So it isn’t just the Government that loses people’s personal details – although in the case of the British National Party it looks as though its membership list may have been lost for it.

While playing down the publication of the party’s details, Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was quick to imply that the embarrassment had been caused by a factional parteigenosse (or comrade, if you lean the other way) who had half-inched the details on his way to the exit. All I can tell you is that it is comprehensive and contains a complete page of Pages and a male witch.

The leak, coming as the BNP might have been hoping to capitalise on the burgeoning recession, is a reminder of two weaknesses that the British far Right has suffered in any attempt to create a mass following.

The first is its almost baroque tendency for internal division. The BNP, like the National Front, has been through numerous mutations and splits, sometimes based on the temporary need to expel unreconstructed old Nazis on the one hand, to get rid of rank careerists and compromisers on the other, or simply to sort out whose turn it is to be Führer.

Times Archive, 1981: National Front complains of police action

Mr Martin Webster claims that the Anti-Nazi League had published addresses and telephone numbers of party members and officials

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There have been more nights of the penknives than anyone but the most obsessed historian of the successors to Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement can remember.

Mr Griffin has been famously alive to the possibility of a coup, and several leading BNPers, including councillors, have left the party in the past year, accused of treasonous behaviour. Indeed, one of the ironies of modest BNP electoral success is that it throws up alternative sources of power within the movement, which then have to be neutralised.

The second intrinsic problem is that there is still a certain amount of stigma attached to being an open member of the far Right. And while BNP membership has risen, the proportion of members who renew their party cards is very low. So you get a rather secretive, shifting organisation, not unlike the transient population of a seedy lodging house. You might stay there, but you might not give it out as an address.

Yet this is exactly what has happened. Now colleagues and friends of members, some of them doubtless of unfortunate immigrant stock, will know that behind the “hellos” was a secret desire to see them put in a lorry and driven back across the nearest border.

True, the shame of membership is probably less than it was. Memories of the BNP’s antiJewish, antiblack and street-fighting past (insofar as it actually is past) may have faded, not least because the scapegoat today is as likely to be a white Slovak as a brown Muslim. And it is also probably true that the victory of the despised liberalism means, ironically, that Britons believe that other Britons should be able to join whatever party they like, including racist ones, free of harassment.

Still, today is an uncomfortable one for 12,000 fellow citizens, and some will regret that.

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