Newly-leaked emails show ex-leftist journalist-turned-snitch Paul Mason attempted a legal crusade to silence his critics and censor The Grayzone’s reporting. While Mason publicly blames “Russian intelligence” for a paranoid blacklist he made, he privately admitted to creating what he called “the network graphic” in talks with the elite legal team he enlisted to harass this outlet.
Once a well-known British broadcast pundit and columnist who fashioned himself as a voice of the movement behind former Leader leader Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Mason is now the butt of a seemingly endless stream of jokes from his former peers among the left. Their mockery focuses on revelations which first appeared in a 2022 Grayzone investigation exposing Mason as a snitch who attempted to supply dirt on leftists to secret British government contacts. Among the most significant documents disclosed in our report was a bizarre chart Mason created to illustrate his view of Chinese and Russian control over Corbyn and the entire UK antiwar movement.
This January, everyone from lefty commentator Owen Jones to UK Green Party leader Zack Polanski taunted Mason for his secret enemies list. In response, Mason has staged a public meltdown, accusing his critics of amplifying Russian propaganda, and implying that the documents we revealed were somehow fabricated. “Outright Putinists are now joining the Greens thanks to Zack’s conversion to the Grayzone agenda,” he tweeted on January 23 in response to mockery from the Green Party’s Polanski.
Now, the Grayzone has learned that in the weeks after the publication of our first article exposing his snitching to government officials, Mason secretly attempted a campaign of legal retaliation against this outlet, and demanded criminal penalties for public figures who shared our reporting.
Previously unseen leaked email exchanges show Mason enlisted an elite law firm called Blackstone Chambers to initiate a legal assault against The Grayzone and others which covered the disclosures, including Britain’s left-wing Novara Media. The files show Mason sought to pressure YouTube into censoring The Grayzone’s discussions about his activities, and even proposed lawsuits against Twitter/X users who mocked his schemes.
In the emails, Mason admits to creating the now-infamous graphic portraying anti-war activists and academics in the UK as tools of Russian and Chinese influence operations. For the past three years, Mason has lashed out at anyone who claimed he was responsible for the image, accusing his critics of spreading Russian disinformation, and even threatening them with ten years in prison.
Mason insisted to his lawyers that he was on a selfless mission to expose how “useful idiots” in Britain who oppose war and NATO expansion were being actively exploited by Beijing and Moscow. However, in the leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone, his lawyers repeatedly advised him that this outlet’s reporting appeared to serve the public interest. What’s more, they explicitly warned him against suing his critics, noting that “the most likely outcome” of his proposed legal harassment campaign was “the Streisand effect – amplifying it further and prolonging the issue.”
Determined to wash his reputation and crush his enemies, which apparently constituted the entire British antiwar left, Mason pressed ahead with his revenge plot until he had no options left. Though his legal crusade ended in dismal failure, he still capitalized on an atmosphere of escalating political repression to place numerous unwitting journalists and activists in the crosshairs of Anglo-American police forces and spying agencies.
From revolutionary Trotskyist to NATO-sponsored think tanker
For years, Mason was a fixture on televisions across Britain, appearing regularly on BBC and Channel 4 for much of the early 2000s. As an avowed Trotskyist, Mason postured as a dissident, mingling with members of the Occupy movement and Arab Spring, while still finding time to publish a novel, “Rare Earth,” which depicted the protagonist, a maverick journalist like himself, helping his female Chinese lover have sex with a stuffed horse. While touting himself as a diehard supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, Mason simultaneously embedded himself with Greece’s anti-establishment Syriza party. From the Greek capital, amid the ferment of anti-austerity protests, Mason tweeted at the boutique leftist porn actress Stoya, “come to Athens – the revolution is happening.”
In 2017, while positioning himself as a media gatekeeper to Corbyn and the movement behind him, Mason was secretly taped in a London restaurant disclosing plans to topple the Labour leader. After the recording appeared in the UK tabloid, The Sun, Mason filed a formal complaint with the press regulator IPSO, demanding punishment for those who embarrassed him. The complaint ultimately failed.
Following the collapse of the Corbyn campaign for Prime Minister in 2020, Mason quickly sought to trade in his leftist credentials for mainstream credibility, at one point publicly insisting that those who “don’t think [Keir Starmer] will advance the class struggle” were likely “not understanding social democracy correctly from a Marxist viewpoint.”
