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Nick’s mock outrage is a sign of BNP
desperation
Nick Griffin and I have one thing in common.
We’ve both declined invitations to a Royal garden party.
Not this year of course. The BNP leader was banned just hours before he was due to stand stiffly on the lawns of Buckingham Palace nibbling cucumber sandwiches.
And boy was he annoyed. The MEP had just spent three hours in his morning suit without spilling anything. Three hours!
And then, out of the blue, the man who has questioned the Holocaust, shared a platform with the Ku Klux Klan and suggested repatriating immigrants “out of a plane over Africa” was inexplicably banned.
How could it happen to a nice man like him?
Bragged
For palace officials it was simple. Griffin had bragged about the invitation on TV as “a highly symbolic breakthrough”. This increased the security threat for other guests, ergo off-ski.
But never one to waste a crisis, Griffin quickly turned genuine surprise into mock outrage.
Why was a freely elected MEP suddenly denied access to a civic function? Was Griffin the only guest to have mentioned his garden party invitation on a website? If not, why was he the only one to be banned?
Actually the showdown should have come as no surprise because the same thing happened last year when an invited BNP member of the Greater London Authority asked Griffin to be his guest.
The GLA’s chief executive wrote to the BNP assembly member telling him to stop exploiting the opportunity for publicity or his nomination would be “reviewed”.
Griffin decided to decline the invitation, saying, “It’s outrageous that a democratically elected member of the London assembly can’t invite who he likes as a guest.
“Nevertheless, because we have no wish to embarrass the Queen and allow the liberal left to do more damage to our institutions I’ve withdrawn from the idea of going.”
Respectability
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since last summer.
Griffin gained some respectability by being a member of the BBC’s
Question Time panel last October, despite angry protests.
But that was his high point. This May the BNP failed to gain a single MP at the general election.
Last July Griffin could afford to be magnanimous. This year the BNP leader is desperate. The British public has largely opted to tackle, not duck, the thorny economic and social problems that give rise to racism.
Nick Griffin is left behind, travelling to Brussels and trumpeting about the chance to meet a Queen who clearly loathes him.
Did he miss much?
Having politely declined an invite many moons ago I can only speculate, along with other citizens who prefer to take their tea and sandwiches amid the universally accessible Scottish countryside.
WAS there something in the water last week?
Hot on the heels of Nick Clegg’s accidental truth-telling about Iraq (“that illegal war”), David Cameron made an even more incredible gaffe.
According to Dave it seems we didn’t win World War 2, Uncle Sam did.
He said, “We are a very effective partner of the US but we are the junior partner. We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.”
Now you hardly need be an historian to know the Americans didn’t even enter the war until after Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Later that evening TV was showing a film about the men and mostly women who manufactured Spitfires, gamely turning up the music to drown out Luftwaffe bombs.
Hardly a day goes by without a reminder of the unbelievable efforts of our mothers, fathers and grandparents as they stood resolute and alone against Hitler.
Folk memory of Britain’s finest hour is sometimes all that’s keeping the flame of self-belief alive in today’s “broken Britain”.
A fact the man who coined the phrase should be well aware of.
 NEXT summer 10,000 English
16-year-olds will spend up to seven weeks doing voluntary work.
Actor Sir Michael Caine thinks it’s a good idea. “There’s a very hard core of young people we have to save,” he said.
He’s right, but organising meaningful tasks for 10,000 will pose more of a challenge than
The Italian Job.
Scots will not be included so perhaps we could follow the lead of the late Rev. George MacLeod who founded the Iona Community.
In 1938 he took unemployed craftsmen from Glasgow to rebuild the abbey and their lives by working together, learning skills and sharing achievements.
Seventy years later we again need his drive and vision.
Lorraine Kelly is on holiday
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