But Richard Barnbrook, could end up having the biggest influence on the capital’s reputation.

By Martin Fletcher

It is a sunny weekday morning. A clean-cut man with a red and blue rosette pinned to his neat beige suit walks briskly among the pebbledash semis of Sheppey Road in Dagenham, East London, pushing leaflets through the doors. It is a common enough scene three weeks before a local election, but this man arouses uncommon passions.

His name is Richard Barnbrook. He is the British National Party’s candidate for London mayor and his leaflet features two photographs beneath the headline The Changing Face of London. The first shows a 1950-ish street party, with lots of bunting, Union Jacks and smiling white women. “This is the way London used to be,” says the caption. “At ease with itself, friendly, happy and secure. A capital city with a sense of community values.” The second picture shows three Islamic women in black niqabs, one flicking a V-sign at the photographer.

A young man called Darren emerges from his house and chases after Mr Barnbrook. He calls the leaflet Nazi propaganda and tells the candidate: “You’re like a cancer.” As they remonstrate, an elderly white lady walks up and throws the leaflet at Mr Barnbrook’s feet. “Don’t put this s*** through my letterbox,” she hisses.

But others welcome Mr Barnbrook.
The yellow-jacketed occupants of a dustcart give him thumbs-up signs. They complain that their wages have been depressed by East European immigrants. Harry Row, 51 and unemployed, walks over to say that he will vote BNP. Asked why, he replies: “All the f****** foreigners over here.”

Such exchanges foreshadow the much larger controversy that is likely to erupt after the votes are counted on May 1, for Boris Johnson’s colourful efforts to unseat Ken Livingstone have largely obscured a significant sub-plot of these elections. Mr Barnbrook will not win the mayoralty, but he stands a very good chance of becoming the first BNP member elected to the 25-seat London Assembly – a breakthrough that would dent the capital’s image as a model of diversity, the image that helped it to win the Olympics.

An Assembly seat would be “the biggest prize the extremist Right has ever won in British politics,” says Tony Travers, a local government expert at the London School of Economics. There are no neo-fascists on the councils of Berlin, Paris or New York, he adds. “For London to end up with such a thing would be an embarrassment and difficult to explain away.”

The BNP won 4.8 per cent of the vote in the 2004 assembly elections – a whisker below the 5 per cent threshold needed to gain a seat. Since then the UK Independence Party, which won two seats in 2004, has imploded, while the issues of race, immigration and asylum have become ever more potent. The mainstream parties are hardly popular, and in recent by-elec-tions the BNP has consistently won more than 10 per cent of the vote.

Mr Barnbrook believes that his party could take two seats. The antifascist group Searchlight has said the BNP could even win three, and has launched its “largest, most targeted and sophisticated campaign” to prevent that happening. That campaign has already enjoyed one success. Last week the BNP withdrew Nick Eriksen, its London organiser, as the second candidate on its Assembly list after he was identified as the author of Sir John Bull, a far-Right blog. “I’ve never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth machine into believing that rape is such a serious crime,” one entry stated. “Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal.”

Mr Barnbrook said that he considered such views “abhorrent”. The 47-year-old candidate trained as an artist at the Royal Academy. Two years ago he became opposition leader on Barking and Dagenham council when the BNP won 12 of the 51 seats. Within days newspapers were gleefully describing the homoerotic poetry and scenes of homosexuality contained in a film called HMS Discovery: A Love Story that the new poster boy of the homophobic BNP had produced and directed in 1989. He insists that it was art, not pornography.

Mr Barnbrook is now engaged to Simone Clarke, until recently a leading ballerina at the English National Ballet. They met after The Guardian identified her as a BNP supporter and he arrived – bearing flowers – at the Coliseum to offer his backing.

He cannot say when they will marry. She is living in Leeds, and while she is not campaigning for her fiancé, she does appear in his leaflet. “Immigration is out of control,” says Ms Clarke, who has a mixed-race child. “I’m voting BNP because they’re the only party who have the guts to speak out on the issues that count.”

In the past two years Mr Barnbrook’s council group has railed against the notion – real or imaginary – that immigrants are jumping the housing queue. It has attacked council programmes promoting diversity and equal opportunities. It has tabled motions – all defeated – to ban burkas from public buildings and halal meat from schools, to mandate daily prayers and the singing of the National Anthem at schools, to have the Union Jack flown permanently over council buildings and to fund St George’s Day celebrations.

Jon Cruddas, Dagenham’s Labour MP, accuses the group of peddling “stunt politics, urban myths and falsehoods”. It certainly taps into the fears of an indigenous population bewildered by the influx of immigrants. But Mr Barnbrook denies that he is racist or extremist.

Over a lunchtime beer, he insisted that he was not opposed to immigrants themselves, and noted that his brother was married to a Jamaican – “I myself am not drawn to that type of person,” he quickly added. He said it was the consequences of mass immigration – for community cohesion, crime and overstretched local services – that concerned him. He even blamed immigration for the tuberculosis he contracted last year. “This disease should not have come into our country,” he said at the time.

All immigration should be stopped, he added. All illegal immigrants and failed asylum-seekers should be repatriated. Poor immigrants should be given financial assistance to go home.

Islam was a threat to the British way of life. “Where you have a large Muslim community you find the indigenous community is whittled away and broken down,” he said. “They will not become part of the community. They take over a community and inflict their identity on it.”

These are jarring views for a man who aspires to represent arguably the world’s most cosmopolitan capital – a city where the foreign-born comprise a third of the population. But Mr Barnbrook rejects the idea that London’s diversity should be a source of pride. He sees nothing to celebrate. He talks of a society that is breaking down, of black-on-black crime that leaves inner-city residents too terrified to leave their homes, of “large swaths of London” where people fear to go at night. “This is not enrichment,” he says. “This is not renaissance. This is a dark age.”

Rise of the BNP

— Under its founder, John Tyndall, the British National Party struggled to capture more than a tiny percentage of the votes at local or general elections. That began to change with Nick Griffin’s election as chairman in 1999 and his attempts to clean up the party’s image

— Its first council seat was won by Derek Beackon in a Tower Hamlets by-election in 1993. By 2003 the party had managed to secure 13 seats, adding another four the following year

— Although the BNP failed to win any seats in the 2005 general election, the party raised its total number of votes to 192,850 – from 47,219 in 2001. Mr Griffin polled 4,240 votes in Keighley, West Yorkshire – 9.16 per cent of the total

— Of the seven million votes cast in the 2006 local elections, the party won 229,000. The Green Party, in comparison, won 364,000 votes. The number of BNP councillors doubled to 46, and in Barking and Dagenham it became the second biggest party

— Mr Griffin claimed that the party had seen an upswing in support after the 2005 terrorist attacks in London, but the party’s annual accounts showed a gain of only 146 members that year, bringing its total membership to 6,502

— Two years ago the party was reported to be attracting about 100 new members a week

Sources: Times database, BNP