BNP 'would welcome Hanson' in UK

The leader of the British National Party says Pauline Hanson will be welcomed should she decide to play a political role upon moving to the UK.

BNP leader Nick Griffin also said he felt sorry for Ms Hanson because she had been "forced out of her country by this politically correct intimidation and bullying. She would not be a sponger. We would regard her as a good addition."

The One Nation founder has put her million dollar property up for sale in Coleyville, southwest of Brisbane, and has announced she's moving to Britain.

Mr Griffin said the BNP's leaders had long observed Ms Hanson's career and "persecution" by Australian mainstream parties. He offered a bit of advice about where Ms Hanson should live, warning she should stay away from central London because it had become overrun with "spongers". He said more than 100,000 "indigenous" Londoners had fled the capital every year over the past two decades after being driven out by immigration.

"It has been a relentless flow because they can't stand living there and feeling like foreigners in their own city," he said.

Ms Hanson's hardline views on race sparked a national debate over immigration policy and Aboriginal disadvantage from the time she entered federal parliament in 1996. In her maiden speech, she said "we are in danger of being swamped by Asians", and questioned multiculturalism.

The Age

Australian anti-migrant campaigner Pauline Hanson to emigrate

Former One Nation leader who said country was being swamped by Asians plans to seek 'peace' in UK

The fish and chip shop owner who gained international notoriety and a seat in Australia's parliament after warning the country it was being swamped by Asians is packing her bags and leaving – and she's bound for Britain.

Pauline Hanson, the former leader of the One Nation party, who once draped herself in the Australian flag and railed against immigration to campaign for a seat in federal parliament, appears to have changed her mind about the rights and wrongs of migration.

She says she can no longer live in Australia. "Sadly, the land of opportunity is no more applicable. It's pretty much goodbye for ever. I've really had enough."

She said in an interview with the magazine Women's Day: "Our governments lack enough people with the fortitude to speak up without fear or favour. Over-regulation, increasing taxes and lack of true representation are affecting our way of life. I feel very much for the young ones. Once it was common for them to own their own home. Not now. It's a harder place."

After more than 10 years in the spotlight she seeks "peace" and "contentment" and hopes to find it in the UK.

Hanson shot to prominence in the 1996 federal election when she claimed that Aboriginal Australians received an abundance of welfare. Although she lasted just one term in parliament she continued courting attention with her extreme views and unusual behaviour. In a video testimony she once recorded with a television network she alleged there was a conspiracy to kill her.

Once, asked during a television interview if she was xenophobic, she replied "please explain" – a response that only bolstered her kudos among followers who viewed her as a maverick unfairly set upon by the political establishment.

Despite three more unsuccessful attempts at returning to federal parliament and two unsuccessful bids to enter the New South Wales and Queensland parliaments, as well as a stint in jail for electoral fraud, a conviction eventually quashed, in 2006 she was named by current affairs magazine the Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians of all time.

Even as her political fortune waned her popularity grew. She appeared in the primetime TV show Dancing with the Stars in 2004, and wrote an autobiography, Untamed and Unashamed. Now she says: "I know I will never be given a chance to enter parliament again."

Some are sceptical that her departure from Australia will last.

Bob Vinnicombe, a longstanding member of One Nation, thinks she will change her mind. "I think it's a passing fad," he said.

"I don't really understand why she would want to go to the UK. She would realise that there's just as many migrants in England as there are in Australia."

Hanson has never been far from controversy and the attention of the Australian media. She once attempted to drive away at speed from the pack that accompanied her on her campaign in 1998, only to end up with a beeline of journalists following her dangerously in hot pursuit.

From the beginning Hanson positioned herself as an amateur, describing herself in her maiden speech to parliament "not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life's knocks". In that speech she also warned that "a truly multicultural country can never be strong or united".

Yet when asked about her decision to move to the UK she said: "Every country has something unique to offer. And I want to experience that, to live it, and not just for a brief time."

The 55-year-old is eligible for dual Australian-British citizenship because her father is English and her mother Irish. But before she makes the final move to Britain, she says she will spend a few months on the south island of New Zealand.

Guardian

What does the Serbian wife think of her husband...the BNP's biggest donor?

Multicultural marriage: Charles Vernon Wentworth,
the BNP's largest cash donor - and Eastern European wife Zorka

His family's power and influence may have waned since the days when they owned great swathes of England, and a castle and country estates were named in their honour. In his Suffolk manor, however, Charles Vernon Wentworth, 52, millionaire scion of an aristocratic clan dating back to the Domesday Book, still carries considerable clout.

