It took me a while to find the full list of BNP members on the internet. That was a bad half hour. My chest felt like it had a tiny man inside it, playing basketball against the inside of my ribs. Boom. Boom.

Ridgeway, Ridings, Ridley ... and, relax. Rigby. No Rifkind. I am officially not a member of the British National Party. I can't pretend it wasn't a relief. I felt like Edwina Currie, when she famously searched for her name in the index of John Major's autobiography, only the other way around.

Only once have I deliberately joined a political party. That was in the spring of 1996, when I joined the Cambridge University Conservative Association so that I could hear one of their speakers. I'd hoped they might let me in anyway, on account of this particular speaker, ahem, knowing my mother. Turned out not.

Unwillingly, however, I was already a member of almost every other political movement at which you could shake a stick, with special emphasis on those leftist or insane. The Labour Party, the Socialist Workers, Cambridge Socialists, CND, all manner of Fabians, Gay Labour, Black Labour, Islamic Labour, Outraged Coalminers Against the Trinity Foot-Beaglers, the lot. Each day my pigeonhole was an ecological disaster zone; something that did not go unnoticed, I should imagine, by my brethren in the wide variety of anti-capitalist green movements to which I also apparently belonged.

I'd been signed up, you see, by some prankster. Some nameless malevolent, who felt that it would be hilarious to wander around the Freshers' Fair jotting down the name of the guy whose dad was in the Tory Cabinet (note for slower readers, cf mother gag, above) in all the sorts of places one might have expected it not to be. Cambridge was oozing with people like that; the sort of sly feckless scum destined to end up writing newspaper gossip columns. Maybe the BNP didn't have a Cambridge University branch. I can't think of any other explanation.

Illiberal

Now that I think of it, though, I did once try to join the Liberal Democrats. That was a few years later. I was writing this newspaper's gossip column at the time. The party had a leadership contest on (aren't they due another one soon?) and they had e-mailed me, possibly by mistake, to tell me that if I sent them £6 I could join and have a vote. So I did.

They cashed the cheque but, a week later, sent me another one as a refund. I still have it somewhere. According to a party spokesman, the party felt that my membership application might be in contravention of an article in their constitution, in which one had to promise not to “bring the party into disrepute”.

It's rather upsetting when Liberal Democrats, of all people, decide that you might bring them into disrepute. Maybe the BNP didn't want me either. There's a thought.

Humane rights?

With the BNP on the one hand and Somali pirates on the other, it's a toss-up this week as to who should win the prize for “Most Surprising Beneficiaries of the Human Rights Act”. The BNP, while opposing the act, is happy to exploit it to keep its members' details private. The Somali pirates, while presumably being fairly indifferent to British domestic data protection, are exploiting it, too.

Indeed, when the Royal Navy detained a few live ones after their exciting shoot-out last week, nobody seemed sure what to do with them at all. In the end, they were handed over to Kenya, but only after the Kenyans had promised our Foreign Office that they would treat them nicely. It's not exactly walking the plank at the wrong end of a cutlass, is it?

What sort of legal advice are they getting, these pirates, before winding their turbans around their heads and toddling off to sea with their rocket launchers? Because they seem to know their stuff. Indeed, they seem to be counting on it. Does your average shadowy Brotherhood of the Skull have an in-house expert in international law? Maybe there are info-mercials on Somali television. “Have you been mistreated after illegally seizing control of a chemical tanker? You could have a case against a Western government! Dial 1-800-PLUNDER today!”

At the risk of sounding hopelessly naive, I'm struck by the way that, in the very few reports that have filtered back from those who have met them on the job, Somali pirates seem to be surprisingly polite and apologetic. One Kenyan mariner told Reuters of being well fed, and being allowed to send text messages to loved ones at home. I can imagine few things more horrific than being held hostage by anybody, but I wonder if one could make the case for our human rights culture having had a rather benign impact on the world of piracy, reducing the murder and tension, and shifting it towards something that is safer for pirate and pirated alike. God, that could be straight out of a Lib Dem manifesto, couldn't it? The fools. They don't know what they're missing.

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