FORMER British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin may no longer be an MEP, but he spends more time in the European Parliament these days than most Ukip MEPs.

He lauded and patted himself on the back that he was, after all, the most successful fascist politician in the history of the British far right.

In the near 15 years he led the BNP, he’d come close to a lot of things.

He led a party out of the gutter of overt neonazism and violent marches and protests and into the council chambers, London Assembly and the European Parliament.

On the night he was elected, back in 2009 as his party took nearly a million votes across the United Kingdom, he promised a political “earthquake” that would see scores and scores of other elected representatives from other political parties cowering for his mercy.

Just over a year later Griffin was on the threshold of being an MP.

His party was also tipped to be within a whisker of taking control of the London borough of Barking and Dagenham.

In response, across the country, thousands of trade unionists took themselves onto the doorsteps of England to counter the BNP’s message.

It seemed a mammoth task. The BNP appeared to be an almost unstoppable machine, yet that well-oiled machine rusted and combusted before even reaching the polling booth.

Arrests were made as one of Griffin’s lieutenants was allegedly involved in a plot to murder him, and days before polling in Barking and Dagenham, where Griffin’s and the BNP’s hopes rested so high, the party’s die-hard activists packed up and went home.

It had only taken 13 months for the BNP to implode. Instead of taking the council, all of their 12 councillors were voted out.

Griffin polled disastrously worse than he had predicted in the seat of Barking.

Griffin had seemed less evil and more dangerously simple since his disastrous appearance of Question Time in October 2009.

Cracks had begun to appear. He had been exposed as not just politically fallible but positively intellectually broken.

The clever and cunning swine who’d brought the BNP to the brink of a political earthquake had really been no different to the Grand Old Duke of York — and marched his men downhill again.

Old prejudices within the party began to surface against him and bills — astronomical records of opulence — began to mount up unpaid.

Griffin abandoned running the BNP day-to-day from May 2010 onwards.

He handed over the party to trusted friends and comrades who carried out purge after purge against dissenters.

The BNP had never been an overtly nazi party under Griffin, and those who had joined in a pique of despair or were of the notion that the BNP was anything other than a gang of unruly thugs fled into the night, ashamed of what they were witnessing.

One thing Griffin had done was build a wider party around himself that had no real contact or understanding of the BNP.

While the party faltered at home, Griffin became far more extreme in the company he kept in Europe. 

He cosied up to and dined with some of the most extreme neonazi gangs on the continent, while back home he suffered the humiliation of bailiffs at the family home, loyalist paramilitaries chasing his family for cash and even a bizarre kidnapping of a staff member at his Belfast head office.

By the time Griffin lost his Euro seat in May of last year, the once mighty BNP was a shadow of the party it was when Griffin was elected in 2009.

The party had just two councillors and Griffin had not long declared himself bankrupt to escape more debts he had run up.

Even those former close friends and comrades he had charged with running the party for him turned against him.

In July, they moved to remove him as chairman. They complained bitterly that he had destroyed the BNP and could no longer foot the mounting bills for his extravagance.

This was, finally, Griffin’s political earthquake. After months of manoeuvring (poorly — he could not even send out a factional email properly) he was expelled from the party in October 2014.

It was also the first headlines Griffin had had for nearly two years. The party had already ground to a near standstill.

Its monthly newspaper no longer appeared and, worse still, its office staff were no longer on the European payroll.

The BNP’s membership is now below 1,000 for the first time in nearly 20 years. Anti-semitism has reared its long-lost head again too.

The party’s head office now diverts its phones as the office staff prefer spending their time in the pub to actually going into the office to answer abusive calls from former and disgruntled members.

There is, allegedly, some £10 million in bequests due into party coffers in the distant future.

Griffin was purged it seems, among other reasons, to keep his debts away from the money.

These days, Griffin is some sort of hired gun — but on a voluntary basis — travelling Europe as some kind of cheerleader for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Russian Federation. Where there is cash, Griffin will always try and sniff it out for himself.

For what’s left of the BNP, they’ll have to grit their teeth and laud Ukip this year.

Their new leader, a disgraced former schoolteacher, does not give media interviews in case he is asked about his conviction for chasing after schoolchildren with a knife and slashing their bicycle tyres.

For the first time since Griffin ever came into contact with the BNP, money is not their problem — it’s just a lack of members and the Ukip factor. And of course, they hate Ukip. Who wouldn’t?

- Matthew Collins is a researcher for Hope Not Hate and the author of the book Hate: My Life in the Far-Right (BiteBack Publishing).