His inherited wealth includes a 660-acre farm in Friston - a pretty hamlet of pink-washed cottages and narrow lanes. The village green and meeting hall also belong to him, so parishioners must seek his permission to stage fairs and other events there, just like commoners of old.

Inevitably, Mr Wentworth's importance makes him the subject of much local gossip; and the fact that he is a rather reclusive, enigmatic figure who has been married three times and habitually goes unshaven and wears scruffy old clothes only adds to the air of intrigue that surrounds him. Tongues were wagging again this week when newly-released documents revealed him to be the British National Party's most generous benefactor, having reportedly donated some £38,000 to Nick Griffin and his extreme Right-wing cronies in recent years.

'Fancy him supporting that lot - he's a disgrace to the Wentworths,' sniffed one long-time resident, who declined to be named for fear of offending the man who also funds the annual children's Christmas party.

Others were astounded, pointing out that their timeless rural idyll is hardly an obvious breeding ground for the politics of fear and bigotry. Most people here are relatively well-off, crime is virtually unknown (according to one parish councillor, there have been two burglaries in 25 years) and ASBOs are something you only read about in the Ipswich newspapers. Furthermore, Friston appears to be the exclusively white Anglo-Saxon community of Griffin's dreams. Among those residents I spoke to this week, no one could think of a single person among its 300-odd inhabitants who comes from an ethnic minority.

Clearly, then, they don't know much about their own squire's new bride. For, by the deepest of ironies, the Mail has discovered that the latest lady in the Wentworth manor is of Eastern European extraction.

Strolling along a damp autumnal lane in her Wellingtons and padded jacket this week, her pet Doberman straining at the leash, the wife of the BNP's arch-backer looked every inch the English landowner's wife. Yet the maiden name of 39-year-old Zorka Wentworth was Ilic. Her mother is from Kosovo, her late father Serbian. Having fled to Britain in the 1950s to escape the tyrannical communism of Yugoslavia under Tito, they were precisely the sort of immigrants who would be barred from entering the country if Griffin had his way.

Although she was born in Bedfordshire, Zorka considers herself half-English and half-Serb, speaks with a very slight Eastern European accent (presumably because she was raised to be bilingual), is Serb Orthodox by religion and celebrates both Serbian and English festivals. This kind of duality would hardly be welcomed in Griffin's ethnically sanitised Utopia. After all, during last week's Question Time debacle, the BNP leader described white Britons as 'aboriginals': English, Scots, Irish and Welsh people 'who have been here for the last 17,000 years'.

Ludicrously, Mrs Wentworth - who met her husband eight years ago, when she was working as a chef in the local pub, and became his third wife last year - would not even be permitted to join the party her husband bankrolls so generously.

Charles and Zorka Wentworth are evidently struggling to see the irony. Talking to the BNP's most unlikely darling couple this week, over cups of tea in their stylish country kitchen, I began to understand why. They seem far removed from the hate-filled BNP rabble-rousers who wave banners in Northern mill towns. And as Mr Wentworth remarks wryly, he is no 'knuckle-dragging' skinhead.

Yet they give the distinct impression that they don't know nearly enough about Griffin and his racially divisive policies, even though Mr Wentworth says he read 'the bulk of' the party's manifesto before opening his cheque-book. 'Is it really £38,000? I thought it was £28,000, but I can't recall. I don't keep personal bank records.'

Does he support them, then, because he has some longstanding connection with Griffin, who was raised just a few miles away in Suffolk and attended fee-paying Woodbridge School, where two of Wentworth's four children were educated? The squire scratches a stubbly chin and ponders. No, he replies, he wasn't acquainted with the BNP leader until they were introduced at a party rally a few years ago.

'I was smoking one of these, and Griffin didn't like it,' he grins, pointing to his hand-rolled cigarette. 'Nick hates smoking.'

But why was he at the rally in the first place? What common ground does he share with Griffin? He grins again and continues: 'I think the death penalty for serious crimes is an issue. I don't know how that would go down in a referendum. But for the likes of the Harold Shipmans, and serial rapists and killers, I would like to see it re-introduced.'

A short, square-built man with a complexion which suggests he enjoys his wine (Serbian reds are a favourite), and a sardonic wit, Mr Wentworth shoots his wife a meaningful glance, then adds: 'And obviously you are going to ask me about immigration.'

