which was actually a pretty accurate analysis\u2026 it didn\u2019t happen because of the spies.’ It was here that the seeds of Tom\u2019s madness and death were sown, as his paranoia intersected with reality. Before there could be any revolution, he realised, the undercover cops \u2013 who really were present at Occupy<\/a> \u2013 had to be weeded out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom saw spies everywhere: in Wetherspoons, in the street, in the squats. He accused his sister, his girlfriends and virtually all of his fellow squatters<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom and his baby brother look much alike, though Chris is milder in manner and tone, and a septum piercing sits oddly against the soft lines of his face. He says: ‘Tom\u2019s belief\u2026 was that there are spies everywhere trying to support the system and keep people like this down.’ He gestures around the squat we sit in, at the punks and freaks and insurrectionaries and shivering spice addicts and grim-faced veterans of a thousand bailiff wars, at its walls daubed with the slogans ‘I <3 Tom Palmer’ and ‘all your allies are spies’. The 2012 eviction of Finsbury Square, which was the last Occupy site left standing, felt to Tom like a victory of ‘the system’ over ‘people like this’. As he searched for reasons to explain this crushing failure, his gaze turned on the activist movement itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Occupy\u2019s collapse came as issues of privacy, security and espionage were being driven to the forefront of the liberal consciousness by Wikileaks. In a statement Tom prepared to deliver to a mental health tribunal following an arrest several years ago, and still available to read in full<\/a> on his blog Anarchesque Boilerplate, he writes: ‘As for the prevalence of spies I think this has been taken to being a negative persecutory belief, when it is just an expression of the increased securitisation of all facets of life.’ He cites Edward Snowden, the detention of investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald\u2019s partner David Miranda, the \u2018blue chip\u2019 hacking scandal<\/a> in which FTSE100 companies hired corrupt private investigators. Such concerns could be found in any Guardian<\/em> column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But things changed. Another friend, Anthony Timmins, says dealing with Tom towards the end of his life was like handling a newborn rabbit: ‘It\u2019s closing its eyes and it\u2019s terrified but it also wants to be petted. They love you, but their whole instinct is “Oh my god, this person is going to kill me.”‘ Tom saw spies everywhere: in Wetherspoons, in the street, in the squats. He accused his sister, his girlfriends and virtually all of his fellow squatters of being undercover agents sent to frustrate his attempts to build world revolution, in a narcissistic delusion typical of paranoid schizophrenia. In this video<\/a> he gets arrested for spitting at an activist he identifies as an undercover cop, while these court documents<\/a> were served after he smashed another Occupy protester\u2019s phone, believing him to be a pig or a Blackwater employee. When he first met Sylvia, he reasoned she must also be a spy, because she always got away unscathed when shoplifting wine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In later years, Sylvia says, Tom thought ‘everyone else was working for the government in some way or another. He reckoned it was just me and him and [a friend named] Vinny who were the only real revolutionaries. So I was like OK, the whole of the resistance is smoking crack under a bridge… this is going to work.’ He dropped out of the squats where he had made a transient home, at one point broke up with Sylvia after she cautiously questioned his beliefs, and rejected his friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘When we got really close, I was always in and out of psychotic episodes,’ says Ellie, the ex-girlfriend. Her manner is still scatty and distracted. She swats at her dangling earrings and does not quite look me in the eye. ‘And Tom was really embracing [his delusions] which is great but also terrifying\u2026 he wasn\u2019t scared of being arrested and sectioned anymore.’ She observes that one function of espionage is to breed paranoia and mistrust among allies \u2013 and Tom\u2019s activism was compromised to the point of uselessness by the fear of the spies he thought were ruining activism. Ellie broke up with Tom as well, as part of a general retreat from the front line of activist life to live with her parents and attend to her own fragile mental health. By the end, Ellie says, she was unsure whether she herself was a spy or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For several months prior to Tom\u2019s death, he and Danny lived with a remarkable man known as \u2018Sir Christopher\u2019, a degenerate old queen who spends his days sitting in state like some decadent fin-de-si\u00e8cle aristocrat drinking cheap white wine, consorting with rent boys, and crank-calling the police to complain about the coterie of drop-outs who pass daily through his Pimlico flat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘I\u2019m an old queer, but I love my sons,’ Sir Christopher tells me, in gravelly tones which slur between camp and cockney. ‘Danny, Tom, and [another friend named] Benjamin. They\u2019re highly educated, they\u2019re all bums, and they want the clouds to open so someone gives them money.’ We drink five bottles of wine between us in two hours, yet he is derisory about the attitude of his ‘his sons’ to drink and drugs. ‘They just don\u2019t care,’ he barks. ‘They\u2019re silly boys and they\u2019ll take anything free that\u2019s going. They don\u2019t know what they\u2019re bloody taking.