For a once prominent member of the far right, Andrew Brons had been a long time in the political wilderness. Mark Foster reports on the rise of the BNP’s MEP for Yorkshire and Humber.

A ONE-TIME leader of the extremist whites-only National Front, he’s been little heard of since the early-to-mid Eighties, concentrating instead on his career as a politics lecturer.

But Andrew Bron’s startling win for the British National Party in the Euroelections – together with the party’s leader Nick Griffin – has catapulted him back into the limelight.

Yesterday, the mainstream political parties were quick to condemn him and his party and their antiimmigration beliefs.

“The BNP are completely beyond the pale. They are an appalling bunch of people,”

said Tory leader David Cameron.

Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, didn’t mince her words either. “It is horrific to think that we have got representing Britain in the European Parliament people who think that black people and people of Asian origin have no place in this country,” she said.

But the BNP’s new Euro- MP for Yorkshire and the Humber was having none of it – calling his success a victory over “lies and misrepresentation” about his party.

And Mr Brons made it clear what he plans now: “I regard this as the first step towards the UK and the British people getting freedom from the European Union dictatorship.”

Although an MEP for the entire Yorkshire and Humberside region, it is unlikely that true-blue North Yorkshire played much of a role in his shock win for the BNP.

His party failed to win a single seat in last Thursday’s county council elections. Despite fielding 11 candidates, not one got even close to being elected.

Mr Brons is a 62-yearold retired college lecturer in politics and law who worked for many years in Harrogate, where he stood for the National Front in both of the 1974 General Elections, taking 2.3 per cent of the poll each time.

At a Birmingham byelection in 1977, he took 12.4 per cent of the vote for the National Front, forcing the Liberals into fourth place, but at the elections in 1979 and 1983, in Bradford and Leeds respectively, he managed only 1.3 and then 1.1 per cent.

He led the National Front in the early years of the Eighties, leaving as it descended into factional infighting, and only recently became active in politics again, joining the BNP three years ago.

He is divorced with two grown-up daughters and four grand-daughters.