Populist enthusiasts can convert into informants against their former allies

Evidence

Seven years later, Mason was engaged in a different set of practices. In early 2022, he had begun emailing contacts in British secret services with info on members of the UK Labour Party who had left the party after Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 parliamentary elections. Having sided with Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, Mason worried that remaining Corbynites in the party would push a pro-Russian line following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Mason’s messages signaled the twilight of an entire epoch: from populist enthusiast to aspiring counter-intelligence informant, from Syntagma to Whitehall. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 11

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did Mason collaborate with UK security services officially, and does this expose wider post-Corbyn party dynamics?
• XREF: Evokes debates about left intellectuals switching sides and informing, paralleling Cold War trajectories like Whittaker Chambers. — connects to: Progressives can redeploy left vocabulary to defend an autocratic populist regime. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 351