Some people think you should resign for failing to protect this data, Nick

The question was simple.

"Are you apologising to your members, whose details you failed to protect?" asked Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

Taken by surprise, and being unused to making apologies to BNP members on any account, Nick Griffin blinked and quickly uttered "Yah" as if the word was something indigestible sticking at the top of his gullet, and he couldn't get it down fast enough.

Recovering in another blink, he cleverly shifted the unwelcome but all too pertinent focus on his own culpability in the leaking of the BNP membership list: " - We're - we're very sorry for people who may have problems as a result of this," he said in barely suppressed agitation, going on to notice that most BNP members would not have any problems, and that if anybody came to be sacked from their jobs on account of their political beliefs then they would be entitled to "massive compensation".

With his personal apology reduced to a rapid and grudging "Yah", his own responsibility subsumed into a corporate "we're", and questions answered that were never asked, Griffin was fixed to continue in his evasiveness, but an unimpressed Guru-Murthy was having none of it.

"Some people think you should resign for failing to protect this data," he interjected. "Are you considering that?"

Following some self-serving waffle that "we" have done all "we" can to prevent this leak and that "we" have changed the "policies" which led to it and sacked the people responsible for it, Griffin's predictable answer was, "I won't resign" - which is more than a little curious when we recall the number of occasions, some very recent, on which Griffin and his spokesmen have called for ministerial heads to roll when lowly departmental minions in the pay of the government have lost similar data in far less dubious circumstances.

Clearly, the buck doesn't stop with Griffin, the man who directly appointed those he now blames for the BNP's predicament, and who therefore bears the heaviest responsibility of all.

Nothing daunted, Griffin continued: "If my members wish to vote me out - we're a very democratic party - we have an election available every year, and if they want to elect someone else in my place that's fine."

Except, of course, that it's anything but fine, as our readers are well aware and those sidelined and expelled members of the BNP who have attempted to unseat Griffin know to their cost. Krishnan Guru-Murthy, more usually concerned with higher matters than the internal affairs of a squalid collection of racists and fascists, cannot be expected to know that Griffin's comment stands the facts on their heads, and so made no intervention as an increasingly confident BNP leader talked of "an appalling witch-hunt by a liberal-left media and by rival political parties", mostly for the benefit of his own watching members and in the cause of further distancing himself from any personal culpability.

To that end Griffin switched his focus to the recent BNP gain on the obscure Boston Borough Council, a tactic mirrored on the main BNP website, knowing that until news of the leak broke on Lancaster Unity the membership continued to bask in the warm after-glow of the Boston result, in which a grand total of 279 people voted BNP.

At the end of the five minute interview Griffin executed a perfect about-turn in the matter of who leaked the BNP membership list. Having begun by saying that he had sacked those responsible (the Decembrist rebels), he now claimed: "This was leaked by our political opponents, this is a big campaign by supporters of the Labour Party to try to damage and intimidate the British National Party because they know that we're creeping up on them in election terms."

Ever since the leaked membership list entered into the public domain the BNP membership has switched smoothly into familiar victim mode, loudly protesting about their rights being infringed, of the danger they are in, and making frequently preposterous claims to have received death threats.

On our side of the fence we naturally take a rather jaundiced view of this unedifying self-pity, knowing, as we all do, that for years the normal method of transmitting the names, addresses and photographs of the BNP's opponents to the Redwatch hate site is through the BNP's active membership.

Nor do we have great sympathies with their shrill wails that Muslim organisations and websites have come into possession of the list. This community has for so long been vilified, lied about and insulted by the BNP and its army of bloggers and keyboard warriors that there is a certain sense of justice being done at last if the BNP hate brigade spend so much as one sleepless night kept awake by stray noises in the dark as penance for the vituperation and indignity to which they have subjected this community.

The police are now investigating the matter of the leak. The leak came from within the BNP, despite Nick Griffin's contradictory claims. It wasn't leaked by Lancaster Unity, it wasn't leaked by the Labour Party, it wasn't leaked by Searchlight, and it wasn't leaked by the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

It came from within the BNP and nowhere else - and it will be the BNP itself which is subjected to police investigation. What subsequently happened to the list is another matter entirely.

If the membership of the BNP had but a fraction of the backbone they claim to possess, they would not be crying like little girls who have had their pig-tails pulled by the school bully. They would be demanding the immediate resignation of the man ultimately responsible for their predicament, the man whose incompetence was responsible for putting in place the "policies" which led to the worst debacle - bar none - yet to have befallen the BNP.

They would tell him to go, to do it now, and to rid himself of any thoughts of severance pay.

Do they have the guts? Do they even have the wits to see that their own worst enemy is the man who, when given the chance to apologise to his members on Channel 4 News, gobbled down his feeble "Yah" as if it would make him sick?