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Searchlight supermole Ray Hill

It’s not often you get to play a part in the total destruction of a far right group. But that’s what happened after the broadcast, 42 years ago this week, of a TV investigation into Nazi gun running in the UK.

In 1981, ITV’s then flagship investigative and current affairs programme, World In Action, began digging into reports that the British Democratic Party, a Leicester- based spin off from the National Front, was involved in buying guns. From the moment the decision was taken to investigate it, the BDP was pretty much doomed. WIA had a ferocious investigative reputation and didn’t take many prisoners.

The BDP was led by a Leicester solicitor, Anthony Reed Herbert. The NF’s local branch, which he led in the 1970s, had been the jewel in the party’s crown, polling thousands of votes, and coming close to seizing a large number of council seats in local elections. But then came the Front’s 1979 general election disaster, at which point Reed Herbert decided that the Nazi reputations of the party’s leaders would be a constant brake on its success. So he split the branch away from the Front and created his own party, the BDP.

But Reed Herbert, a former Conservative Party member and highly experienced local activist, was as right wing as they come and soon he and some of his members were buying guns, getting ready for “the coming race war”. That’s what WIA was investigating.

Ray Hill, Searchlight’s most celebrated “mole” was based in Leicester and although at the time he and Searchlight had their sights trained on the openly neo-Nazi and growing British Movement, he had managed to get very close to Reed Herbert, who entrusted with him with running the BDP office. Ray and Searchlight were ideally placed to assist WIA in its endeavours, which we happily agreed to do.

Anthony Red Herbert (right) secretly photographed meeting World In Action infiltrator

It didn’t take much more than a few tape-recorded conversations and phone calls and the BDP were done up like kippers, agreeing to provide guns for the WIA infiltrator, “Bob”. The programme, entitled “Guns To The Right”, concluded with the broadcast of a hilarious recorded phone conversation between “Bob” and BDP member John Grand Scrutton, the most useless, dim witted and unreliable of those involved in the plot. The conversation went like this:

JGS: I think I can get hold of about six of the items you require.

Bob: You’re talking about six what? Pistols or what?

JGS: Well, yes. I don’t like to mention too much over the phone because you never know who’s listening in. Now, what I shall need for two of them will be about, say, two hundred and fifty quid each. About five hundred quid.

Bob: What time of day should the money be delivered?

JGS: Well, any time to suit yourself. Make it out to Mr Reed Herbert, 337 Humberstone Rd, Leicester. In cash, of course, Bob. Mr Reed Herbert will know what it’s all about, of course, and then he’ll contact me.

After the programme was transmitted in early July the BDP went into a total, blind panic. Grand Scrutton’s fingerprints were all over the plastic wrapping of a gun that had ended up with the police. He’d left it hidden in a graveyard but it was found by a dog walker and handed in. The others knew that, if arrested, he would cough everything in pretty short order.

Reed Herbert decided he had to be got out of the way and, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing from one safe house to another, decided to pack him off to South Africa – in the safekeeping, however, of Ray Hill who was assigned to accompany him to Johannesburg.

Searchlight put a stop to that. Ray booked tickets with a connecting flight in France. Then we got in touch with friends in the police trade unions in France and when they tried to change planes at Orly airport, Ray and Grand Scrutton were detained and returned to the UK.

At that point real panic set in: a scheme to kill Scrutton was only thwarted when Searchlight published details of what was being planned. And finally, when Reed Herbert packed Scrutton off to Ireland to hole up there, he once more sent Ray Hill, the one person he thought he could depend on, as Scrutton’s babysitter.

A disconsolate John Grand Scrutton in Tralee

They ended up at the end of 1981 in a dilapidated cottage on Dingle Bay in the southwest corner of Ireland where Ray lost no opportunity to impress upon the hapless Scrutton that he was in an unfixable mess.

The hideaway cottage in Dingle Bay

At Ray’s suggestion, Scrutton wrote to the WIA producer, Geoff Seed, asking for help. So Geoff and I flew over to Ireland and set up camp in the Queens Hotel in Tralee where we had a series of meetings with the increasingly desperate fugitive. He repeatedly tried to sell us versions of events that falsely minimised his role but after a few days of this, and with Ray’s help, every fake narrative that he offered up was kicked into touch.

Backed completely into a corner, he eventually signed a full confession – typed up on a typewriter kindly loaned by the hotel reception – and agreed to return to England with us and give himself up to the police.

The author, much younger and rather more slimline, at the Dingle Bay cottage

Two days later he walked into Leicester police station with his signed confession, and turned himself in. And what did the police do? Nothing. No-one was charged and as far as we know no-one else was even interviewed. It did, however, spell the end of the BDP which never recovered, so that at least was a job well done. (The BDP which now exists in the UK is no relation at all).

But Grand Scrutton, true to nazi form, knew exactly where to lay the blame. Sitting up late with Ray Hill in the Irish cottage, the night before he returned to Leicester, he bemoaned his fate. “You’ve got to give it to these Jews, Ray – they’re fucking clever.”

(Fact: neither Geoff Seed nor I is Jewish).

If you want to read the whole, hilarious story, it’s in Ray’s book The Other Face Of Terror.