Guess what song is Nick Griffin’s ring tone. I was standing next to the British National party leader in a BBC green room last week when his mobile phone rang. Cue chiming guitar – it was Sweet Home Alabama. You guessed Ebony and Ivory, didn’t you? No, what Nick had blaring out of his phone was moderate, acceptable racism – a paean to the segregationist governor of Alabama and two-time presidential candidate George Wallace (who, before he died, rather movingly apologised to black people for his hideous policies).

It is sort of okay to play Sweet Home Alabama in polite company, a catchy howl of disenfranchised redneck southern anguish. There is no mention of black people in the song, it’s all in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s semi-coherent good ol’ boy subtext. It is, I think, how Griffin would like to see the BNP now – incorrigible, anti-Establishment, un-PC, telling a few home truths. Fifteen or 20 years ago I suspect his ring tone would have been by Wagner, and before that the Horst Wessell song. Except they didn’t have ring tones then, obviously.

It is being said that the BNP, along with UKIP, is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries of public fury over the MPs’ expenses scandal. Indeed, Griffin said to me, shortly before his interview, that the front page of that morning’s Telegraph was worth three or four extra seats for his party.

I don’t quite understand the logic of this. Our MPs are corrupt and venal – so let’s take it out on the blacks? But Griffin has been very canny in repositioning his party as a sort of all-purpose anti-Establishment front, rather than as a slightly less intellectual version of the Sturmabteilung. He has been abetted in this policy by all those despised mainstream politicians who join hands and plead that you not vote for the BNP, by local councillors who refuse to work with democratically elected BNP members, by television interviewers who simply bark insults at Griffin when he appears on news programmes and by the thick-as-mince middle-class lefties bellowing, “No platform for raaaaaacists,” every time the BNP stages a meeting.

As soon as the BNP is engaged, however, the poison begins to leak out and we hear the truth. Last week, on the day of its manifesto launch, Griffin was skewered by his fabulously stupid comments about British Asian people not really being British, a position which is not merely impolite and unfair, but illogical. He had made those remarks six years previously but he could not quite bring himself to disavow them, because they are at the heart of the rubbish his party believes.

Griffin the man is shrewd and articulate. There is no doubt that he has managed to secure the angry support of some white working-class British people, a tranche of the population that has been neglected by the mainstream parties and by Labour in particular. There is some truth to the BNP’s claims that poorly paid whites seem to find themselves at the back of the queue for everything. And beyond the racism there is much in the party’s socially right-wing but economically left-wing manifesto which finds accord with a subsection of the population which mistrusts stockbrokers and estate agents almost as much as it mistrusts homosexuals.

But even the BNP’s biggest vote-winner in recent years – attacking Islam – is a case of expediency and opportunism. It should not be forgotten that the earliest supporters in this country of radical Islam were the far right, Griffin prominent among them. Back in the 1980s the Ayatollah Khomeini and Nick Griffin shared rather more than a mutual, ideological dislike of Jews. They also shared a dislike of international capitalism, the USA, gender equality, homosexuals and liberal democracy. There is not much in the BNP’s domestic manifesto today with which Hizb ut-Tahrir would find fault.

The only reason the BNP dislikes Islam now is that it is practised largely by people with darkish-coloured skins. If that intellectual position is good enough for you, then by all means vote for them.

+ Britain has the lowest rate of convictions for rape in Europe and the figure is still falling every year, a new study suggests. This is taken to mean that British juries have a bit of a soft spot for rapists and are increasingly inclined to let them go free, perhaps because our jurors are mad, ignorant, or misogynist, or all three. What the study did not reveal is that the actual number of men convicted of rape has actually stayed pretty much the same, on average, in the past 15 to 20 years – and at a figure which is comparable with most other countries in Europe.

The big change has been a massive (almost twentyfold) increase in allegations of rape and consequent prosecutions which, by the time they reach court, simply do not hold water. The government, led by Harriet Harman, seems to have a perverse wish to prove that more British women are being raped than is the case. It has told the Old Bill that it wants to see more convictions; hence the enormous rise in prosecutions. Isn’t it this politically inspired mania for prosecutions that has resulted in our low conviction rate, rather than the notion that men commit 20 times as many rapes as they did a couple of decades ago?

Andrew’s aural assault

Listening to an Andrew Lloyd Webber song is like being trapped in a lift with a flatulent middle manager from Stoke; you hammer away at the emergency button but the choking sensation continues: you suspect it will continue for eternity. I trust by the time you read this Europe will have rejected Lord Lloyd-Webber and that another piece of drivel (perhaps that smug, fiddle-playing idiot from Norway) will have won the Eurovision Song Contest. Or maybe it will be Russia again, as consolation for losing the cold war. I’m sure I read in 1997 that Lloyd-Webber said he’d leave the country if Labour won. But he’s still here, churning out ballads for blameless people like Jade Ewen. Another new Labour promise broken.

Out of the way, Plod, I’ll take up the chase

The police have decided not to bother upholding the law of the land because their chief constables “have more pressing priorities”, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers. I think that this is one of my favourite quotes of this or any other year and supports my untested thesis that Britain is being used as a gigantic LSD experiment, perhaps by aliens.

Anyway, the Old Bill will no longer pursue the pink-jacketed fox-stranglers because it’s too much effort and they don’t like the way the law was drafted. I wasn’t aware they were allowed to pick and choose which laws they were inclined to uphold.

My suspicion is that they wouldn’t have dared show such flagrant contempt when Labour was doing better in the opinion polls. Still, either way, it means more weekends for me spent with a bloody aniseed spray and one of those clever laser devices that spook horses.

+ One of the staunchest defenders of an MP’s right to claim as much of your money as possible is the glowering Labour dinosaur George Foulkes. George, now Baron Foulkes of Cumnock, is a member of the Scottish parliament and it is only right, therefore, that he should be able to claim expenses for a flat. In London.

The tireless public servant has to travel relentlessly as president of the Caribbean-Britain business council, chairman of the Dominican Republic parliamentary group and vice-chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago and the Britain-Central America parliamentary groups. His yearly claim for sun tan lotion has not yet been revealed.

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