North Korea's man in London

Dermot Hudson, a 63-year-old retired civil servant with wispy white hair and a faraway look in his eyes, is proudly showing me a T-34/85 Soviet tank in the Imperial War Museum — one of the few items in the permanent collection he considers unclouded by hostile propaganda. Due to the T-34’s light body and proficiency in cold weather, Hudson explains, they played a decisive role in the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. “And of course, the Korean People's Army of the DPRK used these in the Korean War, though later they developed their own tank industry, and they've got their own domestically built tanks.” 

Hudson loves to talk about North Korea. Put more simply: Hudson loves North Korea. In fact, I’m confident Hudson loves North Korea more than any other Londoner — probably more than some North Koreans. Though he doesn’t speak Korean, he’s travelled there 20 times, and he has presided over the UK branch of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA), a global solidarity outfit, since 2001. Over the course of his life, he’s become what, for the sake of expediency, is best referred to as London’s ‘North Korea guy.’ In 2017, his support was recognised by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), which awarded him an official state decoration: the order of friendship, second class. It was a big day for ‘Dr Dermot Hudson’, who received a DRPK-recognised doctorate from the Korean Association of Social Scientists in the history of — you guessed it — North Korea. 

Unfortunately for Hudson, his love of North Korea is mostly unrequited. Hudson’s other lifelong fixation has been a lasting compulsion to survey the UK’s windmills. After we meet, he excitedly emails me a picture of himself standing proud in front of a functional Dutch windmill. Of course, windmills don’t love you back either, but, as Hudson well knows, they come with a lot less baggage than a fervent dedication to a secretive totalitarian state. But London is used to people like Hudson; we’ve even reserved a section of Hyde Park specifically for political outliers. Besides, on a human level, I’m interested in how this kind of totalising advocacy takes hold, how someone like Hudson found himself, both literally and figuratively, 5,000 miles away in the secretive, rigidly maintained state of North Korea.