On 1 July 2017, Jack Renshaw walked into a Wetherspoons in Warrington, sat down and told his friends he was going to assassinate an MP.
Then aged 22, he was part of neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action and wanted to seek fellow members’ opinions on his planned attack.
Renshaw told them how he would murder Rosie Cooper, his local Labour MP, with a machete and then take hostages.
He wanted to lure in a police officer who had been investigating him for child sex offences, murder her in revenge and force armed police to shoot him dead.
Among the six other National Action members listening was Robbie Mullen. Unknown to Jack Renshaw and the rest of the terrorist group, he had already turned informant for counter-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate.
“I was saving myself in a way, I knew something was going to happen eventually,” he tells The Independent. “Things were just getting strange – with Jack especially.”
Mr Mullen, now 28, said the would-be terrorist announced his plan “instantly” after arriving at the National Action meeting in the Friar Penketh pub.
“We just walked straight in and he told us,” he adds. “He had come to say goodbye because he planned on dying the next week.”
Renshaw had been researching Ms Cooper’s itinerary, knowing that constituency political events were not guarded and would make an easy target, as Jo Cox had the year before.
He had bought a Roman-style sword online – marketed as “19 inches of unprecedented piercing and slashing power at a bargain price” – and made a stream of Google searches on how to kill people, and how long it would take for someone to die after having their throat slit.
Mr Mullen said no one around the table tried to talk Renshaw out of his plan, with one National Action member telling him not to “f*** it up” and others throwing in alternative targets, such as the home secretary or a synagogue.
“He was like ‘no, no I’ve already planned it all out, I know what I’m doing’,” the former mole recalls. “He was definitely going to go and try.”
Renshaw never got the chance. Mr Mullen alerted Hope Not Hate, who contacted Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, who alerted Ms Cooper and counter-terror police swept in.
The foiling of the plot, and the events leading up to it, are the subject of a new ITV drama called The Walk-In.
Actor Stephen Graham plays Matthew Collins, who was Mr Mullen’s contact at Hope Not Hate, while his role is filled by Andrew Ellis.
Mr Collins, who has written a book of the same name to accompany the series, says the major change is the replacement of his south London accent with Graham’s native scouse.
“My mum watched the trailer and said ‘why does he have to do it with that stupid accent?’,” he tells The Independent. “I said ‘that’s just a Liverpool accent, mum’.”
Watching their lives played out on the small screen has been a strange experience for the pair, who started working together around five-and-a-half years ago.
Mr Mullen was looking to “jump ship” from National Action, which was becoming increasingly terrorist-minded following a 2016 government ban.
Jack Renshaw was ridiculed in 2014 for a post made as BNP Youth leader where he voiced fears his dog was gay