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n He recalls watching Tom drink an entire bottle of benylin \u2013 an over-the-counter cough syrup laced with codeine \u2013 mixed with a little tonic water, and vomit his guts up. By all accounts Tom was a heavy drinker, though the figure he reported to his GP of 80 units a week does not seem severely excessive \u2013 six cans of lager a night, or a couple of big binges and some tinnies here and there along the way. ‘No revolution without street drinking,’ he used to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘It\u2019s horrible that he\u2019s gone, but I don\u2019t think he\u2019d be dissatisfied with his story. He\u2019d say “I\u2019m pleased with that, that\u2019s a really rock and roll kind of ending.”‘<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I first meet Ellie, she does not know the full details of Tom\u2019s death. Sweetly hesitant, almost plaintive, she asks: ‘how much of\u2026 that\u2026 did he take? Was it too much?’ Though Tom rarely touched hard drugs, on the night of his death he and Danny had been drinking all day at a street party and Tom had just come into some money. He disappeared off and rematerialized with baggies of crack cocaine and heroin. Danny had not seen Tom use either drug before, and believes he had only taken heroin once or twice. He was smoking crack but snorting the harder drug \u2013 an inadvisable method, which makes it hard to control the dosage. In oddly stagey, pantomimed tones, the coroner reads a statement from the man whose flat Tom died in: ‘I said to him, that\u2019s not a good idea. He replied, “I am a big man”.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the eyewitness to his final hours Danny is the only one of Tom\u2019s friends granted permission to address the court, and as he takes the stand he seems cowed by the weight of responsibility. ‘I was literally there, so I know what happened,’ he says, defiant and gently Scouse. ‘We always used to sleep top and tail, and when I woke up I just thought he was asleep.’ Danny went for a shower, but when he came back Tom was still immobile: ‘I said Tom “wake up, wake up”. I slapped him twice round the face. I opened his eyelids but his eyes weren\u2019t there. And he was gone after that.’ The paramedics arrived, pronounced him dead, and carted him out into the street \u2013 naked apart from a blanket, and a pair of women\u2019s knickers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At my lowest points, I enter a mindset which is not precisely suicidal. It is more that I am wilfully unconcerned with living or taking care of myself \u2013 a kind of terminal recklessness. As he drifted from squats onto the streets of Camden, I imagine Tom may have experienced something similar, a hastening resignation to oblivion. Ellie says she ‘watched him do a lot of sketchy-arse things that could have got him killed and he always bounced back\u2026 but you can\u2019t keep playing Russian Roulette forever.’ Danny says Tom was increasingly self-mythologizing in his final months, scrawling his \u2018Agent Kingfisher\u2019 pseudonym on walls everywhere he went: ‘He used to say strange things to me, like \u2018are you ready to die? I am.\u2019 I don\u2019t think he was suicidal but I think he had a vision of what was going to happen.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n That said, Tom\u2019s friends all make it clear that he loved life, and that his death was nothing but inevitable chance, the law of averages reaching a cold hand down from on high to stop his heart. ‘If he wasn\u2019t schizophrenic\u2026 he could have done anything,’ Sylvia says. ‘He was confident and smart and had the spirit and the will. It\u2019s easy to be completely destroyed by it all, but he never was. He was still up for the fight, every day. He didn\u2019t ever seem depressed, he had lots of energy. His ideology didn\u2019t discourage him at all.’ Far from preparing for the end, he was planning a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, and frenetically preparing for his court case over the pissing-on-MI5 incident, where he planned to lay out his critique of state espionage in full.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘It\u2019s horrible that he\u2019s gone, but I don\u2019t think he\u2019d be dissatisfied with his story,’ Ellie muses. ‘He\u2019d say “I\u2019m pleased with that, that\u2019s a really rock and roll kind of ending”.’ Danny tells me that Tom was desperate to join Kurt Cobain, Jimmy Hendrix and Amy Winehouse in the \u201827 club\u2019 of celebrities who overdosed at that age and laughs blackly at the irony of friend\u2019s death occurring just six months too late. He also mocks the idea that MI5 crept into the filthy shooting den where Tom racked up drugs for the final time and slipped poison into his narcotics \u2013 as does Sir Christopher. ‘He fucking died,’ the hoary old lush growls. ‘He took too many drugs and he fucking died.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n Admitting that generalised structural critiques are ‘beyond the scope of this enquiry’, the coroner limits herself to criticising the way the mental health services handled Tom\u2019s specific case, citing missed appointments and opportunities to intervene. Sylvia acknowledges that the mental health services ‘were starting to wash their hands of Tom’, while his brother blames government cuts to research and support funding. But in their communiqu\u00e9 about Tom\u2019s death, ANAL sharply reject the idea that the mental health system could ever have saved their comrade: ‘We do not believe the mental health system failed him. We believe the mental health system is a failure. He did not slip through the net. He ripped a hole in it and tried to escape.