Tuesday 4 October 2022 12:54 AM Secret mole inside the National Front who helped jail racists trends now
As a teenage recruit to the National Front, Matthew Collins was accustomed to senseless violence.
Yet he was stunned by the scenes he witnessed one afternoon in the late 1980s: dozens of his peers, armed with hammers, viciously attacking a group of women protesting at a local library in Welling, South London, over the British National Party’s (BNP) decision to open a bookshop in the area.
‘Of all the violence I’d seen, it was the most sickening,’ says Collins. ‘Helpless people being laid into. I looked around at these people who were my nearest and dearest friends — and realised they were also the most deranged people I had ever met.’
Collins was just 17 at the time, but that moment proved to be the start of an extraordinary journey that led to the now 50-year-old becoming first an informant on the far-Right — and later a handler running a network of moles who would, in time, help to bring down the BNP.
In the process, he has helped to imprison scores of leading far-Right figures, while information from one of his spies helped to dismantle a neo-Nazi terror group, one of whose alleged members had been plotting to kill a Labour MP.
All this has come at a huge price: Collins has received hundreds of death threats and has spent much of his life looking over his shoulder.
‘I have been doing this for a long time, so I’ve made new enemies as well as keeping my old ones,’ he explains.
Now Collins’s remarkable journey from Mein Kampf-reading racist to committed anti-fascist campaigner has been brought to life on the small screen.
Last night saw the premiere of ITV’s new drama The Walk-In — based on Collins’s book of the same name — in which he is played by actor Stephen Graham.
‘It’s an honour, but it’s important that people realise these things really happen,’ Collins says. ‘It’s an important story but it’s also my life they’re showing.’
The Walk-In centres on the 2017 plot to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper. After the murder of fellow Labour MP Jo Cox the previous year, Collins learned from an informer that members of banned group National Action were planning a machete attack on Cooper.
Her would-be attacker, Jack Renshaw, was later jailed for life.
Collins was shown encrypted messages that National Action members had written about him. Among them were death threats. ‘They were obsessed by me. Messages talking about murdering me, raping my mum,’ he recalls.
The youngest of four boys, Collins was raised on a council estate in Lewisham, South-East London, by a single mother after his father left home when he was just five.
‘We were skint, but there was always laughter,’ he says.
Yet as a teenager, Collins was seduced by the racism that then held pockets of working-class neighbourhoods in its grip.
‘There was no racial hatred in our home, but I formed those opinions,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why, but I did.
‘I went looking for the far-Right. And if you grew up in South London back then, it wasn’t hard to find it.’
By 1987, at the age of 15, Collins had joined the National Front. ‘My family said it was the daftest thing I’d done — and they were right.’ Seen through the prism of his later experience, he can nonetheless feel compassion for this disenfranchised group of young men.
‘You join a gang of desperately sad, misplaced men who have an idea of a Britain that never existed, and who were
