Private Eye – 21 December 2007

Far from having a less hostile attitude to the far right in the past than I do now, as HP Sauce laboriously implies (Eye 1199), even as a teenager I used to bore my friends (and local letters editors) rigid with my diatribes against Nazis and Fascists. Thus, the saintly Rowan Williams – then editor of our school magazine – actually asked me to tone down the vehemence of one anti-Nazi article before he would agree to print it.

I did receive a letter, 25 years ago, from a David Jones offering detailed information about leftists in his regional CND, and I did buy him a meal to follow it up; but, prior to that meeting, he had said nothing about any previous involvement with the extreme right. When he later revealed it, it was in the context of having broken with such extremists completely. He then sent me two or three more letters, after which I never heard from him again – presumably because, as your story states, he reverted to type and signed up to the BNP.

My record of opposition to the extreme right is tediously consistent and very well-documented – not only as "elder statesman", as you kindly describe me, but also as "wannabe politician" in the early 1980s.

Yours faithfully,

(Dr) JULIAN LEWIS MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA