The more people see of the BNP, the worse for the party

Nick Griffin's performance on Question Time gave him publicity all right. Voters could see how ridiculous the far-right leader is

I had Nick Griffin down as many things, but I had not previously realised that he was such a big, blubbery wuss. In advance of the Question Time debut of the BNP's führer, some feared and he hoped that it would be a great step forward for his party. He swaggered to his supporters that he would use the occasion to "take on the corrupt, treacherous swine destroying our beautiful island nation".

Well, it didn't quite work out like that. By the morning after the humiliating night before, the BNP leader was moaning that he had been treated unfairly. He is just another crybaby like most bullies turn out to be. The conspiracy against him was fantastically big. It was the fault of the BBC which is apparently the propaganda arm of the "ultra-leftist establishment". This would, I suppose, explain the Marxist indoctrination that infuses Strictly Come Dancing and the Trotskyist subplots of The Archers. It was the fault of London. To put him in front of a representative studio audience from the nation's capital was a dirty trick because London is apparently an "ethnically cleansed" city that "is no longer British".

He was set upon, he whinges, by "a lynch mob". That it was not. He was questioned robustly and, at times, passionately. As some of his repulsive views were exposed to daylight, he tried to squirm unconvincingly out of them. I agree with those who say there is an issue about whether the entire programme should have been devoted to him and the issues his party feeds upon. But for Mr Griffin, it surely should have been a cause for celebration, not whimpering, that he was the centre of attention.

He complains because his performance was so catastrophically awful. There was magnificent floundering when he was confronted by the audience who were the true stars of the show and confounded pre-transmission suggestions that this was not the best format for an interrogation. I especially enjoyed the Asian bloke who stunned him into silence by asking: "Where do you want me to go?" before suggesting that there'd be plenty of contributors to a whip-round to "buy you a ticket to the South Pole. A colourless landscape that will suit you fine". That is vigorous, democratic exchange.

If there was some ganging up against Nick Griffin that was a tad inevitable when three of the politicians on the panel represented anti-racist parties and only one was the leader of a racist party. It was not a "lynch mob". A lynch mob is what his friends in the Ku Klux Klan used to specialise in. The audience met him with simple, scornful laughter when he claimed that the KKK are these days "almost totally non-violent". Don't you like the "almost totally"?

There are several lessons to be drawn from an episode that has been as revealing as it has been contentious. One cheering conclusion is that our democracy is a resilient old thing and can cope with odious characters such as the BNP leader without having to compromise its most sacred principles of free speech and fair representation.

Before Question Time, this argument split the liberal media and the cabinet. On the one side, we have those such as Peter Hain who maintain that the BNP should be banned from Question Time on the old left doctrine of "no platform for fascists". The Welsh secretary was continuing to maintain afterwards that: "The BBC has handed the gift of the century to the BNP."

I don't agree. The BBC has been vindicated. The BNP won nearly a million votes and two seats in the European Parliament in the spring. They remain very much a fringe party, but one with enough support for it to be appropriate for the BBC to proffer an occasional invitation to Question Time just as it does to other minority parties. The BNP should also get its proportionate share of party election broadcasts, as far-right parties have in the past. Banning them is both wrong in democratic principle and counter-productive in practice. Jack Straw was right to go on the programme to confront Nick Griffin directly. The true gift to the extreme right is to give them the opportunity to claim that they are being gagged while allowing them to carry on operating and incubating in the shadows.

One of the toxic myths peddled by the BNP is that there is a conspiracy by the political and media elite to muzzle them because only they dare speak the truth, that truth being, in the warped world of Mr Griffin, that "successive governments" have perpetrated "genocide" against the white population of Britain. Well, Margaret Thatcher was far from perfect, John Major could be pretty hapless and Tony Blair made his mistakes, but they must have been geniuses to have fooled me and millions of other white Britons into not realising that we have been packed off to concentration camps. The views spouted by Nick Griffin – and he is supposed to be the presentable face of his thuggish party – are such hilarious nonsense that politicians such as Peter Hain ought to have more confidence in their ability to destroy them and also invest a bit more faith in the capacity of the British people to see the BNP for what it is. But for that to happen, voters need to be given some opportunities to do the seeing.

