Barking mad — a day out with the BNP

Harry Mount watches Nick Griffin try to win round the disgruntled former Labour voters of Dagenham and Barking — if he wasn’t so ridiculous, he might be dangerous

As always, P.G. Wodehouse got it right. Far-right groups are unlikely to take off in Britain because, for all their nastiness, they always come across as just a little too ridiculous. That’s certainly the impression I got after spending last Saturday in Barking, east London, at the BNP campaign launch. In The Code of the Woosters (1938), Wodehouse neatly took care of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, by casting him as Sir Roderick Spode in his black shorts; by the time Spode had set up his fascist group, there were no shirts left, according to Gussie Fink-Nottle.

Bertie Wooster gives the brilliant speech that does for Spode. ‘The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”’

Nick Griffin is not just a perfect perisher — he’s an awkward one, too. He has none of Mosley’s Olympian self-confidence. Younger-looking than his 51 years, he has a fidgety, inexperienced manner. He speaks too quickly, in stuttering machine-gun bursts, nervously playing with the lower right-hand leading edge of his blue suit jacket as he canvassed in Barking, where he is trying to unseat the Labour MP and Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge. Barking has been Labour since the war (it’s Tom Driberg’s old seat), Hodge has a near-9,000 majority, and it would take a massive swing to dislodge her.