THE British National Party’s first Jewish candidate, whose forebears emigrated from Transylvania in the 1890s, began her campaign for next month’s district council elections on an anti-immigration platform yesterday.

Patricia Richardson seemed undaunted from leafletting Epping Forest by incredulity that she could stand for a party accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, and by outrage from the Jewish community.

“I distinguish between my Jewishness, which is a religion, and my support for the BNP, which is purely political,” she said.

“The BNP is designed to express a pride in British culture and nationhood and is deliberately misunderstood by the media, which is predominantly left-wing. Ordinary voters never ask me if I am Jewish or not.”

She added: “The Jews and the British now share the same enemy — the al-Qaeda terrorists who we know are often hidden in Britain illegally plotting against the West. Both have an interest in the much tougher stand on law and order that we in the BNP are promoting.”

Mrs Richardson, 59, a retired office worker, claimed that the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had driven her towards BNP membership.

She denied that she was being cynically used by the extreme right-wing party as a “fig leaf” to soften its racist image.

Along with her non-Jewish husband Tom, 68, a retired bicycle shop owner who relishes the BNP promise of a return to the death penalty, she is standing for a local council seat in the Debden district.

They are fighting, along with a third BNP candidate, on a “Patriot” electoral platform which declares: “The Government has been deliberately allowing in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, bogus asylum-seekers and economic migrants ever since Blair took over.”

Husband and wife make frequent efforts to deflect the criticism that they are fighting for a party which is anti-Jewish.

Debden has long been Labour territory. But the leader of the Labour group on Epping Forest District Council, Stan Goodwin, accepted that Mrs Richardson could make an impact despite her inexperience this time.

In the past, the BNP received 60 to 70 votes in the area. But Mr Goodwin conceded that “pockets of discontent and disillusionment” with the Government over immigration could boost its vote.

As journalists descended on her small Victorian cottage, which has stickers on the door giving warning against unwanted callers, Mrs Richardson demonstrated the extreme sensitivity of her stand by insisting on recording all the interviews that she gave.

She also insisted that photographs should not reveal the whereabouts of her home in order to protect the privacy of her sons, one aged 23 and the other 15.

Mrs Richardson’s political usefulness has already been recognised by her party leader, Nick Griffin, who made a point of meeting her.

Her first canvassing foray ran into trouble when an Irish family asked if she planned to send them back across the Irish Sea. “But there have been expressions of support too,” she added. “The widow of a rabbi telephoned and told me not to take any notice of the rude things they are saying about me in the Jewish Chronicle.”

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