Gerry’s Fables 9: “The Secret Agent” Setup

Much publicity has been given to a TV show,  The Secret Agent which resulted in the dramatic trials – and acquittals -- of BNP leader Nick Griffin and party colleague Mark Collett on “race hate" charges in 2006.

Less publicity was given to the fact that the whole programme was a set up by Searchlight, with that magazine acknowledging that Searchlight writer Nick Lowles was a “consultant” to the programme, and in fact, that it was Searchlight which instigated the situations which were allegedly the “most shocking.”

As Lowles himself wrote in the pages of Searchlight: “The Secret Agent was a six-month investigation into Britain’s main fascist party. BBC journalist Jason Gwynne joined Bradford BNP during the recent local and European election campaign. There he operated alongside local BNP organiser Andy Sykes, who unbeknown to the BNP, was secretly working for Searchlight and Bradford TUC. … Searchlight and Bradford TUC approached the BBC last summer with the programme idea.”

Above: Searchlight planted these two moles Andy Sykes (left) and Jason Gwynne (right) with the BNP, and they then created situations where they and their Searchlight masters could try and portray the BNP in the worst possible light.  The media, obedient as ever to Gable's tricks, refused to point out that the whole thing was artificially created and set up by Searchlight.

Gwynne himself reported afterwards that he came close to exposure several times during the operation and relied on Sykes to help him remain undiscovered. "But if any suspicions were raised they went through Andy, as a senior figure, and he would tell them he was keeping an eye on me and he would tip us off so we knew to be more careful about the kind of questions I was asking."

In this way, Searchlight was able, in its usual fashion, to manipulate and create the situations which they then exploited. Sykes, as a party organiser, knew exactly to which individuals he could introduce Gwynne, safe in the knowledge they would say something outrageous which could be used on TV.

Quite apart from deliberately setting things up in this way, the Searchlight operation also deliberately ignored the vast majority of BNP members who are nothing like those supposedly shown in the TV show, with Sykes – no doubt under the experienced guidance of Gable, an old hand at these tactics – seeking out the most vulnerable individuals to say something “racist.”

The reality is that there are people with "strange" views in every party – for example, Tory Ann Winterton famously joking in private about illegal immigrant Chinese cockle shell pickers drowning at sea; or Labour Party backbencher Tam Dalyell, declaring in May 2003 that Tony Blair had surrounded himself with a “cabal of Jewish advisers.”  None of those comments, however, drew the opprobrium engendered by the few remarks captured after hundreds of hours of filming the BNP by Gwynne and his Searchlight crew.

As it later transpired, even some of the people making the “outrageous comments” in The Secret Agent, were also working for Searchlight – making it one of the most fraudulent, pre-arranged, smear campaigns ever seen.