Last week’s funeral of the far-right, schismatic Bishop Richard Williamson brought into sharp focus the longstanding connections between some ultra-conservative Catholics and a world of antisemitic bigotry, Holocaust denial and fascist politics.
Williamson died last month aged 84, a few days after suffering a brain haemorrhage. He had been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1988 and 2015, and expelled even from the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X in 2012.
The SSPX was founded in 1970 in opposition to reforms brought in by the Second Vatican Council. Some of its objections to ‘Vatican II’ concerned matters of theology and ritual, but there were also political aspects.
French Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier was sheltered at an SSPX priory for years after going on the run to avoid prosecution for crimes against humanity
Right from the start, SSPX was tainted by well-founded allegations of antisemitism. Its founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was close to leading figures in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National. The French Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier was sheltered at an SSPX priory for years after going on the run to avoid prosecution for crimes against humanity.
SS commander Erich Priebke, responsible for the Ardeatine massacre in 1944 when 335 Italian civilians were killed, was given an SSPX funeral after he died in Rome aged 100 in 2013.
Williamson, educated at the elite public school Winchester and at Clare College, Cambridge, joined SSPX soon after his conversion to Catholicism in 1971. In 1988 he was one of four SSPX bishops illicitly consecrated by the 82-year-old Lefebvre.
Sometimes these were almost comical reactionary rants, for example arguing that women should never wear trousers
Shunned even by many who shared his antisemitism and his bitter opposition to everything Pope Francis stands for, Williamson spent his final years in Margate, but still had a worldwide audience online and never stopped trying to build his faction. He became known for inserting extreme political views into his sermons and articles. Sometimes these were almost comical reactionary rants, for example arguing that women should never wear trousers. But increasingly Williamson’s obsession with Jews came to the fore.
Convicted of Holocaust denial
In 2009, just after the Vatican had lifted the excommunication of Williamson and other SSPX dissidents, and was discussing a possible reconciliation with the Society, Swedish television aired an interview with Williamson in which he repeated Holocaust-denying statements that he had made previously in the USA and Argentina.
This led to the bishop being removed from his post at SSPX’s Argentine seminary, and to his conviction in German courts for Holocaust denial.
Williamson’s subsequent refusal to cooperate with the SSPX leadership and his confrontational approach to these criminal trials led to his ostracism by Lefebvre’s successor as SSPX head, Bishop Bernard Fellay. For a while Williamson was represented by Germany’s best known nazi lawyer Wolfram Nahrath, former leader of the banned Wiking Jugend that was modelled on the Hitler Youth.
Bad company
Williamson also became close to some of the UK’s leading antisemites, including Lady Michèle Renouf, and addressed neo-nazi conferences in London and Germany.
Renouf made a video of Williamson soon after his 80th birthday, meeting at her Kensington flat with convicted Holocaust denier Jürgen Graf. Nazi lawyer Nahrath also came to London for the bishop’s 80th birthday party.
Williamson’s funeral was held at Westgate Hall in Canterbury after SSPX refused permission for a ceremony at any of their premises, and it was conducted by Bishop Paul Morgan, who left SSPX as part of Williamson’s faction and was consecrated a bishop by him in 2023. Reporting was heavily restricted; no filming or photography was allowed, other than by one approved photographer.
But one attendee let the cat out of the bag when he wrote on a traditional Catholic online forum that it was attended by Roberto Fiore, leader of the tiny Italian fascist party Forza Nuova. This came as no surprise to us.
Sixteen years ago, when Williamson was expelled from Argentina due to visa irregularities and Jew-baiting, Fiore’s London representatives organised security and accommodation for him. The bishop was met at Heathrow Airport by professional minders hired by Michael Fishwick, a former member of the National Front directorate, who is Fiore’s main political ally in London.
Fiore, now 65, has been well-known to Searchlight readers for more than forty years. We exposed how he led a group of neo-fascist fanatics who fled Italy after the terrorist bombing of Bologna railway station killed 85 people in August 1980.
This was at that time Europe’s worst ever terrorist atrocity. Fiore was a leading activist in Terza Posizione, which the Italian authorities viewed as a front for the ‘Armed Revolutionary Nuclei’ (NAR), whose members carried out the Bologna bombing.
Terrorists walk the streets of London
After weapons and explosives were found in a raid on the party’s offices, Fiore and many of his fellow activists escaped to the UK, where they were given shelter by Steve Brady (then international officer of the neo-nazi League of St George) and the printer, forger, and international far right fixer Tony Hancock.
Fiore and other members of the fugitive gang in London were eventually convicted of terrorist offences, though not of involvement in the Bologna atrocity.
Soon after his arrival, Fiore and his business and political partner Massimo Morsello began building a business and property empire in London, and extending their influence within the National Front. After a disappointing General Election result in 1979, the NF was already fragmenting. Fiore and Morsello became the financial and organisational muscle behind a ‘radical’ faction combining extreme antisemitism and a fondness for Third World dictators such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.
While older fanatics on the British far right worshipped either Sir Oswald Mosley or Adolf Hitler, Fiore’s ‘radicals’ admired and promoted more obscure mid-century murderers and hatemongers
While older fanatics on the British far right worshipped either Sir Oswald Mosley or Adolf Hitler (or both), Fiore’s ‘radicals’ admired and promoted more obscure mid-century murderers and hatemongers such as the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu.
