BNP ballerina Simone Clarke now teaching children aged three

On its website, the new dancing school prominently proclaims that its teacher is a former principal dancer with the English National Ballet.

Oddly, however, it doesn't mention her name - perhaps because she is Simone Clarke, the ballerina who found herself at the centre of controversy three years ago when her membership of the British National Party was exposed. At the time anti-fascist demonstrators disrupted a performance of Giselle at the London Coliseum in which Miss Clarke, who was dubbed the 'BNP ballerina', took the starring role. Last week she appeared, surrounded by little girls of three and four in tutus, in the community hall in the village of Shadwell, near Leeds, where she runs the Yorkshire Ballet Academy.

Miss Clarke, 39, has been a leading figure in the far-Right BNP. She has shared a stage with leader Nick Griffin and was once engaged to one of the party's councillors, Richard Barnbrook - a man who claimed mixed-race children were 'washing out the identity of the country's indigenous people'. Miss Clarke's move into teaching comes as the Government is scrutinising the BNP's role in public life. It is said to be considering a ban on BNP members working as teachers in schools.

The Yorkshire Ballet Academy is a private dance school and she does not require licensing by the local authority.

Two years ago Miss Clarke appeared with Mr Griffin during a BNP 'Free Speech Evening' in Leicester and pledged: 'I will never, ever leave the BNP because they are the only people who can turn this country around.'

Next Thursday Mr Griffin will appear on the BBC's Question Time in the BNP's biggest media opportunity to date.

Miss Clarke retired from the English National Ballet after the outcry over her membership. In 2007 she was elected to the executive of the BNP-backed Solidarity trade union for a five-year term. Last night she was unavailable for comment.

Shadwell Hall treasurer David Parker, who rents the venue to her for £10 an hour, said: 'She didn't declare her politics. We have had no complaints or negativity. Whether or not the parents know about her views is up to them. I think like most of us our politics are separate from our normal lives.'

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Ballerina used to deflect BNP criticism

In a cynical move to deflect criticism of the party following the explosive events of the past couple of weeks, the BNP deliberately let it slip that Simone Clarke, the so-called BNP ballerina, has become engaged to its London Mayoral candidate and director of the gay porn flick HMS Discovery Richard Barnbrook. According to party sources, the plan was to release that information just prior to the GLA elections in an attempt to gain a few additional votes but it was deemed more expedient to release it now, particularly after the attack on the BNP by Jon Cruddas in the House of Commons a few days ago.

Now the party has been obliged to spice up the dancer's contribution to its flagging fortunes by announcing that she may well quit the English national Ballet to stand for the BNP in a local government election or by-election.

Clarke's star has waned somewhat since her membership of the party was exposed last year. From being the ENB's prima ballerina, she appears to have been moved to less significant roles and, for the last seven weeks since it was claimed her home was burgled, she has been on leave.

The burglary, if indeed it ever happened, appears to have been a most confusing event. One story was that Clarke heard the burglar from her bedroom, promptly locked herself in the wardrobe but was confronted when the intruder managed to open the locked door. The current version, as stated by Barnbrook yesterday, was that she discovered the burglar in the kitchen. Whichever way it happened, the story is that the villain walked off with the newly-bought engagement ring. One wonders where Barnbrook was at the time...

According to Richard Barnbrook, who appears to have taken over as her Press Officer, Clarke has been moved away from the limelight because of her membership of the BNP, itself currently embroiled in allegations of theft and illegal surveillance, and has spoken to the Northern Ballet about the possibility of joining them in an attempt to be close to her five-year-old daughter Olivia, who lives with her maternal grandparents in Leeds. Quite what this would mean to the couple's already peculiar relationship is debatable - Barnbrook is the leader (for the moment) of the BNP contingent on Barking and Dagenham Council. Observers are wondering how his dismal performance in the council chamber could be improved by his fiance moving a couple of hundred miles away.

Clarke is surprisingly downbeat about the whole engagement issue, preferring to maintain a stony silence when asked about it but Barnbrook is not nearly so reticent, stating in interviews with several newspapers; 'In the future we will probably get married and have a family...we are very much in love'.

Simone Clarke, of course, already has a family - a daughter by fellow ENB dancer Yat-Sen Chang, with whom she had a long-term relationship. This ended in April of this year and one can only assume that her budding relationship with Barnbrook had something to do with the breakdown because he is quoted as saying (on several occasions) that he and Clarke have 'been going out for over nine months'. You do the maths.

Just after the announcement that Clarke was a member of the BNP and that she was then in the relationship with Yat-Sen Chang, Barnbrook stated that he hoped the couple would not have children, apparently unaware that the media was full of the fact that she already had a child of with Chang, of mixed British, Cuban and Chinese descent. At the time, he was reported as saying; 'I'm not opposed to mixed marriages but their children are washing out the identity of this country's indigenous people'. He appears to have changed his mind somewhat now he is engaged to Clarke.

'Olivia's all right because she speaks good English, and culturally that's the way she's already leaning,' he said recently, claiming that, once married, he would care for the child 'as if she were my own'.

Clarke, who isn't quite as politically-naive as she tries to pretend, has spoken at a BNP event in the Midlands alongside the party's current leader, Nick Griffin, and was recently elected to the executive of the BNP's fake union Solidarity which, like the party itself, suffered acrimonious splits recently. Solidarity's general secretary is the long-time far-right activist Pat Harrington, a former organiser for the National Front.

We'll leave you with a quote from the Daily Mirror: 'And all we can say is that the rabidly right-wing pair deserve one another.'