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'I honestly think,’ Bruce Robinson says, ‘I’ve nailed the horrible f***er.’ He points to the photograph on the desk. A Victorian gent. Moustachio’d, dressed in a black frock coat, silk trimming on the lapels; a black cravat with a decorative pin. A certain understated style. An artist of some sort, perhaps? The expression blandly neutral – although looking closely there is something a little unsettling in the gaze, a certain cold indifference. But perhaps that's one’s own projection.

So that, I say, is Jack the Ripper.

Robinson nods. ‘It is.’

Robinson is probably best known for writing and directing the film Withnail and I – a black comedy about two impecunious actors who go on holiday in the Lake District, ‘by mistake’. In 1985 he was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Killing Fields. More recently he scripted and directed The Rum Diary, starring his friend Johnny Depp.

But for much of the past 15 years he has been absorbed in an extraordinary – and, frankly, improbable – quest. The identity of the man who was responsible for the horrific murders of five women in the East End of London over a nine-week period in 1888 remains one of the great mysteries in British criminal history. Robinson would dispute the use of the word ‘mystery’ – the word he prefers is ‘scandal’. But he is convinced he has solved it.

Next week sees the publication of They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper. More than 800 pages in length, it is the fruit of intense, one might say obsessive, dedication. ‘I thought it would take me two years – a year to research and a year to write,’ Robinson sighs. ‘Had I known – truly known – then what I know now, I would never have started.’

Robinson lives with his wife Sophie in a 16th- century farmhouse set in a fold of gentle hills in the Welsh borders. They have two children, Willow, 22, a musician, and Lily, 29, an actress. A small stream runs past the front door. Sheep graze on a hill rising behind the house. In the back garden there is a swimming pool that, he jokes, was paid for by Steven Spielberg (Robinson wrote a script for a Spielberg project that became the film In Dreams).

Robinson’s writing room is in a converted barn opposite the house. It has the air of having being lived in. There are shelves crammed with books, smattered with yellow Post-it notes; bound volumes of Victorian periodicals; stacks of photocopies; box files. There is a bust of ‘Willie Shake’ and photographs of Charles Dickens and Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, son of Edward VII – one of the dozens of people who have been advanced as suspects in the case of Jack the Ripper. ‘Awful, awful twat,’ Robinson says. But definitely not Jack the Ripper.

He leans back in his battered swivel chair. Robinson was by his own admission ‘a pretty youth’ – a significant factor perhaps in his being cast as Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet in 1967, when he was first starting out as an actor. Now 69, he has the long, unruly greying hair of a 1970s rocker, and the foxed, time-worn looks and louche manner of a slightly disreputable cherub. Robinson does not own a computer. On the desk is the antique IBM Selectric on which he writes. He has five, which he uses in rotation; a man comes from Leicester to pick them up for servicing when they burn out. It used to be that when writing his screenplays he would feel the need to type the lines of dialogue to perfectly ‘justify’ right, thereby presenting a symmetrical block of text on the page – a process that would require endless tinkering (substituting, say ‘rose’ for ‘hyacinth’ to shorten a line).

He shakes his head. ‘Completely f***ing insane, but I did it for years.’ It is a habit he was obliged to abandon for They All Love Jack – ‘I’d have been writing it for ever.’

More than 100 books have been written about Jack the Ripper. Suspects have ranged from Lewis Carroll and Walter Sickert, to a motley assortment of wayward surgeons, lunatics and disgruntled husbands. But until now nobody has fingered the man whom Robinson calls ‘my candidate’ – a man who moved in the highest echelons of Victorian society, but who now barely ranks as a footnote – his obscurity in itself an intriguing clue to the ‘scandal’ of Jack the Ripper. But we shall come to that later.

'Ripperology’ is a cult that in recent years has become an industry, largely populated, as Robinson puts it, by ‘middle-aged men with disturbing expressions’. It is a world that, 15 years’ work notwithstanding, he is at pains to distance himself from. Robinson says he had no interest in Jack the Ripper, and even less in writing a book about the case, until a chance encounter in 2000. Pondering on writing a screenplay about Herbert Wallace, an insurance agent who was found guilty of the murder of his wife in 1931, but later acquitted on appeal, he was referred to a researcher, Keith Skinner, who specialises in unsolved murder cases, and who bizarrely, as Robinson realised when they met, appeared with him in Romeo & Juliet in the days when Skinner too was an actor. Over a drink, Skinner agreed that the Wallace case was indeed interesting, but far more compelling was that of Jack the Ripper. They made a £10 wager that Robinson could not solve it.

Robinson is not a historian; he is a dramatist, and a few months into his research, having read every book he could find on the subject, it was not the identity of Jack the Ripper that nagged at him. It was the behaviour of the man in charge of the investigation, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren.