Two years later, The Grayzone exposed Mason’s collaboration with British intelligence assets to undermine the British antiwar left, and generate state-sponsored propaganda amping up conflict with Russia. The faded journalist remains dogged by allegations that he was himself a British intelligence asset all along, with even prominent mainstream reporters posing the question to Mason in social media exchanges.
Mason has only deepened suspicions about his motivations by taking a job as an “adjunct fellow” at the Council On Geostrategy, a pro-NATO think tank funded by major defense contractors, Palantir, and the British Ministry of Defence.
While happily raking in cash from the military industrial complex, Mason now seeks to pose as a victim of state-sanctioned efforts to intimidate him into silence, claiming without evidence that his correspondence was compromised by Russia, and repeatedly threatening his critics with legal retaliation.
Paul Mason to lawyers: “I certainly want to deplatform/demonetise” The Grayzone
On June 7, 2022, The Grayzone published an exposé showing Mason plotting with an intelligence contractor to destroy this outlet through “relentless deplatforming” and a “full nuclear legal” attack. Emails we obtained revealed that Mason explored a strategy of “relentless deplatforming” of The Grayzone and the creation of “a kind of permanent rebuttal operation” against it.
Two days after The Grayzone exposed Mason’s leaked emails, he contacted Blackstone Chambers, declaring, “I certainly want to deplatform/demonetise” The Grayzone.
Though largely declining to address the contents of the article, Mason remained fixated on refuting one aspect of the story: his creation of a bizarre black-and-white social connection chart which strongly implied that some of Britain’s most prominent antiwar activists were influencing demographics ranging from the “Young Networked Left” to the “Black Community” at the behest of Russia and China.
Mason admits creating ‘network graphic’
In emails to lawyers, Mason pointedly denied suggestions he was targeting political activists for “blacklisting or deplatforming.” Instead, he insisted, the graphic he created was merely “an attempt to show how people who are clear and overt promoters of Chinese propaganda, and veterans in the pro-Putin hard Stalinist left… are influencing the ‘useful idiots’.”
Mason framed the map as an attempt to rescue Britain’s leftists from themselves, claiming he was simply attempting to keep these “useful idiots” from “putting the whole left in danger of reputational damage.” The image, he said, was just “a work in progress that I started before the war when I realised that very dodgy characters clearly linked to Russian and Chinese influence ops were finding their way into Stop The War online rallies, and being laundered by Corbyn and his allies.”
Mason added, “the only person who has ever seen it” was self-proclaimed disinformation expert Emma Briant, whom he acknowledged meeting in person to devise what he called a “strategy… to expose those actually spewing disinformation… and try to bring the others to a realisation they were being used.”
Mason claimed he only met with Briant because he “wanted to be able to show people on the receiving end of the influence operation that it could be traced back to Russia and China.” Leaked emails indicate he had, in fact, shared his map with British government contacts, contradicting his explanation.
Mason provided an “off record” example of how one actor supposedly ended up on his target map: Jess Barnard, the chair of Young Labour. Barnard drew his attention after attaching her name to an antiwar statement in the days leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To Mason, this constituted “blaming NATO for warmongering and opposing arms to Ukraine.” Barnard, the journalist-turned-snitch insisted, had “links to Socialist Appeal, who are Putin apologists, and she is standing for Labour’s NEC [National Executive Council].”
After The Grayzone revealed the existence of Mason’s graphic, Mason claimed in a series of exchanges with Barnard that he “didn’t recognise” it. Despite previously using the same software to produce a similarly deranged “flowchart” related to Brexit, Mason has consistently evaded public demands for clarity on whether he produced it.
Recently, Mason has resorted to claiming the graphic originated with Russian intelligence, falsely implying that he was not its author. When British Green party chief Zack Polanski shared the map, Mason threatened him with 10 years in prison for “[spreading] disinfo publicly attributed to Russian intelligence.”
But as seen in the new set of email leaks, Mason admitted to creating the chart himself, but decided to mislead the public after deliberations with his lawyers at Blackstone Chambers, led by Ben Jaffey QC.
In his June 2022 email justifying the inclusion of Jess Barnard, Mason asserted, “this is someone in which there is public interest,” claiming she’d been locked in an internal battle with Labour party elites, who supposedly shut down the Twitter account of Barnard’s Young Labour organization “because its [sic] had been blaming NATO for aggression – bringing the party into disrepute.” Furthermore, Mason claimed, Young Labour “refused to help the rest of the Party of European Socialists’ youth section effort to get leftists and human rights defenders out of Ukraine.”
