Matthew Collins takes a gulp of Guinness and glances over his shoulder. He finds it hard to resist looking behind. That’s what happens, Collins says, when you flip sides.
Once a senior member of the fascist National Front, the 50-year-old turned informant, imprisoning scores of leading far-right figures before running a spy network that helped bring down the British National party. He was also handler to a mole who dismantled a neo-Nazi terror group, an alleged member of which had been plotting to kill a Labour MP.
But switching sides has made him a marked man. Collins has received hundreds of death threats and been forced to move house three times. Police visited one of those properties in 2019 with a warning they had intelligence of a real and immediate threat to the life of his children.
“I’ve got a lot of enemies,” he says smiling, revealing the false teeth from when a far-right supporter attacked him on the London underground in front of aghast commuters in 2019.
Speaking in a central London curry house last Thursday, Collins adds: “There’s a long, long queue of people who say I’ve fucked them over.”
Now the risks to Collins are arguably even higher. Two days earlier, ITV had announced, after a meticulously observed 18-month strategy of secrecy, that it would be screening a true-life drama series on how Collins helped foil a rightwing terror plot. Award-winning actor Stephen Graham would play Collins.
Such was the security risk to the production team that throughout filming, the series was given a different name and fictionalised content to hide its true subject matter.
When shooting for The Walk-In began there was no publicity, similarly when Graham agreed to play Collins. None of the production staff or other actors received the full script, apart from Graham, to prevent any potential leaks on safety grounds .
“The security was extremely tight, there were even discussions about whether to run a full list of credits naming everyone involved,” said Collins, though ITV said it would be transmitting the crew list.
Real-life ramifications are already evident. Since ITV issued its press release promoting the drama, two more far-right members have “flipped”, approaching Collins to work as informants. That is in addition to the 22 former rightwing extremists whom Collins is deradicalising. Groups include the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative and anti-immigration Britain First.
“They fall into rabbit holes and my job is try to get and keep them on the straight and narrow, keep up a good flow of information.
“We used to always ask people to question everything. Now they just believe nothing. Going down the route of hate is so easy. It’s far more challenging to look at things progressively.”
Collins, head of intelligence at charity Hope Not Hate, made his reputation running informants inside some of the UK’s most extreme rightwing organisations. He handled the inside man whose eventual testimony brought down National Action, an alleged member of which was plotting to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper. It became the first far-right organisation banned by the government since the second world war.
That inside man was Robbie Mullen, the National Action whistleblower who turned against his neo-Nazi colleagues to unearth the murderous ambitions of alleged member Jack Renshaw, but has since received a slew of “Osman notices” from police – credible warnings of a high risk of murder. Before then, Collins kept Mullen in a series of safe houses and burner phones as they collated intelligence on the terrorist group.
Collins was helped in this task by his own experience on the run from a far right seeking revenge. After an incident in Welling, south-east London, in 1989 when 40 men viciously attacked a group of mainly elderly women protesting about the BNP, Collins made a decision. Risking his life, he began covertly passing information to anti-fascist magazine Searchlight about his work for the National Front and BNP.
When his role was exposed, Collins went into exile under pressure from counter-terrorism police, hiding in Australia for a decade from 1993.
On his return he began bringing down some of his old colleagues in the BNP. Assistance came from unlikely sources. During a stint of undercover work in Belfast where the BNP had opened an office and were looking to drum up support, Collins met senior Ulster Defence Association (UDA) leader Jackie McDonald.
McDonald made it clear that despite links between unionism and the right, he was far from keen on the campaigning of BNP leader Nick Griffin in the capital of Northern Ireland.
“He complained the BNP were taking advantage of Ulster and a low-wage economy. He protested that he liked Indian food and that he was annoyed by allegations that unionism and loyalism were dominated by racists,” he writes in a new book, also called The Walk In.
Collins also describes how he ran a team of four spies from inside the BNP’s Belfast office, three of whom were English. “Once you get one, the others follow. Some wanted a long lunch, others a quick drink but your job is to get them talking,” he said.
To date, says Collins, his work has helped imprison 65 people – “for proper violence, not for writing bad things”. His work as an informant handler meant he frequently crossed paths with MI5 and counter-terrorism police, although he says the security services never tried to recruit him.
Yet he does allege that the security services continue to receive intelligence from senior figures within the far right.
“Some of the most senior people in the British far right are in the employment of the security services.”
In 2018, MI5 took over from the police as the lead agency targeting extreme rightwing terrorism, a development Collins says has led to a more aggressive stance.
“Since the move, even though they’re going in too hard too early, they’re getting results.”
The pressures of running informants, immersing himself in a hate-filled ideology has had a profound effect on Collins’s mental health. In 2020 he began experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder which partly manifested itself in amnesia. “I couldn’t read any more, kept forgetting my phone numbers, the pin number on my bank cards. I even forgot my children’s names, where I was living.”
Therapy has since helped him cope, but he accepts the personal price is high.
“I come from a council estate in Lee [south London]. People like me don’t tend to end up in such a high-profile position.”
One of his three brothers has gone abroad, which Collins believes is directly linked to his work. His primary concern is keeping his family safe, a priority that starts with his children having no idea about their father’s role in the The Walk-In, which screens next month. “They’re not going to know the show’s on, I make sure they’re shielded.”
Collins is pessimistic about the future and what the evolution of the far right will look like. He says the lack of an electable far-right party is a source of growing and considerable anxiety, despite the rhetoric of successive Tory governments often aping its language.
“We have a government that sings their song. The electoral path is dead to them, they have no political outlet and that just leaves them staring at society.”
On the chances of a far-right terrorist attack, he warns: “If you keep pumping out the hate then someone will eventually do it. It’s even more dangerous now than ever before.”
