Barking

As I watched this week's More4 documentary about the battle between Margaret Hodge and Nick Griffin, I pondered that Griffin's party might try and prolong its wretched existence by launching a court action against Hodge for her statement that it wanted "everyone in this room" (the Jewish Hodge and her black audience) to be "dropped from helicopters into the sea" and would give effect to that policy in the event of an electoral victory.

Now, exactly such an action is to be attempted, with a view to having the election at Barking declared void and Hodge barred from public office for three years. The Islamist victory over Phil Woolas, openly crowed about as such on the relevant websites, has thus proved a gift to the BNP, which presumably thinks that it is entitled to its turn if the likes of MPACUK have had one, which MPACUK certainly considers that it has had. So, who next, and where next?

Hodge is, as my friend Ed West has christened them, an Equality Heiress, whose confidence in the Liberal Tories and the 1968 sectarian Leftists on the Bench can be all the greater for the fact that her late husband was one of the latter, a High Court judge late of the Communist Party. So this BNP action stands no realistic chance of success. But has it really come to that? In the post-Woolas world, I fear that it has.