NICK GRIFFIN'S father Edgar, a former Suffolk councillor, said today he was 'incredibly proud' of his son and all that he has achieved in his time as leader of the British National Party.

NICK GRIFFIN'S father Edgar, a former Suffolk councillor, said today he was 'incredibly proud' of his son and all that he has achieved in his time as leader of the British National Party.

'He is the only party leader in Britain who has the courage to try to save the country from mass immigration,' said Mr Griffin, who now lives in Montgomeryshire in mid Wales.

'I don't know if I will watch his ground breaking appearance on tonight's Question Time, because I have a busy schedule,' said Mr Griffin, who recently celebrated his 88th birthday.

'However I will be taping the BBC programme and I know that the public will be watching. It is an opportunity to expose the terrible lies uttered by the other political parties against the BNP in general and Nick in particular.'Mr Griffin, who moved to Suffolk shortly after Nick was born, joined the Conservative Party when he returned from two years national service with the RAF in India.

He recalled: 'The Labour government of Clement Atlee between 1945 and 1951 brought our country to bankruptcy and I felt I had to do all I could to ensure that this country had a Conservative government to get this country back on its feet.'

The family moved to near Halesworth in Suffolk in the 1960s, and Nick Griffin attended the fee-paying Woodbridge School and St Felix College in Southwold before going on to Downing College, Cambridge, where he was a boxing blue and graduated in history and law.

Mr Griffin senior was elected as a Conservative councillor for Waveney district. He was a vice-chairman of Iain Duncan Smith's party leadership campaign in 2001, but he was sacked and eventually expelled after his links with the BNP were exposed.

'The BNP gets dreadful lies told about it,' said Mr Griffin. 'It is disgraceful to suggest that BNP activists go around beating up black people, but that is what is said on the television.'