Dear Question Time panellist, so you’re making history with Nick Griffin on Thursday. You can win, or you can blow it. Here is how to win:

1 Don’t get sidetracked on whether the BNP leader should be on the programme. The BBC’s argument that it is under some kind of legal obligation to include him is hogwash. It’s an editorial decision based on a feeling for what the public think, and it’s correct. In 2009 people expect to make their own minds up, and don’t want to be cushioned from discussion, however problematic.

2 Don’t let him be the focus of the whole discussion. He’s the leader of a very small party. Outside the issues for which the BNP is best known (race, race and race) he has markedly less significance than the fisheries spokesman of the Welsh nationalist party. Who is . . ?

3 Don’t expect him to condemn himself by wearing an armband, yelling, jutting his jaw or making Hitler hand movements. He may have a hoard of DVDs and videos of fascist heroes hidden in his Welsh border cellar next to old piles of Spearhead and The Rune (both of which he edited), but he’ll have chosen his tie carefully and will have put in serious mirror time practising voice modulation and temper control. He may even have role-played the programme, with a hearty from the directorate playing you!

4 Ditch the indignation — you have to earn the right to be angry in front of viewers. Don’t describe his views as abhorrent, hateful or evil or declare yourself shocked, appalled, sickened or disgusted until he’s said something to justfy such a reaction. Abstract fury just looks incontinent.

5 Expect him to sound reasonable, long-suffering even. He will have a tale to tell about how he only wants the same rights for ordinary, native British people that everybody else seems to get, and how he’s only saying the things that ordinary people are too afraid to say. About how this country has been run by a liberal elite who’d sell their nation for a duck pond, a tennis court or a dirty movie, and he just wants to restore us to ourselves. And of course he hates fascism, loves free speech, hates crime, loves order, thinks that other races are not inferior or horrible (just separate), doesn’t want to send all the blacks home (just some), and as for certain incriminating utterances, well that’s all in the past. Don’t we all make youthful mistakes.

6 Bear in mind that all this is one of two things. Either Griffin has undergone a complete change of political, philosophical and moral outlook in the past ten years or he is a consummate liar. The first is just conceivable: he may have looked at the Italian Gianfranco Fini who took the neo-fascist MSI into government as the centre-right National Alliance in less than a decade. The second is more likely.

7 Griffin was shaped by racial politics. He believes that race is the basis of human society and that racial self-interest is the guiding instinct of human beings. This is not a youthful peccadillo — he certainly held that position when I interviewed him at length in 2002.

He believes it about Jews. In 1997 he wrote a pamphlet (available on the internet) called The Mindbenders: The Mindbending Power of the Masters of the Media. It is a list of Jews, or people Griffin assumed were Jews, in positions of power in the media in Britain and Hollywood. I asked him why I was on it. “The main reason you’re there,” he replied, “is that I was commissioned to find all the Jews in the media and you do rather stand out.” Standing out, in the words of his pamphlet, as part of the machinery of “enormous control over every form of mass media the Jews possess”.

Among those castigated were the commissioners of “disgusting pieces of decadence and perversion” on Channel 4, who had brought incest to Brookside, and Jon Snow, who “has made his sympathies clear by joining Jewish journalists in addressing a Jewish Chronicle-sponsored meeting on ethics in journalism”. And then there were the BBC Jews responsible for “Radio 4’s hysterical Holocaust propaganda piece 20/20 — A View of the Century”. Holocaust propaganda being, it seems, the view that the Holocaust happened.

As Griffin told me seven years ago, “[Jewish academics] originated political correctness. Because they saw it was good for the Jews. Because they saw a West made up of nations, each with its own consciousness as potentially a threat to Jews.” In other words, multiculturalism was a Jewish plot to undermine the West.

Why? “Because it’s natural.” Why? “That’s the driving force of human evolution. Different groups fighting for their own identity.” Then he added: “I am not anti-Jewish.”

8 He doesn’t want to admit it, but Griffin loathes mixed-race marriages and births. The BNP’s website had a Q&A section headed “Why are you against mixed-raced relationships?” and answering, anti-scientifically, that “all species and races of life on this planet are beautiful and must be preserved. When whites take partners from other ethnic groups, a white family line that stretches back into deep prehistory is destroyed.” He feels this intensely. Griffin’s problem is that mixed-race Britons are not just a fast-growing group, but increasingly successful. Pin him down on it. Don’t let him sidetrack on to Jews and Catholics preferring to marry within the group. Would he be happy to have grandchildren who looked like Leona Lewis, Lewis Hamilton or Damon Buffini?

9 For an anti-crime party the BNP contains its fair share of people convicted of fraud, assault and other crimes. List some. And, as in the case of its London Assembly member, Richard Barnbrook, this autumn, it tells straightforward lies about crime. Barnbrook invented three murders for a YouTube broadcast, and had to apologise for a “slip of the tongue”.

Griffin has, in the past, extolled the streetfighting virtues of the old BNP. “The cringing liberals and the populists have got it all wrong,” he wrote in 1996. “Far from confrontation frightening worthwhile people away, by strengthening the bonds of the group it actually attracts them — provided you win!” What changed his mind? Or does he still believe in the virtues of “well-directed boots and fists”?

10 For a patriot Griffin has had some exotic dalliances. In 1997 he was secretly recorded lamenting to some French extremists that “Britain does not have the tradition of intellectual fascism which is such an important factor in many other countries. While I do have a number of proposals to help rectify this deficiency, the truth is that this is a handicap which we can never overcome completely.” Ask him what the proposals were and whether they included coming on Question Time and making nice to the viewers.

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