Scary, dangerous and bad for your weekends: Going undercover with the far-right

Back in 2022, Harry Shukman was working for The Mill as an editor. Then he made a dramatic career choice

By Shannon Keating

During the spring of 2023, undercover reporter Harry Shukman sat among a group of far-right campaigners in a fortified back patio belonging to Paul Golding, the Salford-based leader of Britain First, and he was terrified. Shukman had spent the day pamphleting for the party under a secret identity – his fellow pamphleteers knew him as Chris – while he wore a hidden camera. As the group sat around the high-walled, barbed-wire lined patio of Golding’s second home in Dartford, eating takeaway pizza as twilight fell, Golding was staring directly at Shukman’s chest. 

This was a man who had been previously jailed for aggravated harassment. “I felt so uncomfortable, like my heart was about to explode,” Shukman recalls. Golding was looking “dead at my chest, drilling his eyes in, and I felt myself get very hot, like, ‘Fuck, has he seen it?’” Immediately, Shukman began plotting his getaway, though he quickly realised with mounting horror that he was several doors away from the …