John Woodhouse: BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time

A THOUSAND protesters outside Television Centre – Nick Griffin and mainstream TV don't mix awfully well. Let's face it, if he was on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, the insects would walk off.

Nice to see him wearing a poppy though. It's important at this time of year that we remember the ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of British people in the fight against fascism.

Beforehand, Griffin, had claimed his Question Time appearance could send his BNP into "the big time". But with the "big time" comes big exposure. And exposed Griffin certainly was.

"The vast majority of this audience finds what you stand for disgusting," one man told him. "You'd be surprised how many people would have a whip round to buy you a ticket to the South Pole," said another. "It's a colourless landscape and it'd suit you fine."

Griffin's difficulty in trying to enter the mainstream political arena comes not just from placard waving hecklers, but from the spectre of his inglorious past.

Under cross examination, for example, he admitted he'd shared a platform with a leader from the Klu Klux Klan, but he was "a totally non-violent" one. Because of course the Klu Klux Klan spend most of the time skipping through the meadows of the American deep south with a butterfly net.

He also once denied the Holocaust, dubbing it the 'Holohoax'. He smiled when quizzed by David Dimbleby on the matter. It was ill-advised. "Why are you smiling?" snapped Dimbleby. "It's not a particularly amusing issue."

The best Griffin, pictured right, could come up with by way of an answer? "I cannot explain why I used to say those things".

The subject overlapped with Griffin's recent claim that "if Churchill were alive today his natural place would be in the BNP".

"Winston Churchill put everything on the line so that my ancestors wouldn't get slaughtered in the concentration camps," said one young Jewish man, "but here sits a man who says that's a myth, just like a flat world was a myth."

Griffin, though, claims he is not a Nazi. "There are Nazis in Britain and they loathe me," he stated. It must have come as a shock to a good proportion of the viewing audience that they have something in common with Nazis.

Perhaps what annoyed the Nazis was Griffin's assertion, which he disputed saying, that Adolf Hitler went "a bit too far".

Mr Griffin blamed the "political elite" for imposing "an enormous multicultural experiment on the British people".

Apt I suppose. In mythology, the griffin has the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion.

Sometimes it has a long snake for a tail. Oh how it must grate, Nick. You're the ultimate mixed-race legend.

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