The British National Party probably never experienced such a hefty and concerted blow as it did 20 years ago, in the late summer of 2004. About half of the August issue of Searchlight was dedicated to hammering Nick Griffin’s nazi outfit, following through on The Secret Agent, a BBC documentary broadcast in mid-July, which had shocked much of the nation.

Martyn Lester describes the instrumental role played by Andy Sykes, fascist‑turned-Searchlight mole, in sabotaging the BNP and helping it on its way to near extinction.

Valuable though they frequently are, TV documentaries do not often attract a huge number of viewers, but The Secret Agent had a massive audience, prompted both by the BBC’s own trailing of the programme and a no-punches-pulled editorial in mass circulation newspaper The Sun, urging its readers to tune in.

“The BNP is not a legitimate political party,” read The Sun’s editorial leader on the day of the broadcast. “It is a collection of evil, hate-filled, moronic thugs. Watch the BBC’s brilliant documentary tonight and hear from the BNP’s own disgusting mouths their stories of racial hatred and violence… They are criminals who should be locked up for a long time.”

If you are thinking that it’s something of a rarity for a Murdoch-owned paper to use words like “brilliant” about the BBC, marvel further at what the often Beeb-bashing Daily Mail had to say the morning after the broadcast. “Moronic, vicious and full of hate, the racist thugs exposed in last night’s BBC documentary shatter the BNP’s pretence of political respectability. This powerful piece of journalism revealed a truth about BNP extremism that needed to be told.”

If it seems like Searchlight dedicating so much of its next issue to the BNP was a piece of shameless piggybacking on the BBC’s hard work, nothing could be further from the truth. That’s because the documentary had “Searchlight” running through it like “Blackpool” in a stick of rock. The magazine had approached the Corporation with the idea of the documentary a year earlier, had consulted on the programme throughout its production and had supplied the producers with the star (and indeed hero) of the exposé. Yes, another case of what is virtually a trademark – the Searchlight Mole.

The brave inside source in this case, the “secret agent” of the title, was a BNP member who, even as he rose within the party (he eventually became its organiser for the whole of Bradford), became increasingly disillusioned.

Same old leaflet

Andy Sykes had joined the BNP in 2001, worried about rumours of hordes of asylum-seekers and Asian immigrants lurking in the wings. But, once a member, he found nothing to support these scare stories.

“We had leaflets saying that thousands of asylum-seekers were about to move into our area. I then found the same leaflet being distributed in other parts of the city with only the area name changed,” he said in 2004. “Three years after joining the BNP and I have still not met, seen or heard of a single asylum-seeker in my area of Bradford.”

But fears that something was rotten in the state of Griffmark had already begun to assail Sykes before he put together the full picture regarding the scare propaganda. “It was the Bradford riots that got me questioning the BNP,” he said. “My city was up in flames and BNP members were jubilant.”

That’s an observation well worth reflecting on as the riots of July and August 2024 are cheered on by a new generation of fascists. And, if that is not enough to dispel any questions that you may have about “Are these 20 Years Ago Today pieces of any relevance to 2024?”, hang on to your hats for the straw that broke this particular camel’s back.

In April 2002, Bradford TUC organised a community Fun Day in Sykes’ local area of Eccleshill. Sykes was taken aback when the callow leader of the Young BNP phoned him and told him to put together a “crew” of lads, including some of the area’s contingent of Leeds United hooligans, to disrupt the day.

“I couldn’t believe what he was asking me to do,” Sykes recalled later. “I told him that I wouldn’t. That it was an event for women and kids. He didn’t seem to care, and from that day I thought ‘Sod you and your party’.”

That mindless Young BNP thug? Step forward Mark Collett, still in 2024 ploughing the same headbanger furrow but now as the leading light (or perhaps “dawdling dark”) of the preposterous hate machine Patriotic Alternative. Old nazis never die, it sometimes seems. They just cross-fade from one grift to another.

Before formally throwing in the towel, Sykes, along with his wife and young child, attended the very same Fun Day that he had been asked to break up, and approached Bradford TUC’s Paul Meszaros to arrange a meeting a few days later. Meszaros in turn contacted Searchlight, and a secret operation began. Between them they persuaded Sykes to stay in the BNP and supply them with intelligence.

Saboteur extraordinaire

Infiltration or conversion operations do not topple fascism overnight, but they can be successes on their own terms. And, on its own terms, this one was a smash hit. Sykes kept Meszaros up to date on the BNP’s plans, so that Bradford TUC could wrong-foot the nazis time after time, often by carrying out activities in different places and times to what the BNP was expecting.

After The Secret Agent was broadcast, one Bradford anti‑fascist (who had known nothing of the operation) commented: “That explains why we’ve never come across the BNP in two years of leafleting!”

Sykes also sabotaged BNP strategies, in part by actively discouraging or just failing to follow up on membership enquiries. “I was particularly keen to keep anyone with a hint of ability from being active in the party,” he later said. “Those people simply didn’t get invited to our events.”

He similarly put off members who showed an interest in being election candidates, sometimes “accidentally” letting it slip that stories in Searchlight and newspapers about Griffin & Co being connected to murderers and gangsters were “unfortunately true”, or by stressing to prospective candidates how much hostility they might face from neighbours and workmates.

Though the failure to achieve as much as the BNP had hoped for in the 2004 local elections did hint at incompetence, it in part put this down to the after effects of a beating Sykes had received earlier in the year.

But keeping the mole in play once The Secret Agent was broadcast looked like a difficult proposition. One ploy considered was to point the finger at Jason Gwynne, an undercover reporter that the BBC had slipped into Bradford BNP to support Sykes, to portray him as the architect of the documentary, leaving Sykes looking like no more than a man who had naively trusted the reporter.

But this was a far from foolproof solution, and eventually Sykes decided that he – much like Searchlight’s most famous mole, Ray Hill, a couple of decades earlier – would come out as a whistleblower during the programme. It brought him some death threats, but support from friends and neighbours who had been unhappy with his BNP membership, and a standing ovation from colleagues when he went back to work.

Contentious question

Among other things, The Secret Agent exposed BNP activists boasting of violent acts against Asians, BNP council election candidates describing how they wanted to kill Asians (one of them saying this on 24 occasions), and a newly elected BNP councillor conspiring with other party members to launch an arson attack on a vehicle carrying the Searchlight election newsletter.

Searchlight was, of course, pleased that the documentary had such an impact on the public. But some of the shine was, we felt, taken off the programme’s success by the fact that it had been ready for broadcast in May, but that the BBC had delayed it so that it would not be viewed before the June 2004 local elections.

This is another aspect of the affair that remains a contentious issue to this day: the question of whether broadcasters should be obliged to treat extreme organisations as “normal political parties” just because they have managed to register with the Electoral Commission.

It would be nice to be able to report that The Secret Agent put an end to the BNP, but of course it didn’t. The party had yet even to achieve its high watermark in local elections. But the programme did damage the BNP, which later went through attempted (even successful) internal coups, slowly dying but never officially pronounced dead. It has effectively been dormant since 2019.

The leader at the time of the documentary, Nick Griffin, still turns up from time to time, like a bad penny. But he is mostly now regarded even among the far right as a political dinosaur – the Führer of Fossilised Fascism.         

Top photo:
Searchlight mole Andy Sykes (left) and undercover BBC reporter Jason Gwynne (right) with BNP leader Nick Griffin (centre), at a dinner hosted by the party in 2004 for France’s then fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen

This article first appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Searchlight