I spent five years trying to understand Raoul Moat. This is what I learnt

Telegraph

27-03-2025

The second time I visited rehearsals for Manhunt, Robert Icke's new play about Raoul Moat, I couldn't watch. In an arts centre in Belsize Park - they'd moved from a previous rehearsal space due to the noise of a neighbouring musical - I sat on a blue plastic seat, averting my eyes from the actors, staring at a script, waiting for the scene to end.
Most of us develop a strategy to cope with conflict when we're children, a way to manage the noise and fear and uncertainty of what might happen next. In the rehearsal room, despite it being scripted, I instinctively returned to mine: head down, don't look, don't become the focus of the person who just did all that or, shamefully, the person who it was done to.
The scene ended. The room quietened. The actors became actors again. I looked up. A table had been broken, its legs snapped. Apologies were made. It wasn't supposed to happen, but also wasn't the first time. A new table was brought in, unpacked from a box, put on an imaginary stage marked out with red tape. More tables had already been ordered.
The atmosphere never returned to what it was before the explosion. Its after effects lingered for the rest of the day, all of us doing the things we were supposed to be doing, but knowing that something ugly and bad and threatening was still among us. As someone working on the play I felt relief: it meant Robert and the cast understood rage.
It was July 2010 when the Birtley gunman, as Moat initially called himself, left Durham prison. (He was arrested a dozen times in his life but found guilty just once – of hitting a child.) When released, he shot his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, who survived, and her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, who died. He then hid in a tent with two friends near Rothbury, a small village in Northumberland; a place he visited as a child and fantasised about living one day.
The next night they drove back to Newcastle where Moat shot a police officer, David Rathband. He was blinded and later killed himself. Moat and his friends returned to Rothbury and camped out for another couple of days. His friends went on shopping trips, they cooked food on a barbecue, they visited McDonalds and ate ice cream.
After four nights, police discovered their hideout. Moat's accomplices were arrested and later sentenced to a minimum of 20 and 40 years in prison. Moat went on the run by himself, hiding in the trees and crags of Northumberland. Snipers, helicopters, sniper jets, police dogs and Ray Mears looked for him. He was found by a woman walking on the bank of the River Coquet.
Police surrounded him, so he pointed his shotgun at his own head. For hours a negotiator tried to persuade him to give himself up. Moat said he would never be released from prison, so wasn't coming in. The police fired two experimental, non-licensed taser projectiles at him. One missed. The other hit him but didn't seem to work. Moat then shot himself in the head.
I was living in London when it happened, a freelance writer looking for a story to turn into a book. In London, my media friends seemed sympathetic towards Moat, assuming he wasn't sufficiently looked after by 'the system': he never knew his dad, said his mum suffered poor mental health, and as an adult sought psychiatric help. In Newcastle, I found no sympathy, but a feeling of: 'I had a tough childhood and I didn't shoot anyone.'
That split seemed worth writing about, so I arranged to meet Angus Moat, Raoul's brother, then I moved back to Newcastle, my home town, and started years of research: attending the trial of his accomplices and Moat's inquest, interviewing people, hiking in Rothbury with Angus, listening to recordings, but most importantly reading documents.
There was a 'murder statement' Moat wrote on the run, a transcript of recordings Moat made on dictaphone tapes after the shootings, a transcript of the standoff, medical records, correspondence, hundreds of pages of documents from his home, plus the clandestine audio recordings he made in the years before his death, a sign of his paranoia.
When I started writing the book I was looking for answers: Were the police conspiring against him, as he claimed? Why did the police tell him he was in danger? Why was there no police recording of his final moments? Why was a warning he intended to harm his ex-girlfriend not passed on to her?
I think I found the answers I needed. I didn't find any conspiracy. I found lots of small failures, but nobody to blame other than Moat, a strong but diminished man who was unable to control his anger or stick to the facts, and whose decisions exacerbated his problems and ultimately ruined his life, as well as the lives of many others.
He once said he could do something amazing with his life, if only people like the police left him alone. I used that for the title of my book – You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] – in which I tried to examine his excuses, testing the limits of empathy, while ultimately holding him to account for the choices he made.
The book came out in 2016. Eight years later, Robert got in touch to say he'd read my book and was writing a play about Moat for the Royal Court, would I help him. I dusted off my USB drives and boxes of material, started corresponding with him, talking on the phone, explaining the material and the story, reading his drafts, offering advice.
It's not my play, it's Robert's, and there are big differences in how we tell the story. An obvious example is his decision to include Paul Gascoigne, who famously tried to reach Moat during the standoff. But more than that is the feeling a writer puts into a true crime story: what the writer thinks the crime can say to the audience about the world.
When I wrote my book, I went in expecting to write about the neglected north east of England, but when I saw Moat's victims or their relatives in court, then spent years reading and listening to his words, I saw only the story of an individual, whose brain misread inputs, who struggled to control impulse and ego, and whose dangerous body seemed bursting with testosterone.
Robert had his own feeling for what the story was about. The phrase I expect people will use, one I resist because it implies group culpability for individual actions, is toxic masculinity; or a crisis of masculinity. Robert's script makes that aspect unavoidable: boys, men, fathers, father figures, suicide, fear, confusion, and a failure of men to give each other what we need.
There is a trend, since I wrote my book, to focus on the victims and give the murderer no attention. I understand that, and I understand why people will be outraged that Moat is being put on stage. To me, however, the victims didn't do anything, something was done to them, so we don't learn from them. My natural focus is on the murderer, to try to understand one question: why.
Ultimately, Moat took lives; he destroyed flesh and bones and nerves. He did something that seems completely inhuman, despite him being human, just like us. That's what mesmerises us about true crime: we all have the ability to kill, but we continually choose not to. So what made Moat – and all the others – choose the other option?
From working on Robert's play, 15 years after I started my research, I began to feel that Moat believed there is a model of what a man should be, and he became his approximation of that, but when his creation was challenged, the rage came. What we want to know is: where did the rage come from, how can men control it, and how much does it control them?