On the night of September 30, 1888, two women, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, were murdered within hours of each other on the streets of Whitechapel. They were the third and fourth women to have been murdered, and horribly mutilated, in the course of four weeks. The case of Jack the Ripper was already a cause of public alarm. But Charles Warren had not yet bestirred himself to visit the scene of the crimes. On that night, however, he rushed to the East End in the early hours of the morning – his priority, it seems, not to examine the bodies, but to inspect some graffiti scrawled on a wall in Goulston Street, close to where a bloodied apron belonging to Catherine Eddowes had been found. The graffiti read: ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’

Warren immediately ordered the words be washed off the wall. ‘It was a light-bulb moment,’ Robinson remembers. ‘We’ve got this rampaging maniac in the East End, but it suddenly occurred to me – what if they didn’t want to catch him? Is there any mileage there? Let’s go down that street.’

Where it led was to Robinson’s theory – he prefers the word ‘explanation’: that Jack the Ripper was not, as popular mythology would have it, a fiend or a criminal genius. ‘He was a psychopath shielded by servants of the Victorian state.’ More specifically, shielded by the fraternal bonds of Freemasonry. As much as it is about uncovering the identity of the Ripper, They All Love Jack is a scalding critique of the hypocrisy at the heart of the establishment in Victorian England, and the role played in it by Freemasonry. ‘It was endemic in the way England ran itself,’ Robinson says. ‘At the time of Jack the Ripper, there were something like 360 Tory MPs, 330 of which I can identify as Masons. The whole of the ruling class was Masonic, from the heir to the throne [Edward, Prince of Wales] down. It was part of being in the club.’

Warren was an important cog in the Masonic wheel. He was a founder member of the Quatuor Coronati lodge, and an authority on Freemasonic history and ritual. As a young man he led an expedition to the Holy Land in 1867, where he excavated under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But not only was Warren a Freemason. So too was Jack the Ripper.

Robinson’s theory, argued with a forensic attention to detail, is that all of the killings bore the unmistakable stamp of being perversions of Freemasonic ritual: the symbol of a pair of compasses, ‘the trademark of Freemasonry’, carved into the face of Catherine Eddowes; removal of meal buttons and coins from the bodies of Eddowes and Annie Chapman - ‘The removal of metal is axiomatic in Masonic ritual,’ Robinson writes, money being ‘an emblem of vice’... all of these things and more were not feverish acts of madness but carefully laid clues, the Ripper’s calling card, in what he called his ‘funny little game’ - a gruesome paperchase designed to taunt the authorities, and Charles Warren in particular. The cryptic graffiti in Goulston Street was ‘the most flagrant clue of all.’

Warren would later explain that he had ordered the graffiti to be washed away to prevent an anti-Semitic riot. The East End of London was a thriving colony of Jewish immigrants newly arrived from Eastern Europe. It is an explanation that Robinson says the world of Ripperology has largely accepted without demur. He dismisses it as ‘horseshit’.

A significant key to the dismemberment of the Ripper’s victims, he maintains, can be found in the story, central to Masonic mythology, of the brutal putting to death by King Solomon of three murderous Jews, or the ‘Three Ruffians’ as they are known – Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum.

As a Masonic scholar, Warren would have been ‘better acquainted with the story of the Three Ruffians than any other man on earth’; he would certainly have recognised that the word ‘Juwes’ was not a misspelling of ‘Jews’, but a pun on Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. The graffiti was not anti-Semitic, but a message from the killer to Charles Warren that the Ripper was a brother Freemason.

Warren knew what Jack the Ripper was – ‘I’m 1,000 per cent certain of that,’ Robinson says – if not who he was. And others knew it too – the information shared on a ‘need-to-know basis’. The man that Warren appointed to be his ‘eyes and ears’ on the case, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, was also a Freemason. So were at least two of the coroners, Wynne Baxter and Henry Crawford, who ruled on the murders; and at least three of the police doctors who examined the bodies. The incompetence of the investigation was a public scandal at the time – newspapers attacked the police for exhibiting ‘an incapacity that amounts to imbecility’. But rather than being a bungled attempt to uncover the identity of Jack the Ripper, Robinson maintains, the ‘investigation’ was actually a deliberate exercise in keeping that identity concealed.

‘Part of the whole ethic of Freemasonry is whatever it is, however it’s done, you protect the brotherhood – and that’s what happened. They weren’t protecting Jack the Ripper, they were protecting the system that Jack the Ripper was threatening. And to protect the system, they had to protect him. And the Ripper knew it.’

Robinson is not the first person to go down the Freemasonry road. In 1976, in his book Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, Stephen Knight advanced the theory that Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, an eminent Freemason, was the Ripper. Masonic historians were among the first to shoot the theory down. And Robinson agrees. Albert was a buffoon and a degenerate but he was not the Ripper. But in throwing out Albert, Robinson maintains, what he calls ‘Freemasology’ was also attempting to ‘inoculate’ against any further attempt to propose a Freemason as the Ripper – ‘the Masonic baby duly disappearing with the royal bathwater’. But the fact that the Duke of Clarence wasn’t the Ripper, doesn’t mean the Ripper wasn’t a Freemason. ‘He was,’ Robinson says.

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