I'm even more sure that they will do so because another conclusion I draw from this episode is that we are fortunate in Britain that the few fascists we produce are such utter incompetents. We currently have a crisis of parliamentary legitimacy fed by the expenses scandal which is coinciding with the longest and deepest recession since 1945. The combination is feeding a fierce mood of revolt against the mainstream parties. These are conditions in which all the textbooks suggest that the extreme right should find fertile ground for their politics of hate. In some parts of Britain, they have done so. But compared with fascist parties elsewhere in Europe, the overall performance of the far right here has been pathetic. This is probably down to a combination of their own ineptness and Britain's historic aversion to the extreme right. If Sir Oswald Mosley, a fascist who was scarily charismatic, couldn't convert Britain to black shirtism in the Thirties, his miserable heirs in the BNP are not going to succeed.

This does not mean anyone should be complacent about those who peddle the politics of hate, but it does suggest a right way and a wrong way of tackling them. The wrong way is to try to wish them away by selectively banning the party from the airwaves.

I don't doubt that the BNP crave publicity, but Question Time showed why exposure is their greatest enemy. The portrayal of Nick Griffin as a monster almost does him a favour. What we saw on Thursday night was a nervous, sweaty, shifty, amateurish and confused man, manically grinning when confronted with his back catalogue of repulsive quotes and occasionally venting bursts of incoherent nastiness.

For sure, he went on the programme with the aspiration to present himself as a "respectable" and "modernised" face of the extreme right. I don't doubt he hoped to gain some legitimacy by sitting among mainstream politicians. Despite the occasional gauche attempt to chum up with the other panellists, this thin mask did not stand a moment's scrutiny. Questioned by another impressive member of the audience, a young Jewish man, about why he compared the Holocaust to the myth that the Earth is flat, the BNP leader put on his rictus grin and flailed: "I can't explain why I said those things." Sayeeda Warsi, the Tory peer, got it right when she observed that he had failed "to put forward his PR version of what he is".

The BNP has two main sources of support. At the core are extreme racists. The greater and softer section comes from disaffected voters who feel ignored and disenfranchised by the conventional parties and to whom the BNP presents itself as a stick with which to beat the political establishment.

One necessary part of the response from the mainstream parties is to address the grievances they feed on where they are authentic and to explode them when they are myths. Another is to get more aggressive about taking them on. Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems are adopting a hearteningly united front against the BNP. The third important strand is to make it crystal clear to those tempted by them that the BNP is not just another protest party, but an outfit led by a man who "cannot explain" why he was a Holocaust-denier and who thinks the Ku Klux Klan is cuddly.

The more people see of the BNP, the more poisonous they will see them to be. I take that view even though they claim – not a boast to take at face value anyway – that they got 3,000 new recruits from a programme watched by an audience of 8 million. So the BNP's "breakthrough moment" won over, on his own figures, less than half of a thousandth of those exposed to its leader.

Daylight will acquaint more voters with what the BNP really believes. It almost dignifies Nick Griffin to call him sinister when he is so fundamentally silly. The most unintentionally revealing moment was when the he offered his anthropological theories, what he called "the absolute nub" of what he believes. Here, verbatim, is what he said: "The indigenous people of these islands – the English, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh – it's the people who have been here overwhelmingly for the last 17,000 years. We are the aborigines here." There were no aborigines here 17 millenniums ago. Nor were there any English, Scots, Irish or Welsh. Seventeen thousand years ago, these islands were inhabited by Cro-Magnon man living in caves.

That is roughly where we will be again if Nick Griffin ever has his way. But he won't. I have enough faith in the robustness of our democracy and the people of these islands to be very sure of that.