All the King’s men

Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has surrounded himself with a group of trusted lieutenants, of whom all but one appear not to be party members. At the same time he has reduced the powers of the party’s Advisory Council, which now meets infrequently. BNP members should be concerned at how Griffin, fresh from seeing off the challenge to his leadership in summer, is trying to consolidate his power and change the party.

Arthur Kemp

Nick Griffin has always believed in forming a political elite. In the 1980s he called them his “political soldiers”. Now they are the BNP’s “voting members”, the only people allowed to attend the party’s annual general meeting and vote on resolutions. Activists have to meet several conditions to qualify as voting members. One is to attend ideological training to ensure members support the right policies, and it is Arthur Kemp whom Griffin charged with its delivery.

Born in what was then white-ruled Southern Rhodesia, Kemp studied and worked in South Africa, where he became a state intelligence agent and played a role in the run-up to the murder of the prominent ANC leader Chris Hani in April 1993.

Kemp regards himself as something of an expert on race and is famed in white supremacist circles internationally as the author of March of the Titans, a monumental tome which contends that civilisation collapses when “swamped” by “racial aliens”. His sources for the book, which is also vehemently antisemitic and questions the veracity of the Holocaust, include hardline nazis. He attends Holocaust denial and hardline racist conferences in the US and contributes to journals in that field.

Lee Barnes

The BNP’s “legal eagle”, though not a party member, Lee Barnes’s unpopularity in the BNP grew after Griffin put him in charge of moderating the BNP’s internal forum, to which only party members are allowed access. The row led to the forum’s temporary closure just when Griffin’s second trial on race hate charges opened in November last year. Although Barnes’s name is no longer on the BNP’s list of national officers and his column has disappeared from the party website, Griffin recently commended Barnes’s blog describing it as “an intensely argued, intellectually inventive thing”.

Inventive is right. As for intellectual, recently he described a well known musician as “Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers”. And writing about BBC reports on education he said: “They find some ugly geeza bird with hairy legs called Miranda who then bangs on about …” and claimed schools were run by “boring left wing assholes”. When Barnes does try to be intellectual he rapidly becomes incoherent, drawing implausible conclusions from dubious evidence using ever lengthening words and sentences. Several people have described Barnes as very eccentric.

Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc

One of the least known of Griffin’s new clique, Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc runs the Altermedia “white nationalist” news network and provides web services to the BNP as well as managing several leading European hate websites, according to his own postings on the international nazi Stormfront forum. A wealthy Belgian in his thirties, he claims Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, personally tasked him with creating a pan-European white nationalist web presence.

He also acts as webmaster to David Duke, the former US Ku Klux Klan leader who now plays a leading role in the international extreme right. Duke, d’Aubignosc and Griffin met in Germany in summer 2002. D’Aubignosc designs, manages and updates Duke’s official website and also does business with Chris Evans, a former unit commander of the US nazi organisation the National Alliance and marketing director for its hate-music company Resistance Records.

D’Aubignosc holds hardline antisemitic views. In May 2004 he wrote on Altermedia: “Our enemies are the vicious people who hate black people so much they have been using them to destroy us by miscegenation or ‘racial mixing’ which is a form of genocide for us. They are the people who lie, lie, lie to drive America into wars of Israeli conquest. They are the people who deny every nation the right to its own secure living space, while, at the same time, they demand that same space for their own people. They are the ones who plunder American and European taxpayers to subsidise their own terrorist state. They are the ones who poison our children’s minds with MTV. They are the people who sell our women on the meat markets of forced prostitution and pornography on the streets of Jerusalem.”

Patrick Harrington

Not only is Patrick Harrington not a BNP member, he is one of the leaders of a rival political party, Third Way, which also cavorts under the name National Liberal Party.

Harrington is also a longstanding political comrade of Griffin from their days in the National Front in the 1980s and notably accompanied Griffin to Libya in 1988 in a failed attempt to obtain financial support from Colonel Gaddafi. A year later their NF political soldiers group had split, with Griffin forming the International Third Position and Harrington setting up Third Way a few months afterwards.

