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A senior BNP leader with a strong chance of winning a seat in the London Assembly next month has written that rape is a "myth" and that "some women are like gongs - they need to be struck regularly."

The Standard can reveal that Nick Eriksen, the BNP's London organiser and the second-highest candidate on its list for the Assembly, is the author of "Sir John Bull," a notorious far-Right blog which has regularly advocated hatred and abuse against women. The disclosure will be a serious blow to the BNP's hopes of London electoral success.

On 24 August 2005, Mr Eriksen wrote: "I've never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth machine into believing that rape is such a serious crime ... Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal.

"To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that forcefeeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched.

"The demonisation of rape is all part of the feminazi desire to obtain power and mastery over men. Men who go along with the rape myth are either morons or traitors."

On 5 November 2005, in an item entitled "Give her a slap!," Mr Eriksen approvingly quoted Noel Coward as saying: "Some women are like gongs - they need to be struck regularly." On 8 November, he claimed that "the vast majority of domestic [assaults] are initiated by the woman." Mr Eriksen also wrote on 24 November 2005 that mothers "should never go out to work" and described career women as "unnatural and vile... it is a strange kind of woman who would want to invest [her] energies into her job rather than into a man."

Eleven of the 25 Assembly members are elected on a London-wide basis using a form of proportional representation. The BNP is likely to win at least one of these seats, for which it needs around five per cent of the vote, and has strong hopes of winning a second, for which it needs around seven to eight per cent. If the BNP does win two seats, one of them will go to Mr Eriksen and one to London party leader Richard Barnbrook.

Gerry Gable, publisher of the antifascist magazine Searchlight, said: "It is horrifying, and an amazing indictment of the BNP, that someone with these views could be elected to the London Assembly. What is his attitude going to be to his women constituents?"

The author of the Sir John Bull blog, which stopped publication last autumn, is not identified on the website itself. But the Standard established that it is Mr Eriksen by posing as a BNP sympathiser and sending a message to the site's contact email address, johnbull@englandmail.com.

Within two days, Mr Eriksen replied, signing his name, giving Mr Barnbrook's contact number and saying: "As for your kind comments about the blog, I may well restart this after the elections - we shall see what happens! All the best, Nick."

Contacted by the Standard last night, Mr Eriksen admitted the blog postings were written by him, but said they were "deliberately provocative" in order to stimulate debate.

"I was trying to make the point that there are two kinds of rape," he said. "There is stranger rape and there is so-called rape by somebody the woman knows. I was raising an important issue in a provocative way to allow people to make up their own minds."

Mr Eriksen insisted that he "did not condone violence in any way," but was "trying to highlight the fact that violence against men is unacceptable." He said: "It's typical of the media to distort what the BNP say."

Mr Eriksen, a former Tory councillor and ex-civil servant at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport who lives in Richmond, says he will not resign. If he and Mr Barnbrook are elected, BNP leader Nick Griffin says the party will be invited on the BBC's Question Time.