When watching the Question Time debacle last night, the whole disaster was a mistake. By concentrating on Griffin, the man was given a platform. Through continuous attacks by all other parties, his role as underdog and outsider was assured. Griffin may have appeared weird and Janus-faced in his dogwhistling, but his sentences were addressed to the television audience, not the left-liberal attack dogs.
Griffin was described as a “wolf in sheep's clothing”. Perhaps, but it was a pitch to mythically migrate to the mainstream: acknowledge the past and appeal to a wider audience. Will this work?
In 1984, the French National Front (FN) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, below, appeared on the TV show L’Heure de Vérité (the Hour of Truth). At the time, the FN was largely boycotted by mainstream media, and electorally irrelevant.
Mr Le Pen’s appearance provoked intense opposition, but he later described it as “the hour that changed everything”.
He performed well, doing much to dispel his image as a drooling neo-Nazi: viewing figures were huge, and the FN claimed that its membership rose by 30,000.
In European elections later that year, the party won 2.2 million votes. Mr Griffin’s performance on Question Time and the public reaction to it, will determine whether, like Mr Le Pen, he joins “the big time”, or whether he goes down in history as just another Roderick Spode.
There are precedents, especially at a time when the whole political class is despised.