Author: Nick Lowles | Date: October 1999

The Devil's Disciple: The life and times of Nick Griffin

Dr Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, famously pronounced that if you tell a lie often enough, in the end the public will believe you. In a concoction of half truths and a great deal of fiction, readers of The Patriot, the magazine produced by the British National Party's convicted nail bomber Tony Lecomber, have been treated to a blatant attempt to put a favourable spin on the life of Nick Griffin, contender for the BNP leadership.

The result has proved as offensive to his some of his fellow nazis as it is to us. Perhaps the most accurate description of Griffin's utterances came from John Morse, John Tyndall's former cell mate and supporter in last month's leadership contest. In the September issue of the BNP leader's magazine Spearhead Morse writes: "Nick's words would seem to be whatever flavoured chewing gum for the ears that he calculates his audience of the moment might prefer. It's all done for effect. To this writer as to anyone else who has had the tiresome spectacle of Nick Griffin before their eyes for enough years, Nick's auricular spearmint has long acquired a monotonous taste of cow dung."

Of course Morse, like Patriot, has his own agenda to pursue, so we thought we would take a look for ourselves at Griffin and The Patriot's attempts to reconstruct him.

Griffin claims his first involvement with politics was with the Young Conservatives in his native Suffolk, but that he left because of their liberalism. The truth is that they were not so liberal. Griffin's father, Edwin, never experienced any conflict of interest between his position as a local Tory party official and allowing the family home to be used for National Front activities, including a nazi music gig attended by hundreds of very rough and ready boneheads.

It was on this occasion that his son and Nick's nazi playmate Tony Williams - the same man who became a satanist and leader of the recently embarrassed National Socialist Movement - made their first financial killing. Williams's father, an old fascist and beer importer, gave his son a job lot of out-of-date beer which they sold to the young nazi music lovers at a premium price. Twenty four hours later a massive dose of diarrhoea swept through the ranks.

Williams tells anyone who will listen of his happy school days at Felixstowe with his bosom buddy Nick Griffin. He claims this makes him all the more bitter at the way Griffin stole Greenwave, a quasi-green group with a name Williams himself had stolen, which he had set up with his German lady friend.

Edwin Griffin acted as accountant for the exiled Italian terrorist leader Roberto Fiore, when he arrived in this country on the run in the early eighties. He has gone on to become auditor for the chiselling charity shops run by the fascist International Third Position (ITP). Of course according to Nick Griffin, links with terrorists are all in the past.

How odd that both Fiore and Griffin still use the same London lawyer to represent them. Mr Callaghan also represented Paul David "Charlie" Sargent, now serving life for the murder of a fellow nazi and whom Griffin now dismisses as a state "asset".

At the outset of his political career at Cambridge University Griffin became one of the NF's youngest parliamentary candidates. Then as now he was never willing to admit any weakness, either physical or intellectual. Today he claims he got only a second class degree because he was a member of the Cambridge boxing team. He certainly was - known among his fellow sportsmen as "canvass-back Nick".

His last fight was with a black student and almost the entire audience cheered the black fighter on to victory.

Those who saw him and another young NF activist, Patrick Harrington, running arm in arm from the forces of anti-fascist retribution in Bury St Edmunds some years later thought he would have made a better track athlete than boxer. The retribution was over the violence that had accompanied Griffin's NF branch's reign of terror in the area. Assaults by his minders on women's homes and mixed race couples, as well as on the police and US war graves, were commonplace.

It was one of these thugs, speaking to Searchlight from his Isle of Wight home a few years ago, who gave the lie to the stories that Griffin was expelled from the ITP. He said Griffin had spent a number of years in the ITP fine-tuning the skills of a wide spectrum of groups and publications that put the ITP line forward, often disguised or wrapped up in quasi left rhetoric. Nobody pushed Griffin; he probably went over to the BNP as part of a long-term strategy put together during his years in the NF Political Soldiers. One senses that Fiore's hand is no further from the new body politic around the BNP than it is from the ITP.

Griffin certainly brought to the BNP many ideas first hatched in the Political Soldier days, including community-based politics, anti-abortion, countryside protests and a devotion to the sanctity of the family.

Griffin claims that the NF went from strength to strength after he and his Italian terrorist supported friends took over. In reality the membership began to dwindle as part of their systematic plan for developing a trained core cadre of activists, or as they termed it, the Political Soldiers. The two-stage ousting of the old guard in 1983 and 1986 left the NF with a tiny membership. When Griffin first took over, the NF had 4,000 to 5,000 members. By the end of the 1980s when they departed to form the ITP, it was down to a few hundred - and that is being generous.

