QT will have had a record audience last night. Most of them would have been appalled by Nick Griffin. But the audience that matters, in this instance, is a minority - the 5% or so who have voted or are thinking about voting for the BNP. White, working-class, unemployed or struggling, angry at what they see as an entire governing and media class that doesn't give a toss about them.
And I'm afraid that, overall, this might have been a good night for the party that claims to speak for them. Not because Griffin spoke well: he was twitchy, evasive, amateurish and small-seeming. But the rest of the panel were so uninspiring that, for an audience already disillusioned with the whole shower, the contrast wasn't striking enough. Huhne, pompous, Straw weak and rambling, Warsi better but not all that impressive. Bonnie Greer - why does she get on these programmes? - was just the sort of disdainful 'intellectual' that BNP voters get turned off by (she sneered at Griffin's 2:2 degree - yeah Bonnie, that'll destroy him). None of them showed the remotest understanding of why certain people get pissed off enough that they vote BNP - though to her credit, Warsi got closest.
Those of us who don't like Griffin or his gang (and that's the vast majority of us) had our prejudices roundly confirmed or rather, substantiated. But I have a feeling that there will be quite a few people who watched and thought, they're all arseholes, but at least one of them is standing up for "the English" (the whites, etc).
I hoped the audience might be the stars, but there were no real moments of brilliance and whilst there was a lot of shouting, the show never really caught fire (although perhaps this is a good thing). It was a mistake to hold the programme in cosmopolitan West London rather than in a more BNP-ish area. It simply meant there was no real argument, and the fact that Griffin was assailed from every side will only have made him look more sympathetic in some eyes. After all, that's how the people that vote for him feel.
UPDATE: sadly, it looks like my first instincts were correct.
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