His five-figure donation is all the more surprising given his experiences as a young man in the United States. After leaving public school, he went travelling there and his girlfriend fell pregnant. Needing a job to support her, he joined the U.S. Air Force and served for four years. This was long before 9/11 and he says they had a policy of actively enlisting foreigners. He says he formed friendships with several Hispanic servicemen. And later, when he left the military and lived on the West Coast (he worked for a U.S. pest control company before returning to his Suffolk estate), he also saw how multiculturalism worked.

But why, if he accepts it works over there, would it not work here?

'America is historically a melting pot, isn't it?' he says, adding that its vast size meant it was better able to accommodate people of diverse nationalities. In contrast, he argues, this country is too crowded a nation to cope with an influx of foreigners. He recites the familiar argument about Britain being 'overloaded'; and since none of the other parties seems willing to pull up the drawbridge, he has joined, and funded, the BNP.

'I'm not vile or odious - the adjectives they always attach to the BNP. I don't agree with everything they're saying on this, but I'm sure you get die-hard Labour supporters who don't agree with every policy their party has. Or Liberals or Tories.'

Zorka interjects: 'He's not a racist; I'm not a racist. I know the man here. He's not a Nazi.'

Perhaps not, but how can he possibly fund a party who would have turned away his refugee parents-in-law, and possibly his wife?

'I don't think they would send her back home,' he says uneasily, then, almost in the next breath, admits that he is not 'completely au fait' with BNP immigration policy.

'As far as I'm concerned, if anyone's here legally, I think they should be allowed to stay. They're not going to send her back home and neither will I.'

The new Mrs Wentworth grasps her husband's hand and smiles at him. She has met 'Nick', she says, and found him charming. In any case, she and her parents aren't the type of Eastern Europeans he wants to see the back of.

'You can't tar everyone with the same brush,' she argues, seemingly unaware that the average BNP thug, who lives in a very different Britain from the one she has married into, does precisely that.

'My father got a job in the brickworks at 16 and worked hard all his life. My mother came here at 14 and, at just turned 70, she has only just retired. They never claimed benefits in their lives, and worked to make this country better. They aren't the same as the influx who have come here since the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, and still come here now, demanding mobile phones and houses. A lot of them are Bosnian Muslims, but there are also Croats and Serbs. They are so-called asylum seekers and refugees, but they are a lot of s*** basically. They just came over to milk the country.'

Sensing that she is going too far, she catches herself and adds: 'Not all of them, obviously.'

Soon, though, she is sounding off again. 'Britain has huge problems - with everything. I find it absolutely frightening. Youngsters nowadays terrify me; you only have to pick up your newspaper every day.'

Does she have some first-hand experience of this? Do muggers lurk in the hollyhocks?

'No, no - but we are lucky to live in a tranquil part of the country,' she says. 'Others are not so fortunate.'

My morning with the Wentworths left me perplexed. Since I find their politics so abhorrent and worryingly ill-informed, I had expected to despise them. When the conversation moves away from politics, however, they turn out to be a rather engaging pair. Mrs Wentworth has taught her husband some Serbian, and over a traditional Serb dinner - made with their home-grown vegetables - they sometimes converse in her language.

He is also knowledgeable about Balkan history, reminding me that the Serbs were among Britain's greatest allies during the War and how thousands were slaughtered by the Nazis. (Just how this squares with Griffin's admiration for Hitler, he struggles to explain.)

There is much that is decent about Charles Wentworth and his 'alien' wife, too. Each night, they invite the old man who lives alone nearby into their home for supper. And in addition to funding a Christmas party for every child in the village, Mr Wentworth has purchased much of the play equipment on the village green - anonymously, so as not to make a fuss. Given his charitable nature, and his readiness to embrace her family's customs and traditions, it comes as no surprise to hear that Zorka's mother 'adores Charles', as did her late father.

Clearly, theirs is a model multicultural marriage - one whose very success makes a nonsense of the BNP's opposition to the mingling of races, ethnicities and cultures. This reinforces one's impression that the couple, though not by nature malevolent, are dangerously naive and that - in the absence of persuasive policies from the main parties - the BNP are playing on their fears to maximum effect.

Judging by the names listed among the party's major financial backers this week, other unlikely figures are falling into the same trap. They include Plymouth widow Mrs Sheila Butler, the 83-year-old greatniece of World War I hero Lord Horatio Kitchener, who has donated her £11,032 savings to the BNP, because, she told me: 'Nick Griffin is a patriot - like my great-uncle.'