In confessing to having drawn up the paranoid graphic, Mason offered the excuse that it was only for his personal research:
“Is she a fully signed up Putin stooge? No. Is she practically blocking Labour Party solidarity with Ukrainians and bringing the party into disrepute? Yes. So the network graphic was an aide memoire for myself, shared only with Emma [Briant], privately, to show the kind of thing we needed to construct to understand why so many people were getting drawn into networks increasingly dominated by Russia/China.”
Mason’s lawyers warn, “at least some of the hostile reporting against you can be justified”
Days after the 2022 Grayzone report exposing Mason as a snitch, the former journalist began to panic about a forthcoming Grayzone livestream hosted by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate in which the two planned to discuss his leaked emails. Mason fired off an email to Blackstone Chambers as soon as he learned of the planned broadcast, inquiring about options for censoring it.
“Are YouTube susceptible to legal pressure?” he pondered. Mason said his top “reputational priority” was “to squash the idea being put around” by The Grayzone, and Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani, “that I was working with the state to provide some kind of blacklist.” He asked the firm for its advice “as to whether any public response is a good idea.”
Blackstone representatives replied by warning him, “we don’t think there is an easy legal solution to the material already published,” and “we don’t recommend you pursue any legal proceedings against [Aaron] Bastani/Novara or in relation to the other tweets at the moment.”
In reference to Bastani, who said the leaked emails showed Mason aimed to be “a networked Stalin/Beria,” the firm went on to caution: “The various over-excitable references to Stalin/Beria/drunkenness are just vulgar abuse/exaggeration.”
“We don’t think you ought to dignify that sort of stuff with litigation,” Mason’s legal team concluded.
Blackstone was similarly nonplussed by Mason’s proposal to sue individuals and organizations which shared or discussed his Russian/Chinese influence diagram and related emails. They believed “any misuse of private information claim would be met with a public interest defence,” as “all of the activity that is being reported on is essentially political planning and proposed activism by you, which is likely to be an area in which the courts are very reluctant to intervene.”
Blackstone effectively shut down Mason’s entire rationale for legal action, noting “we can see an argument that at least some of the hostile reporting against you can be justified” without knowing the full “context” he described to the firm. “It is possible to understand how Bastani… can properly make negative comments on it,” Blackstone explained.
“In addition to these legal hurdles, there is also the cost, time and stress involved in litigation which has to be factored in. So, we don’t think this is worth exposing yourself to legal and financial risk for years over,” Blackstone concluded. “To be honest, we are not sure we will help you in the long run by suing. The most likely outcome is the Streisand effect – amplifying it further and prolonging the issue.”
Instead, the firm suggested that Mason simply “write a short rebuttal,” while “[keeping] open the possibility of encouraging criminal or other investigation in the US” into The Grayzone.
“Difficult to say you haven’t had any contact with Britain’s ‘secret state’”
On June 13 2022, YouTube deleted The Grayzone’s special on Mason’s emails, claiming without explanation that this outlet had violated the platform’s “policy on harassment and bullying.” Our YouTube channel subsequently received a punitive warning for discussing the contents of Masons’s emails.
That same day, The Grayzone published an investigation into Mason’s relationship with longtime intelligence-linked Foreign Office operative Andy Pryce, exposing how the pair discussed creating an astroturfed “counter-disinformation” outfit in the spirit of the notorious Integrity Initiative. Leaked emails between the two friends show that Pryce boasted of engineering a YouTube ban on “Russian stuff.”
Following the latest Grayzone installment, Mason contacted Blackstone to ask whether he should issue a rebuttal. Again, the firm was opposed. Jaffey suggested he not “do much at all,” because “assuming that the emails are genuine, they have a public interest justification for reporting on the activities of government information operations/your discussions about them with officials.” While maligning The Grayzone’s reporting as “sensationalist” and “silly,” Jaffey didn’t “see any good basis for preventing them from saying it.”
Days later, Mason was melting down over tweets by critics, including the British academic David Miller, who had begun referring to him on Twitter/X as an “MI6 agent.” In an email to his lawyer on June 16 2022, a clearly incensed Mason wrote, “I’ve warned a couple of them privately that they need to take it down,” explaining that he had succeeded in threatening the campaign group Counterfire into retracting.
