There’s only one question that counts now that Question Time has been shown: did it do Nick Griffin and the BNP any good? It’s a tough one to answer. To my eyes, at least, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of the cameras – he was given scant opportunity to gloss over his more unsavoury views; he looked terribly uncomfortable whenever the debate ran away from him; and the other panellists scored most of the major points. But we largely expected that anyway. Griffin was always going to come under heavy questioning, and he was never going to have many friends in the audience.
Like Fraser, I fear that much of Griffin’s job had been done before he appeared in front of the cameras. The protests, the interviews and the reams of publicity that Griffin has received will mean that he has reached out to the one-in-a-thousand, one-in-a-hundred, one-in-fifty people who may be attracted by the BNP’s message.
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