Shared Opinion | 13 June 2009

Each time the BNP has to tone down its rhetoric, it’s a victory for everyone else

It’s oddly unsettling, watching the media establishment trying to deal with the BNP. On Channel 4 News the other night, Krishnan Guru-Murthy was interviewing Andrew Brons, the thinner of their two toadish, loathsome MEPs, and I’m not sure that his impartiality really shone through. He had Margaret Hodge in the other chair, which didn’t help of course, because when that stricken Air France jet plunged out of the sky above the Atlantic last week, it probably sounded less shrill than Hodge at her most calm. Still, there was an edge of apoplexy there, which Guru-Murthy was fighting, and failing, to contain. I could understand it, and I’d probably have shared it, but it still looked bad. He didn’t sound reasonable. If you didn’t know the background, your sympathies might have pointed in the wrong direction entirely.

Which is, on the face of it, astonishing. Even setting aside the way that Andrew Brons actually looks (which is as though a pair of bulldogs have feasted for an afternoon on his already over-large, hammy ears), the man has been an actual, honest-to-God, British Nazi. He once wrote that his primary objection to firebombing synagogues was that it looked bad. He called an ethnic minority policeman an ‘inferior being’, and once finished a speech chanting ‘if they’re black, send them back’. When he turns up on the telly just after Hollyoaks, not sounding notably hateful, something is evidently amiss.

In the many interviews that he has given since Sunday, Brons’s fat-arsed boss Nick Griffin has one constant refrain. ‘This is all old,’ he’ll sigh, when somebody mentions the black-hating, and the Jew-hating, and the White Power T-shirt he was photographed wearing 20 years ago, back when his arse was considerably less fat.