There is some truth in his claim that sales of NF News rose to 4,000, but this isolated success is not put into context, nor does he mention that some whole branches refused to take the paper when it featured black nationalists on the cover. The solitary success he makes so much of occurred in one marching season in Northern Ireland, when NF members there were being locked up for attacks on the RUC and the attempted murder of a journalist.

At that time the NF had some influence with Irishmen on both sides of the border, such as Derek Turner of the Irish Social Initiative. Today Turner runs the growing far-right Tory outfit centred around the magazine Right Now, which he edits, a large step up from being a small time fascist boss and sacked navy rating.

Many of the rest of Griffin's small band of Political Soldiers have also moved on to bigger and better pastures. They can be found around several far-right groups, mainly in the BNP but also in the senior ranks of the Conservative Party in Scotland. Phil Andrews is currently serving as a local councillor in west London.

In his Patriot interview Griffin expounds at length on campaigns such as "Rights for Whites", but fails to mention his long-time flirtation with black nationalist extremists such as Louis Farrakhan's "Foreign Minister" and Osiris Akkebala, an eccentric US black separatist whom Griffin called in as a witness at his trial last year for publishing his racist hate sheet, The Rune. Akkebala's presence failed to prevent Griffin being convicted.

Griffin mentions his attempts to infiltrate anti-Cruise missile campaigns but appears to have forgotten what happened to people who refused to share platforms with him. Memories spring to mind of firebombed homes and the desecration of graves of US airmen who died flying from Britain against the Nazis in the Second World War.

Perhaps the real purpose of these acts was to besmirch the name of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which for a long time was a thorn in the side of the state.

When it was revealed that Griffin had a contact telephone number within a Ministry of Defence building last year, he tried to wriggle out by saying it was to do with mercy flights to Bosnia, which again was rather odd as it is the ITP that has concerned itself with Bosnia not the BNP.

Some of Griffin's nazi comrades still wonder why Joe Pearce was imprisoned twice for editing Bulldog, which published hit lists, while others in the NF at that time escaped charge. They may also recall the result of attempts to embroil Welsh nationalists in the activities of a group calling itself Sons of Glendower, which was claiming responsibility for arsons against English-owned homes in Wales. Welsh activists lined the streets with slogans proclaiming: "NF = MI5". Only the numeral was wrong.

Several nazis internationally also wondered why people seemed to get arrested soon after being visited by Griffin and his cohorts. One was a Spanish army officer who was jailed for spying for Colonel Gadaffi.

Griffin claims that in its later years the Political Soldier section of the NF was bedevilled by religious cranks, but of course these were the very same people who had run the NF alongside him in its final days.

It was no surprise, then, that Martin Webster, the former very capable national activities organiser of the NF, recently denounced Griffin publicly for his hypocrisy over homosexuality. Griffin has attacked Webster for being gay, yet surrounded himself in the NF and later the ITP with gay men.

Griffin's cold-blooded nature is revealed when he complains that the Political Soldiers only flirted with Gadaffi for petrodollars, but got no money, only copies of Gadaffi's Green Book. He forgets to mention that his organisation was the only UK outlet for these very expensive books for some time and this, plus a free trip to Libya, was the Libyan leader's way of rewarding his supporters in Britain.

Griffin's negotiations and close cooperation with the Libyan People's Bureau in London at the very time that WPC Yvonne Fletcher was butchered by the Bureau's occupants and died writhing in agony on a London pavement were only aborted when the Bureau was shut down. The closure did not stop the laughter and amusement at her tragic death among Griffin and his playmates.

One can only speculate why Griffin's friends in the ITP continue to maintain close connections with Baghdad and Belgrade and why the BNP has attacked Nato action in the Balkans and sided with Iraq. Either they are still serving old masters or they are still in the game of taking money from anybody prepared to hand it over.

And that brings us to another financial matter. While disapproving of and plotting to oust Tyndall as BNP leader, Griffin was happy to take his money to edit Spearhead for several months, hiding behind one of his many aliases, Tom North. We understand that the Inland Revenue may be knocking on a few doors in the near future for an explanation of precisely how business between Tyndall and Griffin was transacted.

Finally Griffin claims that there are no photographs of him in nazi uniform like those of Tyndall. Maybe so, but what about the pictures taken of Griffin in Tripoli with Harrington and that "religious crank" Derek "bring back the inquisition" Holland, or the time he shared a flat and business with Fiore, the convicted leader of the Italian terrorist NAR, a number of whose bank robbing and cop killing members are at present awaiting extradition from London.

Griffin is clearly a disciple of the devil, but just which devil is still anybody's guess.

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