Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time may mark the beginning of a new surge in popularity for the far Right. Or it may represent the high-water mark for the BNP, the moment when the party was seen for what it is, and crashed in flames.

The history of fascism in Britain shows that the far Right thrives on publicity, attention and controversy; but the political past also shows that the more closely the British public gets to examine far-right extremism, the more emphatically it rejects it.

Mr Griffin’s sense of history is somewhat confused, since he claims political descent from both Oswald Mosley and Winston Churchill: the most famous Fascist in our history and the most trenchant opponent of fascism.

In an interview with ITV News, Mr Griffin claimed that if Churchill were alive today, “his only place would be in the British National Party”. Yet he has also allied himself with the notorious leader of the British Union of Fascists: “There is a strong, direct link from Oswald Mosley to me.” That precedent is not a happy one for Mr Griffin, for if the past repeats itself then the BNP may well be about to follow Mosley and his Blackshirts down the plughole of history.

In 1934 the Blackshirts appeared to be in the ascendant. Lord Rothermere’s fervently anti-communist newspapers gave Mosley a political platform, and enthusiastic backing — “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” trumpeted a series of articles in the Daily Mail. Membership of the BUF swelled to 50,000 members.

On June 7, 1934, thousands rallied to hear Mosley speak at Olympia in West London, in a choreographed display of Fascist and racist bombast. Hecklers were attacked by Blackshirt stewards and violently thrown out. The audience, including many distinguished members of high society, watched appalled as Mosley’s thugs weighed in. There was further violence at Cable Street, in the East End of London, in 1936, when anti-fascist protesters blocked a BUF march.

By then the tide had already turned. Rothermere dropped Mosley as emphatically as he had once supported him, declaring that he could not support his increasingly strident anti-Semitism.

Membership of the BUF plummeted to 5,000. Mosley did not even attempt to fight the election in 1935.

Close media attention and a higher profile had enabled the public to see Mosley and his followers more clearly, and they did not like what they saw. Hitler probably assessed the British public reaction most accurately. “Fascism does not lie in the English character . . . Mosley could not seduce a whole nation.” Mosley was a charismatic, posturing fantasist. Like his latter-day successors, he adroitly used the media to appear larger than he was. In truth, though fashionable in certain upper-class circles, the BUF was never a major political force.

Like the BNP, the Blackshirts delighted in provocation and noise, but never fully connected with the voting public. No Mosley candidate was ever elected, even to an East End London County Council seat. Blackshirt marchers were almost always outnumbered by counter-demonstrators.

In the British public imagination, the Blackshirts often seemed not so much menacing as ridiculous, and rather embarrassing. In The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse parodied Mosley as Roderick Spode, a wannabe dictator backed by supporters strutting around in black “footer bags” shouting “Heil Spode”. Spode is a comic buffoon: “Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.”

But if the experience of Mosley’s Blackshirts suggests that the British far Right withers when exposed to the light, another more recent historical precedent seems to indicate that modern television has a way of conferring political respectability on extremism.

In 1984, the French National Front (FN) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, below, appeared on the TV show L’Heure de Vérité (the Hour of Truth). At the time, the FN was largely boycotted by mainstream media, and electorally irrelevant.

Mr Le Pen’s appearance provoked intense opposition, but he later described it as “the hour that changed everything”.

He performed well, doing much to dispel his image as a drooling neo-Nazi: viewing figures were huge, and the FN claimed that its membership rose by 30,000.

In European elections later that year, the party won 2.2 million votes. Mr Griffin’s performance on Question Time and the public reaction to it, will determine whether, like Mr Le Pen, he joins “the big time”, or whether he goes down in history as just another Roderick Spode.

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