Hello and welcome to episode seven of season two of bad gays, a podcast about evil and complicated gay men in history.

I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Schulles Museum in Berlin.

And I'm Hugh Lemmy, an author and writer.

Last week we talked about Pim Fortown, a Dutch far-right politician who pioneered a particular kind of self-consciously tolerant and

sort of want to be liberal far-right politics.

Who are we going to talk about this week, Hugh?

This week we have a very strange character who is a sort of shadowy, almost cult figure

in British culture.

It's the skinhead, Nikki Crane.

So let's start with some context, I guess.

Nicola Vincenzo Crane was born on the 21st of May, 1958,

in a semi-detached house in Bexley,

which is on the very southeast limits of London.

He was raised in the area in a town called Crayford.

Bexley is quite a conservative borough.

Between 1964 and today, it's only returned a Labour Council on three occasions,

but had a Tory-controlled council almost continuously between 1974 and 2002.

It's in the suburbs, but it's not like the leafy sort of well-off liberal suburbs of

North London.

It's predominantly white, even today, eight out of ten inhabitants are white.

But there's always been a small and active far-right movement, fielding both National Front

candidates and their Splinter Party, the National Party throughout the 1970s. And in fact,

...