One of the most relieving things about not being a Nazi anymore is regaining a sense of decency and sensitivity. For years inside the far right, nothing got me upset. Sure, there were the usual minor juvenile emotional upheavals, but horror stories and tragedies were like some sort of cherished good news to us. Every shocking, vile incident, every disgusting news story was welcomed as it would prove we were right about whatever it was we could to use it to suit us for. This included floods, rapes, murders, terrorism – everything. The world was so evil that we could immunise ourselves to its apparent nature. Or perhaps, we could revel in it as if nothing could hurt us. Occasionally I’d catch a stark glimpse of myself, without a smile and seemingly without a care. I’d talked, bullied and convinced the life out of myself and consumed my thoughts and emotions with hatred. This way, nothing could harm me. I don’t know whether this was because we were genuinely evil or just misguided. We were certainly emotionally damaged, victims of our own bullshit-posturing. Perhaps deep down, for everyone, it was a charade. But I had switched off, and without much difficulty.
In the middle of my little drama, Martin Wingfield announced that he was withdrawing from the NF to move up north to Barrow. Barrow, the tiny non-League football team that for some reason The Flag had been following the fortunes of. Anderson decided to open the administrative PO Box in East Ham because nobody would want to join a National Front based in Barrow. Wingfield declared he would continue to put the newspaper together, only because Anderson refused to buy it from him on behalf of the party. Anderson went all northern and admitted to being ‘chuffed to pieces’ that it would no longer be printed on the south coast. A printer was found over Barking way, who turned out to be Jewish. Initially, Wingfield didn’t even go to live up north, which made the situation all the more strange.
The Directorate meeting to discuss the forthcoming annual conference had to be shifted to a hotel after people refused to have the meeting in Anderson’s living room. With no vacuum cleaner in the house, I had been on my hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, sweeping up old glass, bogeys and god knows what else from under the sofa. Anderson got more than a little defensive about people’s refusal to hold the meeting in his house. Why couldn’t a dozen or so people cram into his living room and drink tea out of his two (filthy) mugs? I pretended to be as perplexed as him, but was very grateful when he threw all the newspapers back on the floor.
On the agenda for the meeting was what the NF should and should not discuss at the conference. There were the usual non-controversial motions like ‘hang all child molesters’, a staple NF policy, and ‘hang all rapists’, which would probably have to be mitigated by ‘as long as they’re not NF members’. The whole boring process of stitching up the conference was done with a knowing glow of satisfaction by those present. We were all so very important. Fuck the members.
Tina Wingfield was also voted a pay rise on the basis that she would not be holidaying in Spain that year. Opening my big trap, I suggested the new Deputy Chair, Steve Brady, should take her on holiday instead. To make sure there was a clear definition between ‘Movement’ and ‘Party’, the NF decided before the conference to ratify its decision to stand fifty candidates at the next general election, guaranteeing the NF television time by way of an election broadcast. Possibly this is where the idea for Tellytubbies was devised.
None of us could decide where we stood on the issue of the Iraqi troops in Kuwait; the country was in recession and Thatcher was unpopular but none of these issues were up for discussion. Instead, second on Anderson’s agenda was the proscribing of the BNP. Everyone on the Directorate agreed to the motion being put forward, which meant it would be passed at conference. It was hoped that this would kill off the increasingly successful rival party. ‘The BNP is damaging our chances and our name,’ said Anderson. I then relayed this to Edmonds, over tea at the BNP office, prompting him to respond that ‘the NF is damaging the good name of National Socialism.’ To lighten proceedings, Anderson and I announce that we will be holding an election seminar on how to deal with the press, and how to run an election campaign. ‘If they want a party, the NF should have a picnic,’ suggested Edmonds.
The IRA blew up Ian Gow, the MP for Eastbourne, just before the national conference took place. I felt a little sad and remorseful for him, mainly because my comrades took so much joy from it. Gow was a firm friend of Thatcher but resigned from the Front Bench over the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s. The press reported that some women from the SWP were shouting sickening slogans about his death at Hammersmith tube station so during the week, Blackham, a couple of others and I went looking for some of them as they were putting up posters, jumped out of the car and battered them to the ground. We would’ve done it anyway, but we felt that if we were caught this time, the police would have been sympathetic to our reasoning.
