Ministers warn of poll boost for BNP after Question Time.

There are times when I simply despair. This is one of those times.

After Nick Griffin's disastrous appearance on Question Time, the BNP are claiming that a record 3,000 people have registered to join it's ranks in the greatest recruitment drive in the BNP's history.

Lord Mandelson warned that Griffin's exposure would produce "a bubble in the opinion polls for the BNP". He reflected fears across the mainstream political spectrum that the BNP had received a once-in-a-generation PR opportunity.

But Mandelson said Griffin, who was pilloried during the programme when he struggled to explain his denials of the Holocaust, would suffer in the end. "When the content and the meaning of what he said sinks in for people, most of them will recoil from what they heard," Mandelson said. "In the short term, he may have done himself a favour. But in the long term he has done himself no good at all."

Mandelson's immediate fears were backed up by a poll carried out after Question Time which showed 22% of voters would consider voting BNP in a local, European or general election – including 4% who said they would "definitely" consider backing the party, 3% who would "probably" consider it, and 15% who said they were "possible" BNP voters.

I think we all must have been watching a different programme. I saw Griffin crash and burn, but I am told that others thought that he had been picked upon.

I was of the opinion that, when one turns up promoting something as odious as racial purity, it should be no surprise to anyone that 99.9% of people oppose what you are saying.

Apparently, some others saw it differently.

The BBC said it had received about 350 complaints from viewers. Around 240 claimed the programme had been biased against Griffin, while more than 100 said he should not have been invited.

Griffin is, of course, claiming that he has been treated badly; claiming that the show should not have been broadcast from London as London is "no longer British".

Griffin used a press conference in Essex yesterday to claim: "The British public are aghast at the display of bias from the BBC, the venom from the political class, and the sheer unfairness. That was not a genuine Question Time, that was a lynch mob.

"People wanted to see me and hear me talking about things such as the postal strike. One or two questions about what a wicked man I am, fair enough, but the whole programme – it was absurd."

In contrast with his emollient remarks to minority ethnic members of the Question Time audience, the BNP leader stridently condemned the decision to record the show in London.

"That audience was taken from a city that is no longer British," he said. "That was not my country any more.

"Why not come down and do it in Thurrock, do it in Stoke, do it in Burnley? Do it somewhere where there are still significant numbers of English and British people and they haven't been ethnically cleansed from their own country."

Those comments alone should tell most people where Griffin is coming from, but apparently there are some who feel sympathy for what he is saying.

As I say, it simply makes me despair.

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Tags: Nick Griffin, BNP, Question Time