Colin Jordan: leader of the far Right

As founder in 1962 of the National Socialist Movement, which he led until its reorganisation in 1968 as the British Movement (which he also led), Colin Jordan made a reputation of sorts for himself as the most intemperate voice of the far Right in the liberalising decade of the 1960s. 

Modelling himself as a history student at Cambridge on Arnold Leese, whose prewar Imperial Fascist League had advocated the gassing of Jews, Jordan was, principally, virulently anti-Semitic. Supporters of his NSM carried out numerous arson attacks against Jewish property in London — though Jordan himself escaped being implicated in these. 

His inflammatory participation in an anti-Semitic demonstration in support of Adolf Eichmann (who had been executed in Israel as a war criminal in 1962) was characteristic. 

But he did not hesitate to use other forms of racism, notably colour and immigration, when it suited him. Thus, an early vehicle for his ideas, the White Defence League which he founded in the 1950s, was active in the Notting Hill race riots of that decade. And he delivered a vituperative attack on black and Asian immigrants, in a leaflet entitled The Coloured Invasion, for which, in 1967, he was prosecuted, convicted and jailed for 18 months under the Public Order Act 1936. 

He had become familiar with the workings of the Act at the outset of his career as leader of the NSM. Jordan was a proponent of street violence as a means of giving weight to his political opinions, and in the summer of 1962 he and colleagues had attempted to set up a paramilitary body to be known as Spearhead. 

With its brown shirts and boots, this was to be a street army based on Ernst Roehm’s Sturmabteilung (SA) which flourished in the early years of Nazism. But Spearhead’s “military” manoeuvres were observed by the police, its London headquarters were raided and Jordan and his corps of officers were prosecuted and convicted. On that occasion Jordan received a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment. 

These were just two of the frequent brushes with the law that punctuated his career. The last to gain him much public notice was a somewhat bathetic affair in 1975. In June of that year he was arrested for stealing three pairs of women’s red knickers from a branch of Tesco’s in Leamington Spa and subsequently fined £50 by Warwick magistrates. At about that time he stood down from the leadership of the party. 

John Colin Campbell Jordan was born in Birmingham in 1923, the son of a postman. He was educated at Warwick School and in 1942 was called up for military service and served in the Royal Army Educational Corps. After being demobbed he went to Cambridge where he read history. 

At Cambridge he founded the Nationalist Club, and this subsequently led him to membership of a succession of extreme right-wing organisations. He was attracted by the ideas of Arthur Leese, who subsequently bequeathed him a house in Notting Hill, which became the London base of the White Defence League. 

In the meantime he had become a schoolmaster, teaching mathematics at a Coventry secondary school. By 1962 its board of governors had decided that his teaching was incompatible with his leadership of the NSM, and he was dismissed. 

In July that year the party had held its notorious rally in Trafalgar Square in which Jordan used the platform to attack Jews in terms that recalled the coarsest invective of Nazi propaganda. Hundreds of supporters and opponents of Jordan’s became involved in violent clashes and with the crowd eventually growing to about 5,000, a full-scale riot developed. Jordan and his deputy John Tyndall, NSM’s national secretary, were arrested. In August Jordan received a sentence of two months’ imprisonment, Tyndall six weeks. The longer sentences both men received as a result of the “Spearhead” case followed that October. That summer, meanwhile, the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, had entered Britain illegally, and at an international conference in the Cotswolds he and Jordan declared the establishment of the World Union of National Socialists, with Jordan as its “World Führer”. 

Notwithstanding his contempt for democratic processes, Jordan stood in a number of parliamentary elections, quietly losing his deposit with unfailing regularity. One of his most spectacular election interventions was not connected with a candidacy of his own. In 1965 the Labour Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, who had lost his seat the previous year in a general election contest at Smethwick influenced by the race/immigration issue, was, as his party thought, being shoe-horned back into Parliament at a by-election in the safe seat of Leyton, whose MP had been persuaded to stand down in exchange for a peerage. 

Jordan was determined that the race issue should discomfit Labour here, too. His neo-Nazis noisily invaded Gordon Walker’s first campaign rally in Leyton, and were only repulsed after Jordan was flung off the platform. In the event the voters of Leyton did not prove amenable to the Labour high command’s hopes. Gordon Walker failed here, too. He was obliged to resign as Foreign Secretary and submit himself to the electorate at the general election of 1966 before he was returned to Parliament. 

After standing down from the leadership of the BM, Jordan continued to advocate violent solutions to the ills he saw besetting the British state. In the 1980s he revived Gothic Ripples, a publication Leese had founded in 1945 and ran it as a personal project. 

In 1963 he married Françoise Dior, a niece of the fashion designer Christian Dior and herself an ardent fascist. The marriage was dissolved in 1967.

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