It’s becoming a summer of discontent for all three contenders for the führership of British nazism.

Alek Yerbury is well ahead of all competitors in the Hitler-lookalike contest, but as we recently reported, his admission that Searchlight is 99% correct about corruption on the far right hasn’t made him many friends.

Long before Yerbury changed from British Army boots to jackboots, his former Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett was basking in media attention under the label “Young, Nazi and Proud”.

Now Collett is middle-aged, but still nazi and shameless.

Obsessed by money

One main criticism of Collett among his former PA comrades is that he is obsessed by money, and distracted by issues that are irrelevant to most British voters.

His obsessional antisemitism has led Collett to rant endlessly about Iran, even though neither Tehran’s mullahs nor the pro-Palestinian movement want anything to do with him.

Shunned by most of Israel’s critics, Collett does get reciprocal and lucrative admiration from the other objects of his online devotion – Vladimir Putin’s Russian government and its propaganda agencies. But as we shall report later this week, his Kremlin-worship risks destroying PA.

Disastrous leaders

That leaves Kenny Smith, the obese Duce of the Homeland Party. For months things seemed to be going Smith’s way, if only because Yerbury and Collett are even more disastrous as far-right leaders.

But during the past six weeks, the wheels have come off the Homeland wagon, and it now looks like just another fascist calamity, wrecked by the personality flaws of its own leading members.

First to quit was a faction led by Steve Laws, the Folkestone anti-immigration campaigner who has shifted from populist filmmaker to leader of Britain’s hardcore racist, Jew-baiting fringe.

Laws picked a fight with Kenny Smith over a range of issues, including Smith’s appointment of a gay Homeland member, Carter McAfee, as a party organiser in Northern Ireland.

Crude clickbait slogans

Homophobia is only part of the picture, though it later turned to be weirdly prevalent in Smith’s party. The basic problem with Laws is that he wants to adopt the crudest clickbait slogans that play well on social media, and make them the foundation of party policy, without any idea of how such ideas could be formulated as practical proposals.

Anyone raising practical objections is dismissed as a sellout, or to use an imported American far-right term, a “cuck”.

Or even worse: a “Zionist shill”.

Laws’ main ally in the First Homeland Split was Sam Wilkes, a vlogger based in the Channel Islands who hides behind the name “Zoomer Historian”.

Between them, Laws and Wilkes took a large chunk of Homeland’s online support, but Smith and the party loyalists could at first argue that they still had the more practical, electorally-focused activists on board.

But not for long, because within a month there was the Second Homeland Split!

Hitler worshippers

This time it was the moderate faction who deserted, undoing much of the work that Smith had tried to do in establishing Homeland as “sensible nationalism”, in other words as something more like the old BNP or the 1970s NF, encompassing everything from Powellite Tories to Hitler worshippers.

The strategy seemed to be working, and even after endless internal bickering and disappointing election results, former UKIP activist and super-pretentious “intellectual” waffler Pete North was still writing on 2 May that “the Homeland Party is quite refreshing”, and praising party leader Smith for wanting to distance “nationalism” from “cranks and bad actors”.

But already, even in North’s post-election article, there were rumblings of the coming earthquake: “The problem with that is that the cranks are unappeasable. No hard line is ever hardline enough. Ideological purity, no matter how obnoxious and repellent, matters to them more than growing a movement that might achieve something.”

Well, yes, Mr North: but wasn’t that obvious to you last year when you were happily making common cause with notorious ex-BNP nazis?

Threw in the towel

A month after the local elections, North threw in the towel. The immediate reason was that his fellow Homeland strategists no longer wished to be bored to death by his endless policy papers, and North admitted he had “lost the argument”.

But it also became obvious that Smith viewed North as a liability. The Duce needs to be able to defend his party against Laws and his fellow “purists”.

And North’s online incontinence, unable to get through a day without posting in support of Netanyahu, has repeatedly given ammunition to Smith’s critics.

Nazi tradition

Yet North also (finally) woke up to the underlying, intractable problem that Homeland belongs to a fringe nazi tradition that can be traced back via John Tyndall to Arnold Leese.

This side of the British far right “family” descends from those who thought Mosley was too moderate.

As North put it, when summarising the reasons for his departure (several weeks after the second Homeland Split): “What troubles me about British nationalism, though, is the extent to which this issue (the ‘Jewish Question’) is an all-consuming obsession bordering on the psychopathic – to the extent that if you dabble in Nationalism, you will eventually be sharing the same space with Holocaust deniers and closet Neo-Nazis.

“They do say, if you sup with the devil, use a long spoon, but I fear there is no spoon long enough.”

…the ‘Jewish Question’ is an all-consuming obsession bordering on the psychopathic – to the extent that if you dabble in Nationalism, you will eventually be sharing the same space with Holocaust deniers and closet Neo-Nazis

Pete North

North has walked out into the political wilderness. Too “moderate” for Homeland and too racist even for the dog-whistlers of UKIP and Reform, he’s now reduced to musing on X about the potential of a Tory revival.

If Robert Jenrick took over the Tory leadership from Kemi Badenoch, North would probably try to join the Conservative Party, and it would be very telling if he were admitted.

One ex-Homelander who has been readmitted by the Tories with indecent haste is Alex Bramham, who was the other big name to quit Kenny Smith’s party in the Second Great Homeland Split.

Bramham was suspended by the Tories in 2022 while a local election candidate in Manchester. He later joined the modern version of the SDP (a tiny socially conservative and Europhobic party), before jumping ship to Homeland late last year.

Whereas the Homelanders’ big problem with Pete North is his sympathy for Israel and refusal to tolerate Holocaust denial, their problem with Alex Bramham is that he was once openly homosexual.

Extreme homophobia

Searchlight has no idea what Bramham does in his private life, but according to his own recent postings on X, his former comrades in Homeland, notably his regional organiser Tom Huburn-King, couldn’t stop obsessing about it.

When Bramham (reasonably enough) pointed out that it was odd for Homeland to invite the French racist Renaud Camus (who is openly gay) as a keynote conference speaker, but then to tolerate extreme homophobia (even murderous homophobia) within the party’s internal leadership discussions, Huburn-King’s reply was: “Shut the fuck up and do as I say.”

Would these “sensible nationalists” be able to get through 24 hours without spewing hatred against Jews or homosexuals or both?

And is even a “sensible nationalist” party able to recruit senior officials who are capable of carrying out their roles without descending to Chaplin-esque caricatures of dictators?

Rejoined the Tories

On 21 June Bramham announced he had rejoined the Tories, inspired by “the excellent work of our local MP, Sir Gavin Williamson”.

Perhaps Williamson is proud of being able to recruit a man who until a few weeks earlier was a leading activist in a racist party run by ex-BNP nazis.

If so, it’s a sign of how far the Conservative Party has fallen as it rolls around with Farage in the political gutter.