The rise and fall of a young fanatic

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.