There was no way the Tories were ever going to lose his seat, so it would have been pointless for us to fight it although Anderson declared that we should, in memory of Gow and to remind everyone that it was his party’s policies that killed him. Mr X then rang the office, asking whether the NF were going to stand in Eastbourne. Apparently the other parties were considering it despite the circumstances surrounding the MP’s death.
‘Definitely,’ I said.
‘Can I quote you on that?’ asked ‘X’ to which I again responded, ‘Definitely.’
It made the front page of The Sun on the Saturday, though thankfully Mr X did not use his name on the story. I met Blackham in Beckenham High Street and we both bought a dozen copies for posterity, though I knew I could never take mine home now. Mr X even attributed a rather articulate quote to me that, in reality, I had never made. Anderson denied ever having sanctioned a decision to stand and made me feel very small. ‘We’ll have to fight it now, though, won’t we?’ said he with his shaking hands on hips.
That year’s AGM took place in central London. I got to sit in a room behind the conference room under strict instructions to sell as many stickers, books, videos and magazines as I could. All through the day’s proceedings people popped in to stretch their legs. When the conference room was full, I counted ninety people in attendance, which The Flag later reported to be 100 ‘delegates’.
The man with the UVF connections popped in to check on me. ‘Have you and Eddie joined the UDA?’ he asked, casually reading the back cover of a book.
‘I think so,’ was the best I could offer. He nodded appreciatively, then came in closer.
‘You know it’s not secure? They’ve got all kinds of silly bollocks going on. I don’t want to say too much, if you know what I mean…’
I took notice, after all he did get locked up for his previous actions, plus he was a bit of a plonker with a nasty temper.
A few others came in during the day to complain and bitch about things that barely interested me at the best of times. Their lives got so caught up with the most minor details about the most minor of things; their lives were so empty they had nothing else to do but concoct conspiracy theories. Someone left a copy of Searchlight on the table and I read that instead of listening to the awfully banal business of being a full-time anal Nazi.
The NF candidates chosen so far were paraded before the audience. Eddie got the biggest cheer, as he would expect. Afterwards I told him that his address was displayed at Birmingham Town Hall so people could see where the candidate lived and who had signed their nomination papers. He was not the least bit interested. ‘I got the biggest cheer Maff. Who in all honesty is gonna come knocking on my door late at night when the candidate for law and order is in the house holding a pistol?’ Indeed.
Three people abstained from voting on the resolution to proscribe the BNP but twenty more came in to complain about it, even though they had voted in favour. There was not one vote against the motion. I voted in favour of everything; why argue?
After the conference there was the usual piss-up and a bit of a discussion as to whether it was worth travelling to some train stations to pick off some football hooligan gang that we could all agree none of us liked. Instead we ended up fighting with the staff and patrons in an Irish pub. It started with someone in the toilet tearing down an anti-Irish sticker and ended with two men laying comatose in the toilet and the bar staff hiding, as stools and glasses were hurled at them. Some of the northern lads did a runner but most others just walked to another pub and watched the police and ambulances turn up. A great afternoon was had by all. We took a seat by the window and watched while football hooligan gangs added to the confusion. I didn’t feel uncomfortable. Sure I had days where I was wracked by guilt and self-pity, but this is what I did and this is what I was part of. I know it was wrong, but there really didn’t seem to be anything else and my head was buzzing with the thrill of being a pimply politician for one half of my day and part of a vicious gang of thugs the next.
Most of the conversations had been about the rise of the BNP and how ineffectual the party was in countering them. A lot of people were moving across, not because they were avowed ideological Nazis themselves, but because the BNP was saying and doing what we wanted to hear. So what if Tyndall dressed up as a Nazi? If we could go Paki-bashing while he admired himself in his bedroom mirror, who gave a fuck? By eight o’clock, as one after the other my comrades had departed to their homes, I was the last one in the pub, wishing that I had enough money to hire a hooker.
