‘In the 1980s, almost everyone in the National Front came from an Irish family’

Matthew Collins is searching around his desk, pulling out one mobile device after another, before holding them aloft. “I tend to carry about five mobile phones with me at a time,” he says, with a weary chuckle. “The main problem is that I had amnesia from PTSD, so I forget all my passwords.” Collins is displaying his array of phones by way of explaining how he operates a secret system of moles throughout the British far-right, while being the most famous anti-fascist activist in the UK. “I commit as little on paper or electronically as possible and I run a little team of people, who the fascists don’t recognise, to go to demonstrations and do drop-offs. I guess it’s a proper spy network.”

A profanely jocular Londoner, 50-year-old Collins seems an unlikely spymaster – “I was called the fat James Bond by the Germans,” he says – but his work is deadly serious. He has suffered attacks and threats for his efforts. But he is effective. In 2017, with the help of one of his moles, Collins uncovered a plot by an illegal far-right group to kidnap and murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper.

This story, a real life thriller, is retold in pacy, often darkly humorous fashion in Collins’s latest book, The Walk In, as well as in a new ITV drama of (almost) the same name, The Walk-In, featuring the acclaimed actor Stephen Graham in the role of Collins. The title refers to the nickname for the informants he handles for campaigning organisation Hope Not Hate. In this specific case it applies to Robbie Mullen, a disillusioned member of banned splinter group National Action, who revealed his organisation’s murderous intentions to Collins.

I felt the poverty we experienced could be redressed if there were no people of colour

“I knew National Action were naughty, I knew they were hidden, and I’d got a little bit blase about them. But when I saw inside them through Robbie, my initial reaction was, this is really dark,” he says, over Zoom. Gradually, Collins learnt about the group’s tight structure, extreme ideology and, eventually, the conspiracy to kill Cooper, which resulted in the 2019 conviction of would-be killer Jack Renshaw. Crucial to this operation was his relationship with Mullen, whose trust he cultivated even as he garnered intelligence. “I never sneer at these people, some of them have had horrendous lives.”

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Collins knows what he’s talking about. He was once a walk-in himself, a self-described “National Front bootboy” who grew disenchanted with his erstwhile comrades. “I did three years as a dedicated swallower of fascism, and two and a half years passing information against them,” he says of his actions. As a teenager in southeast London in the 1980s, he had grown alarmed at the changing demographics of his poor but “almost exclusively white” council estate, drawing him towards the National Front (NF). “I felt the poverty we experienced could be redressed if there were no people of colour,” he recalls.

I’d been involved in loads of punch-ups, but this was one too far

There were other, more personal factors. “Another thing was searching for male role models, regardless of who they were, wanting to belong to something, and also, adventure,” he says. “Even though they were the most obnoxious, unappealing people in society, I somehow felt that was like security for me.” His heritage – his father, who left his mother when Collins was young, is Irish - also played a part. “There was all that forced assimilation, about being more English and wanting to fit in,” he says, ruefully observing that his was not an isolated case: “It’s a well-known fact that during the 1980s, almost everyone in the National Front came from an Irish family.”

Collins veered between the NF and the equally extreme British National Party (BNP), but things changed in 1989 after he took part in an attack on an anti-BNP meeting in a London library, injuring dozens of women. “I’d been involved in loads of punch-ups, but this was one too far,” he says. “It started a conversation with myself, I just thought I cannot do this any more. For a while in the NF, I felt I was in something really revolutionary, like [1970s sitcom] Citizen Smith. But there was nothing revolutionary about it, it was just violent bores. And I just thought I’d like to f**k these people over.”

Some of these people are so desperate they’d sell their grandmother for 50 quid

He continued to move in his old circles while working as an informer for anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. When his cover was about to be blown, he moved to Australia, where his experiences further changed his outlook: after working beside Vietnamese immigrants, he says, “My eyes were opened to that empathy.”

Returning home after a decade – “I left England for Australia a scared little boy and came back a confused young man” - he worked for Searchlight again, including a stint in Belfast, running BNP informants there. As well as gaining interesting perspectives on life in Northern Ireland – “People assume that loyalists are mad anglophiles, but actually they really hate the English” – he felt that he was doing something useful for the first time since returning from Australia.

Since then, Collins has expanded his network, leaving Searchlight (apparently in some acrimony) to work as head of intelligence for Hope Not Hate. “I’d ring people up and make them an offer,” he says, “Some of these people are so desperate they’d sell their grandmother for 50 quid.” But while he speaks candidly about taking advantage of his informants’ desperation, his own past gives him an understanding of what attracts them to fanatical beliefs in the first place.

“I don’t ascribe to the idea that you just fall into hatred on the internet,” he says. “It’s portrayed as someone goes online looking for last night’s goals and then suddenly becomes a Nazi. I think people are searching for extreme answers to the problems that we have, and they’re increasingly finding these horrible, misogynistic ideas. But that’s where we are.”

The British fascists are really nasty, but the Irish ones are just bonkers

Of course, the routes to radicalism have changed since the 1980s. Collins is particularly worried that the anti-vax conspiracy theories that bloomed during the pandemic have fuelled radicalism. “When people think science isn’t real, you start to question other things, and then predominantly the main focus is the Holocaust,” he says. “People from divergent political ends of the scale suddenly find they’ve got a common ground. You’re seeing fascists and people you’d describe as hippie types suddenly all agreeing, and they all draw the same conclusions that the Jews are behind it.”

Other things have changed too. Whereas British and Irish far-right activists once had nothing to do with each other, connections have improved since the Troubles ended. “The relationship between our extremists has never been better and stronger,” he says, noting that “the rise of Irish ethno-nationalism has impressed the younger generation of British fascists.” That said, he also sees differences. “The British fascists are really nasty, but the Irish ones are just bonkers,” he notes.

Collins delights in scorning the far-right in excoriating terms, both in conversation and on paper, but in reality he doesn’t see it as a laughing matter. Though he estimates there are only around 5,000 people in the UK’s extreme right, “you don’t need a lot of them to be dangerous”. He points to Darren Osborne, who drove into pedestrians outside a London mosque in 2017, killing one person. And while his work with Mullen foiled National Action’s assassination plot, Collins thinks the far-right is more dangerous than ever. “They’ve moved away from trying to look electorally respectable to understanding that they have absolutely no chance in hell of any electoral success. All that’s left for them is to return to the idea that underpinned them, which is violence.”

For me, every one of these people is a potential Matthew Collins - they could come out the other side and do something good

Collins has first-hand knowledge of this. While we speak, he jokes about getting used to his new teeth, dental work necessitated after being violently assaulted by vengeful far rightists in a tube station in 2019. Several times, he talks grimly about the obscene threats directed at his mother, while his family has had to move home. “I’m a terrible partner,” he says.

For all his black humour, Collins concedes that the stressful, perilous work as a handler of informants has taken a toll. He would retire if he could afford to so, he says, and move to Skibbereen. But after all he’s been through, it’s hard to imagine him walking away from his life, and not just because his story has been thrown into the television limelight. (Tellingly, the series was filmed in secrecy, to avoid far-right retribution: he won’t even say if he met Graham, his screen Doppelgänger.) For Collins, it’s not only political, it’s personal.

“For me, every one of these people is a potential Matthew Collins - they could come out the other side and do something good. The other thing is I want to live in a civilised society, and you can’t have that when you have people trying to deny rights to others based on who they love, where they were born or what colour they are. That’s not a civilised society. So I’ll keep doing this until Britain is civilised.” He pauses, then adds, “Of course, Irish readers will say it hasn’t been civilised for 800 years.”

The Walk In by Matthew Collins is available from Hope Not Hate