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shivering before the court, Tom\u2019s mother is asked when and why the police referred him on to the mental health services. I think of Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, the French critical theorist who sees the literal police force as the \u2018petit\u2019 police, part of a broader system of social control and consensus, which he describes as \u2018police\u2019 in its entirety \u2013 voting booths, mental hospitals, ‘the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved.’ To Ranci\u00e8re, the only real politics is the \u2018dissensus\u2019 of people disrupting the social order he terms \u2018the police\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom admittedly found the mental health services a softer touch than the police, and sought referral as an alternative to jail time. But fundamentally, as Sylvia says, ‘he really was mad.’ He was sectioned three times, and increasingly came to view the mental health services as the weak arm of the law. In the plea he prepared while incarcerated in a mental institution, he cites an undergraduate politics textbook making a point as much Hobbesian as anarchistic: ‘an essential feature of a sovereign state is that it monopolizes the use of legitimate force \u2013 it controls the military and the police. A state requires a coercive capability to maintain law and order.’ He links this comment to the Mental Health Act 1983, ‘used\u2026 to keep political prisoners’. The mental health services do not collude with the police: they are the police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the various mechanisms of restraint employed by the mental health service, the two bluntest are sedation and incarceration. Tom\u2019s mother says the antipsychotic drugs he was prescribed ‘dulled his senses, took his spark’; he claimed they sometimes made him impotent. As we pass red wine and a drooping spliff around the squat and talk about meds, it seems virtually all of Tom\u2019s friends have been prescribed the drugs Sylvia describes as ‘eugenic’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sylvia and I discuss RD Laing, the so-called acid Marxist and High Priest of anti-psychiatry, who considered schizophrenia ‘as a way of moving the family’s and society’s problems onto one person who is scapegoated.’ (Her words, not Laing\u2019s). What she takes from this is not a refusal of paranoid schizophrenia\u2019s biological basis, but a sense that ‘people do not exist in a vacuum’, that ‘mental health is really political.’ Capital atomises our suffering, blames us and the so-called chemical imbalances in our brain, then flogs us SSRIs to recalibrate them. To Mark Fisher, the cultural theorist who committed suicide earlier this year, ‘the task of repoliticising mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This does not mean mental illness is simply something done to people by society: it is the product of the dialectic relationship between self and society, the dissensus between the two. Discussing those traumatised into madness<\/a> by the brutal violence of colonialism, Frantz Fanon writes: ‘The doctor intervenes in order to liberate the patient from this “foreign body”\u2026 In fact, it is not “foreign” at all. A conflict is only the result of the dynamic evolution of the personality, and here there can be no \u2018foreign body\u2019. We ought rather to say that the problem is one of a \u2018badly integrated body\u2019.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most valuable insight here is Ellie\u2019s. ‘The way my parents say I\u2019m out of psychosis is \u2018oh, you\u2019re back in the real world now,’ she says. ‘You have to go through this indoctrination of what is normal and what isn\u2019t normal.’ Our mental health system, which seeks to ‘integrate’ bodies into a system of production and reproduction and make them healthy subjects of capitalism, could never have cured someone like Tom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a perverse way, the same can be said of the anti-capitalist movements which were Tom\u2019s safe haven for so long. Ellie remembers him storming into squats with ‘no sexism, no homophobia, no racism’ scrawled across the wall, and daubing ‘NO ABLEISM’ below the familiar shibboleths. Safer spaces<\/a> structured to accommodate mental health problems like anxiety or depression struggled to make room for a loud-mouthed paranoid schizophrenic, and Tom was often thrown out of meetings. Being a \u2018good activist\u2019, after all, often simply means being a good worker. Resistance replicates the forms it struggles vainly to overthrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ellie was able to step outside of her own psychoses in a way that Tom was not, and seems to be managing her recovery well. But hearing her talk about months spent with Tom ‘running round central London’ cracking open squats and pretending to be spies, and the days she now spends hawking trinkets on a market stall for minimum wage, it is hard not to feel she is wistful for her former life. It is not just the healthcare system which is corrupted. Health itself is a capitalist concept, measured by ability to work, by days off sick, by the strength of one\u2019s arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘I was waiting till I was adequately better to go and talk to him,’ she recalls, as she shows me texts \u2013 about spies \u2013 from the week Tom died. ‘But I was waiting waiting waiting for the right moment, and now it\u2019s too late. I really fucking regret it.’ People talk about \u2018health and happiness\u2019, as though the two are not constantly opposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMI5 killed Tom Palmer<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Kingfisher3.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHeroin killed Tom Palmer<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The state killed Tom Palmer<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n