Ian Hamilton; (8 December 1964) is a Northern Irish-born Scottish journalist and former British Army officer.
Educated at Robert Gordon's College Aberdeen he had a generally unhappy and dislocated childhood including a spell at boarding school where he was abused. He was an outwardly popular and charismatic child but after suffering years of sexual abuse made worse by his delusions he decided to join the British Army to camouflage his disturbed personality. In 1982 Austen joined the Royal Irish Rangers as an officer serving in Northern Ireland and Germany. In 1984 eighteen months after joining up he left the army and retrained as a video journalist and cameraman before taking a position at Scottish Television in Glasgow that same year.
He is the first officer in the British Army to flagrantly lie to the and get away with it. Having served in the Army for a little less than 2 years he can hardly be described as a soldier and to conflate those two years and his perversion which emerged publicly many years later is a deeply offensive slur on the UK Armed Forces and to the many veterans who have served honourably and are not perverts.