Examine Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time last year, or the British National Party’s campaign for the European parliament, or even their work ‘on the ground’ in Barking today and you will find something very peculiar. The party is desperate to demonstrate to an electorate angered by expense abuses that it is a tightly run, principled organisation, unblighted by self-serving corruption and ready to ‘clean up’ mainstream politics.
The reality (as Harry Mount points out opposite) could not be more different — witness the headline ‘BNP Publicist Sacked Over Plot to Kill Nick Griffin’ which appeared on the Sky News website at the start of this month. The publicist in question is a man called Mark Collett and, aged just 29, he was the party’s youngest high-ranking official, and close to Griffin. Collett stood shoulder to shoulder with the leader when both were arrested for race-hate offences in 2005 and he was considered to be one of the BNP’s most effective speakers. He would deliver savage indictments of the ‘global conspiracy’ against Britain. ‘We’re the biggest threat to the corrupt political establishment,’ he told a BNP audience in 2007, ‘[the] traitorous white politicians who have sold us down the river.’ It was a popular message then, and in the lead-up to last year’s European elections, Collett refined it even further to communicate to the disgruntled electorate that the BNP was the ultimate ‘anti-politician’ party.
Then the BNP ‘uncovered the most serious and dangerous threat to this party and its officers that we have ever witnessed (sic)’. It found that Collett was ‘conspiring to launch a palace coup’; and the police had been informed of ‘serious allegations affecting the safety of Nick Griffin and senior management/financial consultant James Dowson’.
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