She said she had abandoned the Tories, and then UKIP, because 'I don't like it that most people [here] are brown, yellow or green these days', and the BNP was the only party that promised to recreate Britain as the country of her youth.

Another prominent donor is Kent fruit farmer Adam Champneys, who is reported to have given the BNP £15,000 in the past year alone. He is battling a serious illness and was unavailable for comment this week. However, like Charles Wentworth and Kitchener's great-niece, this accomplished pilot and antiques collector, who served in the Intelligence Corps, is far removed from the disaffected, down-at-heel rabble one normally associates with the BNP.

Whether or not we believe the BNP's spin doctors when they claim that membership inquiries have soared on a wave of public sympathy after Griffin's Question Time mauling, it would be foolish to ignore their broadening appeal. For when a wealthy English landowner places one hand around the shoulder of his new Eastern European bride and with the other signs a £38,000 cheque to a party who would banish her from the country of her birth, we should all feel more than a little worried.

Mail Online

Escape from the Holocaust: The Secret life of Britain's Anne Frank

When her parents were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, a six-year-old from Newcastle was hidden away in Paris. Now she is retracing her path to freedom

The fragments of the story were there all along, bundled into a shoebox which lay, unopened, in a spare room at Suzanne Rappoport's apartment in Leeds. There were the postcards her father had sent, asking after her but providing no word of her mother; the studio photograph of the three of them taken a few weeks before they were separated; and the immaculate, handwritten note she had penned, aged no more than nine, telling how she longed to see them both again. "Je serai bien contente de revoir ma chere petite maman et mon cher petit papa," reads the letter. She never did.

Ms Rappoport was born of an immigrant British mother and has spent her entire adult life in England. But its defining event occurred on a warm August afternoon in German-occupied Paris, in 1942. The French police were collaborating with the Nazis in the round up of non-French Jews - those who had come to France but were not born there - for deportation. Among them were her parents, taken from their small flat at Belleville, in the attractive 20th arrondissement.

Ms Rappoport would have been taken, too, were it not for the courage and sheer audacity of the woman across the third floor landing, Mme Yvonne Collomb, who removed the child from the flat - even as French police waited for her parents to pack a case each - and then helped conceal her from the Nazis and their collaborators for over three years. Though other British Jews are known to have been among France's 30,000 Hidden Children, who escaped the Nazis in circumstances captured by Sebastian Faulks's novel Charlotte Gray, Ms Rappoport will become the first to tell her story this week, in a BBC Timewatch documentary which takes her back to the apartment block where, 65 years ago, she was concealed in a makeshift bed under her neighbour's kitchen table.

There would have been no story to tell had not Ms Rappoport's mother, Millie Spadik, whose own parents first arrived in Liverpool by passenger ship in the early 1900s to escape the Russian pogroms, decided to leave her home in Newcastle upon Tyne for France after an unhappy marriage. She settled in Paris where she had met Josek Rappoport, a Polish tailor, though she and her daughter returned to north-east England several times before the war. With Millie's income as a garment finisher supplementing Josek's salary, they enjoyed theatre and cinema and were able to indulge their daughter in her favourite treat - grenadine and lemonade with a straw at a café on Rue de Belleville. The last family photograph, taken at the Studio Jean Guy, marked their daughter's sixth birthday - 23 July 1942.

What occurred next remained firmly in the past until Ms Rappoport, now 70, concluded it was time to revisit it. Her decision to go back stemmed from a chance conversation about her parents with one of her neighbours in Leeds, Barbara Govan, whose Screenhouse Productions company has produced the Timewatch documentary, which airs on BBC2 on Friday. "I felt that I needed, while I still could, to find out what had happened to my parents - and to my grandparents, who were also taken that summer," Ms Rappoport said. "There were so many fragments of memory. That's how it must be with an experience like that."

She was at her father's shoulder, as he sat watching the pigeons in the sunshine through the window of their third-floor apartment, when they both heard the sound of the French policemen on the wooden staircase at 58 Rue de Belleville. The child was not immediately anxious: there had been a curfew for her that summer and the yellow star she and other Jewish children wore made her uncomfortable, but her parents had been assiduous about keeping the family's true predicament from her. It was as her parents locked the front door and quickly ushered her into the small family bedroom with them, bundling her under the bed, that it became clear something was seriously wrong. "Mother was sobbing, pacing backwards and forwards and tearing her hair out," Ms Rappoport recalled. "From under the bed, I saw clumps of it falling to the floor. She knew what was coming." After the front door was broken in, the Rappoports were ordered into their sparse little kitchen and were packing bags in front of the small Salamander stove, under the eye of the policemen, when Mme Collomb rushed in. "She said: 'What's my child doing in this apartment? I've been looking everywhere for her. She dragged me out by the arm before I could react," Ms Rappoport said. "She got away with it. The police left the building with my parents but never came looking for me."

