Profile: Nick Griffin

By Griffin's account, he lost his left eye in an accident when a discarded bullet exploded in a pile of wood he was burning at his home in 1990. Others have speculated that the accident happened during "survivalist manoeuvres" - a version lent some credence because his wife, Jackie, was not informed until a week later.

The timing is interesting: Griffin had just left the extremist National Front (NF) after an ideological spat and was living in France, where he had cashed in on the 1980s property boom after buying houses in Shropshire. Leading a disgruntled breakaway faction of the NF, he founded a new movement with one of the most notorious fascists in Europe.

Griffin's collaborator, Roberto Fiore, was wanted by police in Italy after the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station, which left 85 people dead and 200 wounded. Fiore, leader of the far-right organisation Terza Posizione, was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in his absence and had spent much of the decade lying low in Britain. In 1986 he and Griffin set up a lucrative business, later renamed Easy London, helping young students and workers to find accommodation and work in London. The profits went to fascist groups.

The new political movement conceived by Griffin and Fiore had the arresting title of the International Third Position, with a racist agenda aimed at Jews, blacks and immigrants. Bizarrely, Griffin's anti-Israel stance led him to make a fundraising trip to Libya at Colonel Muammar Gadaffi's expense in 1988 (a few weeks before the Lockerbie bombing) and to laud Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, both of whom also shared Griffin's antipathy to world capitalism, homosexuality and women's rights.

Griffin's professed sympathy with Islam's values was at odds with his subsequent denunciation of the religion as "a wicked and vicious faith", for which he was tried for inciting racial hatred in 2006 and found not guilty. His pragmatic U-turn allowed him to exploit public fears by claiming in the recent European election that Asian Muslims were sexually grooming white girls.

At any event, the loss of his eye changed his fortunes. The accident, he said, "knocked me out for a full year so I couldn't finish the renovation work, interest rates went sky-high and I lost the whole lot". He was declared bankrupt, owing £65,000, and dropped out of politics for a while.

These days he lives at an isolated stone farmhouse in the Welsh hills, about 10 miles from Welshpool. The two-acre property is guarded by security cameras, burglar alarms and two rottweilers.

Visiting members of the media, whom he amiably calls "lying scum", tend to allow that Griffin is affable, funny and well read, as befits a Cambridge graduate. Only when fervour gets the better of him does spittle fleck his sharp suits and fashionable ties. His physical presence is unimpressive: of medium height, with a slight paunch accentuated by his bullet-proof jacket, he has dark brush-like hair and small, fleshy features.

According to his jovial wife, he has "never done a proper job" apart from renovating houses, chopping down trees and teaching foreign students English. "I've been the one who has actually gone out every day, working to keep us going financially," said Jackie. "He's spent his time playing at stupid politics. To Nick, it's all a game."

Jackie, a nurse who met Griffin while visiting her sister at Cambridge, may sometimes "hate the thought of being talked about as the wife of the BNP leader", but by all accounts it is a happy marriage. She acts as Griffin's assistant and a BNP administrator. They have four children, Jennifer, 23, Richard, 20, Rhiannon, 19, and Elen, 15, all Welsh speakers.

Griffin is now characterised as the most dangerous political figure since Sir Oswald Mosley led the British Union of Fascists. However, the BNP's victories this time are attributed in part to the collapse of the Labour vote. Griffin's limited success has been to rebrand the party, muting its blatantly racist ideology - "Adolf went a bit too far" - and making the BNP "user-friendly" by tapping into the fears of the white working class about Islamic fundamentalism, immigration and jobs.

Griffin's beliefs were instilled at an early age. His parents, Edgar and Jean, had met as Young Conservatives while heckling a Communist party meeting. Edgar, while serving in the RAF in India, had witnessed inter-racial violence during Partition, and returned home opposed to multiculturalism and immigration. He ran an electrical contracting business in Barnet, north London, where Griffin was born in 1959, but the business failed and the family moved to Suffolk.

Aged five, Griffin pedalled his tricycle up and down his street to campaign for Reginald Maudling, the Conservative candidate. After attending Woodbridge school in Suffolk, he won a sixth-form scholarship, becoming one of only two boys in the girls' public school of Saint Felix, Southwold. According to Dominic Carman, his biographer, he was known as "Nick the Prick", who told the school librarian: "I'm not an extremist; I'm a socialist - a national socialist."

In 1974 Edgar, by now a Conservative councillor, was so dismayed by Britain's leftward drift that he took his family to a National Front meeting in Norwich. Griffin, who had read Mein Kampf by the age of 13 and whose favourite game was "counting black people on the streets from the car window when my parents drove through London", joined up soon afterwards.

The guest speaker that day was Martin Webster, the National Front's activities organiser. Webster, who was openly gay despite the party's homophobic stance, claimed Griffin turned up on his doorstep the following year and they began a two-year affair.

Griffin strongly denied the allegation, saying he couldn't sue because no court would put any value on his reputation. "I did stay at his flat when I was 16, not knowing he was a poof," he said. "I found out he was a poof because he tried it on, and I said, 'No, thank you'."

At Cambridge, where he studied history and law at Downing College, Griffin founded the Young National Front Students. A waiflike 8st loner, he was beaten up after an NF meeting and decided to learn to box. He became a boxing blue but graduated with a second-class degree, after which he spent a year on the dole. He began working for the NF, rising to its governing body and launching the magazine Nationalism Today.

After Griffin's "accident" his parents saved him from financial ruin by selling their house. For a while he was a security man at the meetings of David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian - "I looked quite good in a black leather jacket and an eye patch". Griffin later reproached Irving for conceding that 4m Jews may have been killed by the Nazis.

In 1995 Griffin relaunched his political career when John Tyndall, an avowed Nazi who had founded the BNP in 1982, invited him to join the party. Griffin claimed he fell out with Tyndall over the latter's policy on Muslims: "Because he hated Jews so much, he thought Muslims couldn't be all that bad if they didn't like Jews." With majority support in the party, Griffin became BNP leader in 1999, ousting Tyndall in a bloodless coup.

He embarked on making the BNP electable, concealing his own extremism. He depicted party members as "politically incorrect rebels" rather than a bunch of skinheads; indeed, bomber jackets gave way to suits. The watchword was "normality". He declared: "We are the first glimmer of resistance from the British people against being turned into a minority in our own homeland."

In a moment of candour, he admitted that the BNP's hope lay in public despair: "The worse the mess, then the more one rubs one's hands with glee." In another unguarded lapse, he told a journalist: "Basically, it's race hatred, isn't it?" He dreams of an old England, when "serfdom had given way to huge numbers of people owning their own plot of land and having access to the village commons". If Griffin's BNP has a future, it will always be looking back to the past.