The NF media conference was booked by me under the name of Anderson’s print company at the Clarendon Hotel, Blackheath. I told Anderson it was central to trains from the south coast, but it wasn’t. I booked it purely because it was a ten-minute walk from my home. The media conference fell flat when only eight of the thirty people we had been expecting turned up. Anderson was the only person in the room who had actually been interviewed on television in the last ten years, and you may recall how he had ‘nailed it’ perfectly. He sat in the tiny room we had hired, crossed his legs and actually interviewed himself in front of the other seven of us. He started off politely asking himself questions, which he answered perfectly, before turning on himself with tough, nasty questions, which he also deflected perfectly too. The seven of us just sat and stared at him.
After our own, rather flat AGM, Anderson and I rang around all the London hotels, trying to find where the BNP would be holding theirs. Edmonds had been badgering me to attend but I didn’t feel as if I could. Eventually we found the Great Western had a booking by the so-called Chesterton Society, and called to tell them it was really the BNP. They had four times more people than we had at our own rally and they did not take a vote on anything once.
I spent the afternoon before the election address was posted, at the Hancock printing empire with Tom Acton, printing the bloody things and cursing Anderson. Acton was a poor printer and, according to Anderson, a poor accountant too. During the Eastbourne election campaign, Anderson claimed Acton was having a nervous breakdown, but during my time with Acton the only thing he seemed interested in breaking was Anderson’s neck. I did not mention any of the various plots I was involved in, or knew that Acton was involved in. Given Brady’s recent elevation to Deputy Chairman, it was possible that things were already afoot. Acton announced that he and the Nashes had recently approached Andrew Brons, a lecturer in politics and former Chairman of the party, to rejoin, a move which would almost certainly lead to Anderson’s demise. Joe Pearce and Roger Denny were also keen to make a comeback now that Wingfield was gone, or at least going.
Hancock’s premises were on an Uckfield industrial estate and brimming to the roof with bomb manuals, copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, KKK manuals and pornographic calendars. Just about every piece of Nazi literature in the world passed through the premises, most of it making ours look timid in comparison. I took literature instead of payment, knowing that on the far right the cheque is always in the mail. I sent a dozen postcards with Adolf Hitler on the front to a dozen unsuspecting recipients, and put a Danish Waffen SS poster on my bedroom wall. The calendars with German women and farmyard animals were not for giving away.
The southern branches of the NF went to work on the Eastbourne by-election full-time. A couple of young skinheads were living in Cambridge, young and in love and they came across an NF sticker with the Worthing PO Box number on it. The next day, they packed their bags and moved to Worthing, certain it was the centre of NF activity. It wasn’t, so they moved to Eastbourne and worked full-time on the Eastbourne election for the NF, courtesy of the dole. The NF had more than a dozen people active in Eastbourne every day during the election. This was more of an indictment of Thatcher’s employment policy than an example of people’s commitment to the party, but I enjoyed the break and any time I managed to spend alone down there. It was rumoured that the deposit for the campaign was donated by a landlord of an Irish pub in south London, after he was visited by a family demanding protection money on our behalf. There certainly did seem to be a lot of cash flying about as we drank dry pub after pub.
There were quite a few young people down in Eastbourne, on weekends anyway, so it was inevitable that Eddie Whicker would end up throwing somebody through a bus shelter. Inevitable, I suppose, that we would harass the local Labour Party, damage someone’s car and exchange blows with student types outside the front of a pub. We got resoundingly beaten at the polls by the Liberal Democrat alliance. They all beat us, so we put in a contingency plan to give Lord Sutch a good kicking should we ever meet him. Though I do remember he applauded one of our candidates at one election, one where we also came last, obviously.
Eddie had been going to more and more UDA meetings whilst acting as a driver for Frank, which was ‘Billy’s’ real name. A senior UDA figure also came over to the mainland for a series of supposedly clandestine meetings. Sectarian murder, for which the UDA was now better known, was on the increase. The UDA were planning to use ‘cell’ structures, to counter the success of the police and military infiltrating them.
‘You’re still on the team Maff,’ said Eddie. ‘Frank’s very impressed with you.’
My only thought was, ‘has nobody noticed that Frank is a Catholic?’