Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo. By Paul Jackson

Colin Jordan may not be Britain’s most notorious fascist, but he was an unpleasantly significant one nonetheless. In the post-war period, following fascism’s defeat and during the interim between Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and the advent of the National Front in 1967, Jordan was one of those keeping the flame alive—part of the continuum that ran from his mentor and benefactor Arnold Leese’s virulent interwar racism to the politics of hate that the British Movement brought to the British streets in the 1970s. Jordan, as Paul Jackson makes clear, was integral to the dissemination and embodiment of British neo-Nazism—a term the author spends much time unpicking and redefining in the opening chapter. Jordan was a career Nazi; a stain on the edge of Britain’s body politic that remained frustratingly irremovable. To this end, Jackson’s biography of Jordan is a welcome study: essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the politics and personnel of the British far right.

As may be expected, the book is chronological, taking us through Jordan’s studies in History at Cambridge to his membership of the British People’s Party and onto A. K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists, the White Defence League, the British National Party, the National Socialist Movement and, in 1968, the British Movement. Such a series of organizations, with their linguistic overlaps and recurrent splits, tell us much about the fractious and ephemeral nature of fascist politics on Britain. More to the point, the fact that Jordan—like his rival in love and politics John Tyndall—was simultaneously able to gain a media profile and public notoriety amidst so much in-fighting and stalled vanity projects is notable. Arguably, it reveals more about our—or the media’s—fascination with fascism than it does British politics (like a dog returning to its own vomit). Whatever, Jordan garnered attention—and even when he was caught red-handed with a pair of stolen red knickers in 1975, he continued to pontificate and endeavour to orchestrate neo-Nazi politics through a range of publications. He even revived Leese’s Gothic Ripples from 1979 and, by as late as 2001, was in court on charges of publishing racist literature. Nevertheless, as Jackson makes clear, the shoplifting scandal all but ruined his reputation as a would-be leader of the far right. He died in 2009.

Trying, for the moment, to take the politics out of the equation, Jordan’s life makes for colourful reading. Aside from the knicker-lifting affair, the 1960s saw Jordan battle with Tyndall for the love of Françoise Dior, a doyen of the Nazi underground and niece to Christian Dior. They married, briefly. More generally, Jordan cuts a fascinatingly pathetic figure—a would-be Fuhrer in tatty threads, aspiring to greatness in back rooms with an ever-changing coterie of odd-bods. But this is very much a political study, with Jackson using Jordan as means to explore the evolution of British neo-Nazism. As such, Jackson follows the trails of Jordan’s ideology, his quest for political (and racial) purity, his navigation of intra- and inter-party disputes. What we see is an intractable man. A poor leader and organiser, but someone who could garner the support of a select few keen to join in with Jordan’s fantasies. His commitment cannot be doubted, given his lifelong dedication to his particular cause and the periods he spent in prison. But this is a tragic tale, intriguing for its shedding light into the political shadows but simultaneously grim in terms of its subject. The fact Jordan remained so fixed in his views makes the study one lacking in twists and turns. But Jackson has done the dirty work for us, providing an account of both British neo-Nazism and a summary of the politics that guided one of its guiding lights.