The bishop whose excommunication was lifted by the Pope despite his denial of the full extent of the Holocaust has arrived in Britain after being threatened with expulsion by Argentina.

Sporting a dog-collar and a smart overcoat, Richard Williamson was met by three minders wearing raincoats after landing at Heathrow at 7am.

Walking into the arrivals area, the group forced their way past a host of photographers and reporters, helped by four armed police officers, and were whisked away by representatives of the ultraconservative Society of St Pius X in a silver Land Rover with blacked out windows.

Father David Sherry, a member of order who was there to meet the bishop, refused to say where he would be staying.

Bishop Williamson’s arrival in London was less eventful than his departure from the Argentine capital where, dressed in a black baseball cap and sunglasses, he scuffled with a waiting reporter, raising his fist and apparently shoving him.

He was met at the airport by Michele Renouf, a socialite, who said she was there to offer him legal assistance. The team who defended Frederick Toben, an Australian who was arrested for Holocaust-denial at Heathrow last year at the request of German prosecutors, was on “standby”, she said. He was released from Wandsworth prison after a British judge ruled that the arrest warrant was invalid.

Lady Renouf said Bishop Williamson was being treated “appallingly”, and persecuted by a new religion she called “Holocaustianity”.

His views were “not denial – this is a propaganda term. This is people who wish to question and evaluate,” she said.

The row over the bishop’s views erupted after he claimed on Swedish television that there were no gas chambers and that no more than 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust, rather than the accepted figure of six million.

The Times has learned that, while in Britain, he is planning to meet the revisionist historian David Irving, in order to find out how to present his views on the Holocaust without arousing controversy.

Jewish travellers at Heathrow were appalled to learn of Bishop Williamson’s arrival. “It’s outrageous – you can’t deny it when millions of people died,” said Mayer Gruber, 36, from North London. “If they can deny this, they can deny anything.”

Mr Gruber said he would have liked to have confronted Bishop Williamson about his own family members who died in the concentration camps. “It was a family of 11 – four of them survived,” he said.