Ms Rappoport now believes that her parents and their neighbour had rehearsed this script in readiness for the moment. "Mme Colomb had sent her daughter out to play at the Butte de Chaumont park that day," she said. "I also found my parents' sideboard in her apartment, and items like their Japanese tea set, which puzzled me. I now think it might have been their advance payment to her for the task she was prepared to undertake."

The days which followed brought the same bewildering existence which the two young Jewish brothers experience when hidden in an upstairs room in Charlotte Gray. Mme Collomb made her new child a bed under the kitchen table, protected from view by a long, thick chenille table cloth, and she occupied her with a pair of slippers made from old dusters. It was Suzanne's job to polish the floor with them. "I loved skating around the slippery kitchen on them," Ms Rappoport recalled. "She knew how to distract me."

But it soon became unsafe for a child, whose existence was well known, to be confined so close to home. Mme Collomb tapped into a network which was hiding children in rural France and sent her to the village of Mondoubleau in the Loire Valley, whose role in hiding children has been documented. It was here that the reality of her parents' absence and her own grim existence - with hours hidden from view in a cellar - began to dawn on her. Though she did not know it, those into whose care she had been entrusted did not share Mme Collomb's empathy. A letter, written from a family in Mondoubleau to Mme Collomb and recently recovered from the Leeds shoebox, reads: "Je regrette de vous mettre en embarras pour [Suzanne] mais je ne peux pas la garder. Je ne peux pas m'attacher a la maison pour un enfant." ("I'm sorry to put you in a difficult position over Suzanne but I can't look after her. I can't be stuck at home for a child.")

Suzanne was moved to a farmhouse in the Auvergne, where her yearning to see Ms Collomb, as well as her parents, was evident in an emotional a letter to Ms Collomb which concluded: "Je vais vous quittaient en vous embrasant de tout mon petit coeur."

Correspondence from southern Poland told Mme Collomb that the prospects for the child's parents were grim. Several postcards from Suzanne's father confirmed he was in the Auschwitz camp at Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million Jews and 75,000 Poles perished. His prisoner number - Birkenau 3776 - is at the top of the cards (translated into German at the camp) in which he reports: "I'm digging coal. I'm in good health. How is my child? Of my wife, I've heard nothing."

Young Suzanne, like dozens of France's hidden children, received no word of her parents' fate. She wept when a child, Fernandres, who had shared her predicament in the Auvergne, was suddenly taken home to Marseilles by her parents. Her years in hiding brought several close escapes - she was caught in the crossfire of a resistance attack on a German munitions train on one occasion - but eventually, after the war had ended, she returned to Mme Collomb, only to find herself within days on a ship to her maternal grandparents in Newcastle. "After everything, it wasn't what I wanted," she said. "I was returning to a strange country where I didn't speak the language. As soon as I was old enough, I left my family for London."

"Forget what happened," her grandparents told her, leaving her to reach her own conclusions about her parents' fate. And to this day, the precise details about them are unclear. Though Ms Rappoport has located them both at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, where 76,000 Jews deported from France are remembered, the dates and places of their deaths are still unknown. Discussions are currently under way in Europe on how to speed up the unlocking of a vast archive of Nazi documents, including an index of 17.5 million names, controlled by a commission on which 11 countries, including Britain, are represented. This may also reveal more about her paternal grandmother, who died at Auschwitz, and her grandfather, who died at a holding camp.

Mme Collomb's collection of evidence - passed to Ms Rappoport in 1969 when she went to France in search of documentation to assist her application for a British passport - has helped her to discover more than she hoped to learn and prompted her to ensure the Frenchwoman, who died in 1992, is remembered for her heroism. Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, has already agreed to name Mme Collomb as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, and her name is also to be placed on France's Mur des Justes, which acknowledges those who defied the Nazis. It is now known that Mme Collomb saved others including a M. Hubermann, another neighbour, who hid in her broom cupboard.

