Swordplay took a keen interest in British National Party leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC Question Time. Was it, as some feared, a publicity coup for the BNP – an early Christmas present, if you will – or was it a PR disaster? We asked our sometime scribe, Alex Wade, to stay up and watch Question Time from a different perspective. A left-field one, perhaps…
Lights, camera, action… And they were off. The year’s most hotly awaited Question Time set off at what might have been a canter had it not been for the charisma bypass suffered early in his life by Jack Straw, the first speaker and Justice Minister. Charged with arbitrating on whether it was fair that the BNP had hi-jacked the reputation of Winston Churchill, Mr Straw eschewed the opportunity for a simple ‘No’ and rapidly disappeared into a monologue whose undoubted sense was occluded by the sheer tedium of his delivery. Astute viewers groaned, for their fear that this was to be the leitmotif not merely of Mr Straw’s answers but those of all the assembled politicians was soon born out.
First, though, we were treated to a dash of Griffinesque absurdity. By way of refuting Mr Straw’s condemnation of the BNP’s deployment of Churchill, The Griffin said that his dad had been in the RAF during WWII, while Mr Straw’s had not. Thus, Mr Churchill would today be a member of the BNP. At this juncture I imagined that Bonnie Greer, positioned uneasily to The Griffin’s left, must have felt decidedly downcast, for against such an intellectual leviathan how could she hope to get a word in edgeways?
The audience, though, were having none of it. Such support for The Griffin as there was among its members was dwarfed by a majority which BNP apparatchiks suggest was hand-picked by the evil leftist ratings-grabbing mandarins who had elected to steer the BBC into such perilous waters. They need not have feared, for, as sundry PR experts predicted, The Griffin could not resist hoisting himself by his own petard. A curious half-smile playing on his fleshless lips, he vanquished presenter David Dimbleby’s cross-examination of his beliefs about the holocaust with the implacable: “I do not have a conviction for holocaust denial.” Yet again I could not but feel for Ms Greer, by this stage no doubt quaking in her boots and desperately wondering how on earth she could counter the might of The Griffin.
“I am the most loathed man in Britain,” said The Griffin, and if only he had stopped there we might perhaps have witnessed a touching mea culpa, or maybe even a damascene conversion. But fearlessly brandishing his law degree, The Griffin was unstoppable. He was loathed for the same reasons that the British love to hate celebrities: for being successful. Yes, he had consorted with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but he was “almost totally non-violent” so that was alright, wasn’t it? Such liaisons were, Mr Dimbleby suggested, part of The Griffin’s game-plan of making himself liked by everyone before leaping forth from the closet with his pernicious politics.
“Homosexuals can do what they want in their own closets,” replied The Griffin, “but if they start kissing in public they will be shot.” Actually, The Griffin didn’t say that, but he certainly doesn’t like same sex relationships. Amid much talk of perversion it was left for Mr Straw to make a reference to Dr Strangelove that few in the audience seemed to understand, while both Baroness Warsi, the Tory spokesman on community cohesion, and Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman, consulted the politicians’ handbook and, duly persuaded that a circuitous answer is always preferable to a straight one, disappeared into pointless, parenthetic ramblings illumined only by cheap shot splatterings of vitriol.
Their target, The Griffin, was immune. Convinced of the divinity of his mission, he smiled often and joined in the laughter when one audience member said he should be consigned to the South Pole where “the colourless landscape will suit you”. One moment of charming hilarity was even concluded by The Griffin reaching out his left arm as if to hug the estimable Ms Greer. Did he press her flesh? The camera moved on so quickly that I couldn’t tell, but Ms Greer’s discombobulation must, by now, have been irretrievable. “To think that this man, the most loathed in Britain, hasn’t got a conviction for holocaust denial, is friends with the Ku Klux Klan and doesn’t like people who aren’t white – and yet is a genius! And he nearly touched me!” Yes, Bonnie, it’s true, it’s all too sadly true.
By the end, who was the victor? The easy answer is democracy, and not merely because Baroness Warsi magnaminously confirmed that “Newspapers have the right to publish articles.” Voltaire’s famous aphorism about not agreeing with people but defending their right to say they like will be on the tip of many a hack’s tongue this morning, and not without reason. The Griffin’s views are loathesome, but they are not – as Mr Straw pointed out – contrary to law, and thus he had the right to air them.
But the more difficult answer is that the mentality of the gang is alive and well among right-thinking people as much as it is amid the BNP. Messrs Straw, Warsi and Huhne – even, to an extent, Mr Dimbleby – ganged up on The Griffin and too often resorted to insult and aggression. That’s what The Griffin does, and he should have been met with measured argument rather than his own tools. Thank God, then, that Bonnie Greer was there. Even if, as she sat next to The Griffin, she probably rather wished he was in Antartica.
The final scores are:
David Dimbleby: 7/10 – good effort; judicious air of reason.
Chris Huhne: 5/10 – passionately verbose. Verbosely passionate. Or just verbose.
Baroness Warsi: 4/10 – in denial about her circumlocutory tendencies.
Jack Straw: 3/10 – passionless and verbose.
Bonnie Greer: 9/10 – delightful air of reason and moderation.
The Griffin: who he?
Pictured courtesy of jormungund: the Griffin vulture – the most loathed bird in politics.
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