It looks like Nick Griffin’s political journey may be coming to a close after the BNP ousted their leader of 15 years. Griffin’s career has been a strange one, some of it chronicled in a book I recently read, Race with the Devil by the Chesterton and Solzhenitsyn biographer Joseph Pearce.
Pearce is now an academic in the United States but in a previous incarnation was youth leader of the National Front, and I first stumbled across him five years ago while looking for someone to write about Shakespeare and Catholicism. His face on Google Images seemed strangely familiar, and when I read more about Pearce I remembered why; I had seen him in a documentary about his past as a rather frightening, fierce and intelligent young Fascist involved in exposing Left-wing teachers (not exactly a needle in a haystack, you might think, but there was a menacing implication of what Pearce’s young comrades might do to these “reds”). This was from back in the late 1970s when Pearce was running Bulldog, the NF’s youth magazine, which was sort of a cross between the Beano and Der Sturmer.