The French government has awarded Ms Rappoport a small annual compensation - for which she must attend a Leeds police station each year to prove she is still alive. A class action suit co-ordinated in New York against the French railway, SNCF, for transporting her parents and many others continues - though a regional court verdict in their favour has recently been overturned.

"The police never came looking for me at Mme Collomb's house that day and whether I was on the arrest list is a mystery I shall never know the answer to," Ms Rappoport said. The horror that she was spared is perhaps best understood by the letters written by other Parisian children before they were herded away on trains, that summer. "My heart is heavy and I can't tell you all I am feeling," said 15-year-old Jacques Befelor before departing Paris on what was known as Convoy 15 to Auschwitz. "We are rushing to prepare for a long, sad journey and it drives us mad that we are to be separated. This is the end."

Independent

Le Pen's mask slips as he plays the race card against Sarkozy

The candidate who claims to be closest to the people rarely leaves his office, except to go to the radio or TV studio. The candidate who promises never to lie to the electorate refuses to say what he would do if elected.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, 78, is the "invisible man" of the French presidential campaign: invisible but ever-present, like a virus. He began the campaign pretending to be a more mellow, and more tolerant, man. But in his latest broadcast appearance - he seldom appears in public - the veteran far-right leader reverted to his favourite theme: xenophobia.

The front-running, centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, "comes from an immigrant background," Mr Le Pen told a radio interviewer on Sunday. By comparison, he, Mr Le Pen, was a candidate of the terroir: literally, a candidate rooted in the native earth.

"It's obvious, there's a difference," Mr Le Pen said. "There is a choice there which might be considered fundamental by a certain number of French people".

This is Jean-Marie Le Pen at his most poisonous and his most plausible - and also his most effective.

Mr Sarkozy, 52, the man who is favourite to be the next President of France, is indeed half-Hungarian and a quarter-jewish on his maternal, French side. He does not look particularly French; his name does not sound French. Ask almost anyone in France if this will make a difference to their choice in the presidential election on 22 April and 6 May and they will say "no". Mr Le Pen knows, however, that it does make a difference, for a significant minority of French people, especially people on the hard right, tempted to vote for Mr Sarkozy.

Mr Le Pen, and he alone, has been prepared to break the taboo and make a public issue of Mr Sarkozy's Hungarian and Jewish blood. When challenged - as he knew he would be - he immediately pointed out that Mr Sarkozy had himself boasted of his immigrant background during the campaign. If Mr Sarkozy had not mentioned his family, Mr Le Pen said, he would not have mentioned it either.

At 78, fighting his fifth - and presumably last - presidential campaign, Mr Le Pen has lost none of his tactical brilliance or his moral cynicism. He knows, better than anyone, how to touch the buttons of inchoate anger and xenophobia.

Although placed fourth by the polls, Mr Le Pen insists that a "tsunami" of "rejection of the system" will carry him into the crucial top two places in the first round on 22 April. Can he repeat his extraordinary coup of 2002 and reach the second round?

Mr Le Pen has been creeping up in the opinion polls, to around 13 or 14 per cent. Last time he knocked out the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, with just under 17 per cent. There are two candidates ahead of him this year: the unconvincing Socialist, Ségolène Royal, and the likeable but undynamic centrist François Bayrou.

Mr Le Pen predicts that they will cancel one another out, and he will dart between them, with about 20 per cent of the vote, and reach the second round.

There are a number of reasons to believe that Mr Le Pen will fail. First, he has never scored more than 18 per cent in a national election. Second, he is an old man and beginning to look his age. (His decision barely to go on the road is partly strategic but may also be intended to conserve his flagging energy.)

Finally, he has a candidate running against him this time - Mr Sarkozy - who has stolen and moderated many of his favourite issues: immigration, insecurity, excessive taxation and nationalism.

Another shock cannot not be ruled out, however. Mr Le Pen predicts that somewhere around 5 per cent of the 30 per cent of voters now supporting Mr Sarkozy will return to the far right on 22 April. Hence his decision to make Mr Sarkozy's Hungarian - and implicitly his Jewish - blood an election issue.

And there is a further complication. Pollsters in France have never managed accurately to gauge Mr Le Pen's support. Le Pen voters systematically lie. This year his electorate is even harder to plumb than ever.

An unknown but significant minority of far left voters - and even Arab and African - voters say they are tempted to vote Le Pen this time out of bloody-mindedness, frustration or determination to "make the system explode". Last fling or not, Mr Le Pen may have one shot left in his locker.

Independent