UKIP egg on Griffin's face

It's an odd state of affairs when the BNP feels driven to go sneaking through the back door of the UKIP to make Britain's main anti-EU party an offer it can refuse - especially as the BNP has long held that the UKIP is a state-run "false flag" operation brought into existence with the specific intention of taking away the BNP's support.

Something of a storm in a thimble, news that UKIP's Nigel Farage humiliatingly rebuffed the BNP's offer of an electoral pact that would see each party stand down in electoral regions where the other had the better chance was not likely to play well to a BNP audience poring over an almost uniformly gloomy sequence of recent by-election results, and hardly set the tone for this year's looming BNP annual conference.

It simply wouldn't do for Nick Griffin to be seen with the UKIP's egg on his face, and so a quick and dirty rescue operation has been mounted to turn public indignity into apparent success.

We have no reason at all to doubt an angered Nigel Farage's version of events: namely that Buster Mottram (ex-National Front, failed Great White Hope of British lawn tennis) "gatecrashed" a meeting of UKIP's National Executive Council, relayed Nick Griffin's proposals to the bemused party leadership, was cold-shouldered and ordered to leave, which he eventually did with police assistance.

Farage wasted no time in making the matter public, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth in BNP-land, since the racist party had been unceremoniously rejected by the one organisation it loathes more than Al-Qaida.

That it was the BNP which approached the UKIP, and not members of UKIP who approached the BNP, is amply confirmed by deputy-leader and budding rubber magnate Simon Darby, who told the Press Association:

"It was with a view to ending this ridiculous situation of splitting the anti-Euro federalist vote and it hasn't paid off, frankly. We are aware there are people very highly placed in Ukip who are very sympathetic to the logic that the vote could be split - that was where we were coming from. Someone has to take a lead on this if we are not to continue to be propelled into this federalist monster."

There is nothing in Darby's statement which indicates that anybody at all in UKIP made the first move, as the BNP now claims.

Rather, because the BNP proposal involved allowing the BNP free rein in the north and abandoning the south to UKIP, it seems that the proposal was deadly serious - because we all know who has parachuted himself in as the BNP's top Euro-candidate in the North-western region (its best hope); we all know who is most desperate to leave behind his toy pig farm for the riches of an MEP; and we all know who must demonstrate some clear electoral success for the BNP in the Euros or face internal revolt.

This proposal can only have come from Nick Griffin, with a gimlet eye fixed on the main chance. He'll make more from his utterly pointless membership of the European Parliament than he ever will from his BNP-bankrupting redundancy deal.

Given the lamentable condition of UKIP, I am quite convinced that Nick Griffin sent along his offer to Nigel Farage in good faith and in the belief that UKIP would take it seriously. I also believe that he did not expect Mottram the messenger to lay the plan before the UKIP in the unorthodox manner that he did, and nor did he expect the subsequent demeaning publicity.

Attempting to pull things around in one of his most hypocritical postings to date on the BNP website, Griffin affects to have known all along that there was little possibility of UKIP jumping into bed with the BNP, and the BNP itself is working overtime to give the impression that - somehow - it has tricked the UKIP, which, as a result of BNP cunning, will now fall into complete disarray.

This is so much whistling in the dark, but the BNP sheeple have taken up the tune, mostly because they have little choice if they are to drive from their minds the fact that the hated "false flag" UKIP has inflicted upon them a resounding humiliation - and the fact that it was given the opportunity to do so by Nick Griffin himself.

In his posting, Griffin - forgetting that wise politicians do not count their chickens before they are hatched - talks of "four virtually guaranteed BNP seats", a sign either of the contempt in which he holds the electorate or that in which we know he holds a BNP membership gullible enough to believe the prediction. It's probably the latter, as he attacks Nigel Farage for putting "his chances of securing his personal ambition ... above those of his party activists", which we imagine will strike only the sourest of notes in the BNP's North-west region, undemocratically hi-jacked by Griffin to secure his candidacy in a constituency in which he believes the rag-tag-and-bobtail vote will provide him with enough of a percentage to send him on his way to Brussels.

The man who plotted John Tyndall's overthrow and has ever since been engaged himself in the removal of his internal BNP enemies then has the effrontery to accuse Nigel Farage of "low cunning" in the expulsion of Buster Mottram and others, spluttering indignantly: "That’s democracy, Farage-style - sack those who might express dissent and then claim unanimous support!"

Now where have we seen "democracy" of that kind in operation lately? And who else do we know is most urgently desirous of gaining what he himself describes as "five years of well-pensioned, feather-bedded, spanking luxury"?

A trick has indeed been worked by the BNP, but the victim was not Nigel Farage and the UKIP. It is the gullible mass of BNP sheeple, who have willingly convinced themselves that a self-inflicted public relations disaster is in fact a great victory for the infallible Griffin.

Will they ever learn?