and sought to achieve its goals by building grassroots social movements.
When Fiore arrived in Britain, he was looking for activists among whom he could spread Third Positionist ideas and struck up a friendship with Griffin, who was impressed by the Italian’s knowledge and organizational experience. Together with two other young National Front members, Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington, the group became known as the ‘Political Soldiers’, after a manifesto written by Holland and published in 1984. Claiming that the white race was under threat and the ‘death of Europe’ was at hand, the manifesto called for activists ‘to be moulded into National Revolutionary Warriors’, and to become a new type of man ‘who will live the Nationalist way of life every day’. The manifesto concluded with the exhortation ‘Long Live Death!’, a slogan derived from Evola.15
Such rhetoric proved unpalatable to many NF members and the party split in 1986, with the Political Soldiers naming their faction the Official National Front. They further elaborated their theory of race, arguing that ‘the racialist position now adopted by the National Front is based on the Nationalist principle that self-rule and the preservation of racial and cultural identity is the inalienable right of all the people of the world.’16 Following this logic, they began to adopt the language of black separatist and Third World liberation movements, professing support for the Iranian Revolution and Palestinian freedom. The Political Soldiers heaped praise on the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya theory of direct democracy, claiming ‘the very ideology which we hold dear is articulated in a superbly concise and direct manner in the pages of [Gaddafi’s] Green Book.’17 They also applauded the ‘true democracy’ of the Libyan People’s Committee and Gaddafi’s ‘belief in the inalienable right to self-determination of all the races of mankind’. The Green Book, then, was ‘essential reading for all who share our vision’. Griffin and Holland travelled to the Libyan capital Tripoli in search of financial support from Gaddafi, who at the time was funding a range of groups who opposed Western governments. They returned empty-handed, save for a couple of crates of the revered volume.
Beyond their own dwindling circle, the Political Soldiers had little impact. Unsuccessful attempts were made to set up a housing co-op in Northern Ireland in 1986 and, later, to infiltrate the anarchist squatters’ movement in Hackney, East London.18 The Official National Front increasingly came to resemble a cult: selected groups of recruits were reportedly taken for ideological cadre ‘training’ on Griffin’s parents’ land, while slogans such as ‘Fight Racism’ rapidly alienated members who had not kept up with the pace of change. When the March 1988 edition of the party newspaper featured pictures of Gaddafi, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the US black separatist Louis Farrakhan on the front cover, it provoked a wave of resignations from the party.
The Official National Front disbanded in 1989 and Griffin’s clique renamed itself the International Third Position. They began buying dilapidated properties in rural France and renovating them: Griffin describes this as purely a business venture but others have claimed it was an attempt to set up a commune.19 At the same time he was becoming politically estranged from Holland and Fiore, both of whom were Catholics, and were introducing an increasing amount of religious rhetoric into the ITP’s doctrine.
In March 1990, Griffin says he was stacking a bonfire at one of the properties in France when he accidentally threw some shotgun cartridges onto the fire. One apparently exploded, seriously injuring Griffin and blinding him in one eye. He was forced to return to convalesce at home with his parents, who were almost bankrupted after they had bailed him out of a property deal gone wrong. For the time being, Griffin disappeared from active politics. He had achieved nothing, but the ideas he had toyed with would later resurface as he manoeuvred to take over the BNP.
3
The Führer of Notting Hill
In the spring of 1964, an American journalist named George Thayer visited a run-down property in Notting Hill, West London. Researching a book on Britain’s fringe parties, he had been granted an audience with John Tyndall, leader of the recently formed Greater Britain Movement. At 76 Princedale Road Thayer found a forbidding building, with steel shutters and wire mesh covering the ground floor windows. Swastikas had been painted on the brickwork, high out of reach of the street, which bore splashes of paint that had been thrown during a recent scuffle with opponents.
Once inside, Thayer was ushered in to a small back room, adorned with a portrait of Adolf Hitler, and found Tyndall: ‘He was a composite of all the characteristics I had vaguely associated with Nazis in Hitler’s Germany,’ wrote Thayer. ‘He had cold, evasive eyes, was blond and balding, and had not the slightest spark of humour. He was suspicious, nervous, and excitable, and moved with all the stiffness of a Prussian in Court.’
‘Jewry,’ Tyndall announced to Thayer, ‘is a world pest wherever it is found in the world. The Jews are more clever and more financially powerful than other people and have to be eradicated before they destroy the Aryan peoples.’
Tyndall went on to explain that his party was seeking to imbue the ideas of Hitler with specifically British characteristics. Details, however, were sketchy, and at the time of the meeting the only concrete proposal was that the swastika armbands worn by members inside the Princedale Road HQ – to wear them outside would have fallen foul of public order laws – would be blue, rather than the traditional red. ‘It will be interesting,’ mused Thayer, ‘to see how he combines the qualities of National Socialism with those of John Bull.’1
There were two guiding stars in John Tyndall’s political universe: Adolf Hitler and the British Empire. Born in 1934, and subsequently a pupil at Beckenham and Penge grammar school in south-east London, he was an undistinguished scholar who spent most of his spare time playing football and cricket, or indulging his passion for fitness. After completing his national service, he flirted briefly with left-wing politics, even visiting a world youth festival in the Soviet Union, before moving swiftly to the right. Tyndall’s conversion, he would later claim, was motivated by disgust at the idea that the British, a nation bound by ‘bonds of race’, as he saw it, might recognize colonial subjects as equals. In this belief, he found a home in a group called the League of Empire Loyalists.2
As the name suggests, the League’s origins lay in a backlash against the decline of Imperial Britain. Formed in 1954, it was not the first far-right group to emerge after the Second World War – that was the Union Movement, formed in 1948 by the former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley and what remained of his supporters – but it was the first to have an impact on mainstream political life.
A pressure group rather than a political party, the League campaigned against the ‘Butskellite’3 consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s that saw both Labour and Conservative parties adapt, if reluctantly, to reduced influence abroad and the social democratic principles of the welfare state at home. The group’s modus operandi was to disrupt political speeches and public events with heckling and elaborate stunts. Members blew bugles during meetings, hid under speakers’ platforms overnight so they could burst out mid-speech, or bluffed their way in to receptions for visiting dignitaries.
But there was a more sinister edge to the League. The group, which brought together retired military officials and former colonial administrators with the right-wing Tory fringe, also provided a new home for fascists. Its founder was A.K. Chesterton, a cousin of the writer G.K. Chesterton, who had been a propagandist for Mosley’s British Union of Fascists until 1938. A.K. Chesterton fought for Britain against the Nazis during the war, but he was deeply anti-Semitic and a fervent believer in white racial superiority.
By Tyndall’s account, it was during his time in the League of Empire Loyalists that he was introduced to ‘the conspiracy theory’, via the pages of Chesterton’s magazine Candour. He also encountered the League’s West Midlands organizer, Colin Jordan, a young history teacher who was using the League as cover for other activities.