Codreanu’s symbol, the Archangel Michael’s Cross, was inscribed on the weapons used during two recent terrorist mass murders, Branton Tarrant’s shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Payton Gendron’s shootings at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
Seeking backing from Gaddafi’s regime
After forcing out the NF’s long-serving national organiser Martin Webster in 1983, Fiore’s faction incited a further split in 1986, eventually forming the International Third Position, sometimes known as the “cadre faction”, or by its enemies as the “Gaddafi Front”. Two of its leaders, Nick Griffin and Derek Holland, even travelled to Libya seeking financial backing from Gaddafi’s regime.
The Fiore faction’s plotting coincided with continuing efforts by traditionalist Catholics to influence the NF and other far right groups. Two of the most prominent NF activists of the ‘80s converted to Catholicism, but ended up in opposing factions.
Derek Holland, a former Trotskyist, was considered weird and fanatical even by NF standards
Derek Holland, a former Trotskyist, was considered weird and fanatical even by NF standards. He ended up with Fiore’s faction and later lived in Rome, before moving to Ireland where he still lives. Little has been heard of Holland for many years, but he is understood to have remained loyal both to Fiore’s politics and to Bishop Williamson’s version of schismatic Catholicism.
The other most famous NF Catholic convert, Joe Pearce, former editor of the party’s thuggish youth newspaper Bulldog, took a different direction. Though courted by Fiore, he joined the rival ‘Flag Group’ faction of the NF. After a spell in prison, he turned to conservative Catholic academia in the USA, but avoided the SSPX.
Europe-wide network
Fiore’s faction has not for years had a formal political group in the UK, but the Forza Nuova godfather has a Europe-wide network of allied parties, who have increasingly followed a pro-Moscow line. Fiore and friends were especially keen to support Russia’s allies in the murderous Assad dictatorship that ruled Syria until being overthrown last December.
Today, Fiore’s best known British ally is Nick Griffin, who regularly attends Fiore-backed conferences and used to travel to Syria to meet Assad’s henchmen.
But with Griffin increasingly irrelevant, a more important and literal legacy of Fiore’s NF days is his alleged control of charitable trusts that inherited a substantial property in Hampshire. Liss House was left to the Fiore-linked “St George Educational Trust” by the veteran fascist Rosine de Bounevialle, former political secretary to the NF’s founding chairman A.K. Chesterton.
In 2020-21 Liss House was sold for £800,000. .
Home is where the hate is
Since October 2022 the Charity Commission has been carrying out an inquiry into the St George Educational Trust. The last documents submitted before this inquiry began showed that Fiore’s ally Michael Fishwick (the former National Front official who organised Bishop Williamson’s arrival at Heathrow Airport after his expulsion from Argentina) was one of its three trustees.
The entire affair has caused fierce dissension within what was once Fiore’s faction because Colin Todd, a leading ITP official who lived at Liss House and looked after de Bounevialle in her declining years, was forced out of the property. After a long dispute, Todd accepted a cash settlement which he promptly converted into alcohol consumption.
Todd accepted a cash settlement which he promptly converted into alcohol consumption
But whatever his many faults, Todd has at least tried to carry on de Bounevialle’s work, producing irregular and low-quality publications including Candour, a relic of the journal once edited by Chesterton and de Bounevialle.
Fiore and Fishwick on the other hand don’t seem to do any political work in the UK, though the Charity Commission is still seeking to determine whether the charity’s funds have been used illicitly for political purposes. HMRC have also in the recent past taken a close interest in the trust’s affairs.
Poisonous antisemitic rhetoric
Even if the old ITP have (apart from Todd) given up on UK political activism, Bishop Williamson wasn’t short of admirers for his brand of poisonous antisemitic rhetoric. Among those paying tribute on X after Williamson’s death was Nick Scanlon, who in just a few years has meandered around the British far right joining numerous groups, including last year as London mayoral candidate for Britain First.
In that election, Scanlon had the distinction of finishing behind a joke candidate called Count Binface, not an obscure aristocrat but a joke candidate who wears a dustbin on his head.
Perhaps he never recovered from that humiliation, or perhaps he was sick of pretending to be concerned only about “Islamic extremism” when he is really a racist and fascist.
Whatever the reason, Scanlon has now jumped ship to the Homeland Party, the breakaway from Patriotic Alternative, led by former Scottish BNP organiser Kenny Smith.
Every nazi’s favourite Bishop
Scanlon’s enthusiasm for every nazi’s favourite Bishop might be fine with Smith, a former follower of jackbooted BNP führer John Tyndall. After all, according to his former ally Mark Collett, Smith has a swastika tattooed on his chest. But public tributes to a notorious antisemite might not go down so well with Homeland’s self-styled pro-Israel recruits such as former UKIP “intellectual” Pete North, or with the fogeyish ex-Tories Smith is trying to attract.
One lesson from Richard Williamson’s life and death is that the far right’s poisoned arrows are often turned on each other.
You can find an earlier, detailed investigation into Williamson and his far-right traditional Catholic supporters here.