Mason quickly whipped up a fiery riposte, branding The Grayzone as a “pro-Russian website,” unconvincingly claiming the contents of his leaked emails “may [emphasis added] be edited, distorted or fake,” and dismissing as “defamatory and false” any suggestion he had “collaborated in any way with Britain’s secret state, or that I am an ‘agent’ or ‘asset’ of an intelligence agency.” He insisted his critics were deliberately endangering his life, claiming that branding him as an MI6 agent was “designed to place my personal safety as a journalist at risk.”
Jaffey responded with an edited draft of Mason’s polemic that confirmed his harshest foes were at least partially right about his intelligence connections. It was “difficult to say you don’t have any contact with ‘Britain’s secret state’, so I have toned that down a bit,” the lawyer told Mason.
After publishing the amended rebuttal, Mason subsequently went silent about The Grayzone’s ongoing revelations of his covert activities and contacts with intelligence-aligned elements. Mason has not responded to a detailed emailed request for comment about the latest set of emails showing that he plotted a legal assault on The Grayzone while admitting to creating the paranoid diagram on the British antiwar left.
For the past two years or so, Mason has focused his energy on a series of failed attempts to secure nominations to run for parliament as a Labour MP. Targeting constituencies across the country, nowhere near his place of birth or residence, he was widely mocked for briefly inserting Welsh language into his ‘X’ bio while eyeing a seat there. Mason failed to make the longlist.
Mason sought to exploit courts, media, and police to attack The Grayzone
Mason apparently had good reason to keep quiet about The Grayzone’s reporting. As it turns out, he had been using his purportedly hacked email to covertly contact Labour leader Keir Starmer and then-shadow defence secretary John Healey. And he feared that this reporter knew all about it.
As Mason told Jaffey on September 29 2022, “[Kit Klarenberg] still has all my correspondence with Keir, John Healey and a senior ex military person so there is implicit pressure.” However, it was not until February 2025 that Mason’s contacts with Starmer and Healey were publicly disclosed.
Mason further revealed to Jaffey that a figure he described as a “former Labour foreign policy advisor who now works in corporate security” had been exposed through his leaked email exchanges. He worried that if the full content of his email account’s sent and received files was publicized, “the politicians are outed.”
“At that point,” he fretted, “the attacks will be reframed as a wider attack on UK democracy.”
Mason’s overblown statement strongly suggests public messaging around his alleged hack was being coordinated with high-level Labour government officials.
A December 2022 email from Mason to Jaffey further reinforced the sense that he was secretly collaborating with elements of the British state on his messaging. Claiming that the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre had told him Moscow hacked his messages, Mason informed Jaffey that he’d been told “strictly off record” that two senior British politicians had “also been targeted.” As a result, the NCSC “went public with Politico to confirm there is an ‘intensive investigation’” involving British law enforcement and cyber spying agencies, Mason wrote.
He was referring to a 2022 Politico article which detailed the purported hack of his emails, painting him as a “celebrity Marxist” victim of malign Russian activity, alongside former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, whom I had exposed for participating in a secret plot to install Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in order to engineer a hard British exit from the EU. The new emails suggest the British government prompted Politico to publish its article, which was repeatedly amended after publication due to its inaccuracy.
In the meantime, Mason informed Jaffey that this journalist’s “friends” had “told my contacts he was approached by [British police] over alleged abusive phone calls/threats to two other victims” – a categorically false claim. In fact, I was contacted in late July 2022 by a senior British detective and invited to attend a police interview in London due to bogus allegations of personal involvement in hacking. Though I was threatened with arrest for non-compliance, the police dropped the request weeks later.
Despite these setbacks, Mason remained determined to weaponize the law against The Grayzone for the high crime of factual journalism. On December 16 2022, he informed Jaffey he’d “given a verbal witness statement to two officers” from Britain’s National Crime Agency. The officers, Mason wrote, had “indicated it was likely the UK will pass the investigation into the hack on me over to US law enforcement, and that the statement needs to be robust enough for the US courts.”
Having sought to weaponize the UK court system to criminalize journalists for exposing his secret collaboration with the UK state, he appears to have been hellbent on bringing charges against Grayzone editors in the United States as well.
At no point did Mason dispute the factual nature of our reporting, nor did he push back on his lawyers when they advised him that we were acting in the public interest by revealing his covert contacts with British government operatives. Instead, he resorted to the most authoritarian strategy possible, blaming Russian intelligence for this outlet’s factual reporting, and hoping that the British and American security services would respond by breaking down our doors – all to shield himself from further embarrassment.