Harrington reappeared at Griffin’s side in 2006 when he was brought in as general secretary of Solidarity, the BNP’s trade union front. At first it seemed he was there to maintain the fiction that Solidarity was independent of the BNP. But when a row broke out between Harrington and the two BNP members on the Solidarity executive, which quickly led to a split in the union, it quickly became clear that Harrington was the only man Griffin could trust.

Since then Harrington has brought in two more Third Way activists, Graham Williamson and David Kerr, to help run Solidarity. Third Way’s political philosophy would appear to differ considerably from that of the BNP. Its website features an equal opportunities statement and it claims to welcome “guest workers … to fill gaps in the country’s infrastructure”. It seems that Griffin’s desire to build a political elite along the lines of the political soldiers overrides any superficial ideological differences.

Alan Goodacre

The BNP’s economics guru, Alan Goodacre has come from nowhere to command a key role in the formation of BNP policy as a member of the party’s Policy Forum. His influence can readily be detected in the economics section of the party’s 2005 manifesto and several articles by him appear on the BNP’s website.

According to John Bean, editor of the BNP’s magazine Identity, Goodacre is also the editor of Jihad Watch, a BNP subscription email bulletin. Griffin has become increasingly Islamophobic and Goodacre helps fuel this obsession. In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle he claimed that the BNP had genuinely repudiated antisemitism and no longer denied the Holocaust, while appealing to British Jews to understand that the BNP “are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat”. His views received short shrift from the Jewish community.

Goodacre has also been at the forefront of a prudish demand for a return to Victorian sexual values as the only way to attain an imagined morale high ground over Islam.

Simon Darby

The only BNP member among Griffin’s new cabal, Simon Darby was recently appointed the BNP’s press officer after the abrupt departure of Stuart Russell who, rumour has it, was told to go away by Arthur Kemp. Darby was already, and remains, the BNP’s deputy leader, a fact that emerged during Griffin’s first trial on race hate charges early in 2006, when everyone assumed it would be Scott McLean, the BNP’s deputy chairman, who would take over had Griffin been convicted and imprisoned.

Darby, who has also been the BNP’s West Midlands organiser and director of information technology, demonstrated his ability at dealing with difficult questions when he took part in a studio discussion after the screening of a documentary on nazi hate music early in 2006. He was totally demolished by Lord Lester, QC and after evasion, lies and an eruption into antisemitism, he seized the opportunity of a commercial break to disappear.

Like many BNP members these days, Darby is a keen blogger. Coincidentally his blog started two days before the sudden resignation of his predecessor as BNP press officer, Stuart Russell. It is an eclectic mixture of twitcher notes, political musings and attempts at developing his technical skills with video, sound recordings and camera. One clip of a recording of a telephone conversation last month attracted several complaints from readers who were unable to play it. He has now expressed a desire to upload a recording of the deep grunt of a fallow deer at the start of the rutting season.

Tony Lecomber

Although Tony Lecomber was removed from BNP membership in summer after he assaulted Eddy Butler, the BNP elections officer, he still acts as a behind-the-scenes adviser to BNP officers and rumours continue to circulate that he remains close to Griffin.

Formerly Griffin’s number two, Lecomber was convicted and jailed on five charges under the Explosives Act after he tried to bomb the headquarters of a political organisation in the 1980s. He received another three-year prison sentence when he assaulted a Jewish teacher. Lecomber ran Griffin’s campaign for the party leadership in 1999 and has acted as his enforcer, much to the resentment of many party members.

More recently, in 2006, Lecomber tried to encourage Joe Owens, repeatedly named by Searchlight as a gangland hitman, to carry out a “hit” on a Cabinet minister. Nevertheless Griffin was reluctant to ditch him. Griffin even kept Lecomber on the party payroll while telling party members that links had been cut.

When Lecomber attacked Butler outside Loughton tube station, Griffin was only able to prevent Butler from going to the police by promising to expel Lecomber. But unlike other people removed from the BNP, Lecomber was not “proscribed”, which meant party members were allowed to associate with him socially. A very mild notice to members described Lecomber as “a long-term, devoted and very valuable key official in the BNP and a genuine nationalist” and recognised his “sterling work for the cause in the past and his selflessness in stepping away in order to avoid compromising the future”.

If Lecomber is part of Griffin’s new cabal that would leave Butler, architect of the BNP’s elections strategy, in an invidious position.

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