The BNP leader Nick Griffin appears to have made a first attempt at launching himself into a career as a TV chef, with what threatens to be the first of many cookery programmes on BNP TV.

Dressed in a Help for Heroes rugby shirt and standing in his home kitchen, Mr Griffin talks the viewer through his recipe for a beef stew, in a video posted to YouTube entitled “Recipe for beating the Tory blues”.

The fledgling presenter, who last week filed for bankruptcy, explains that he wants to provide simple, cheap recipe ideas to BNP members who have told him “their wives can’t afford to put enough decent food on the table”. He nonetheless adds the caveat that “we’ve not done this before”.

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Apologising to those who already know how to do a bit of cooking, Mr Griffin gets down to the basics with advice such as “different things make different times to cook”, “do take the tin foil off your stock cubes” and – when peeling an onion – “get rid of the outside stuff you obviously don’t want to eat”.

Early on Mr Griffin admits that normally “BNP TV does politics not cookery”, and while working with his “British stewing steak” and “British white potatoes” the politician cannot help but throw in a couple of asides on matters of personal interest.

“English cookery actually for centuries was the best in Europe,” he says at one point. “It only became very simple after the Hanoverians came over from Germany.

“Incidentally, the word ‘curry’ first appears from a cookery book during the reign of, I think it’s Richard II, 13th century,” he adds. “So don’t let people tell you that you have to have huge numbers of immigrants to have good cooking.”

He goes on: “We’ve got a Mexican restaurant in a town not far from here. The place isn’t swamped with Mexicans. You take the recipe – that’s really all you need.”

In scenes very loosely reminiscent of the end of a Nigella Lawson cookery programme, Mr Griffin ends the programme by serving up the dish to what appear to be friends, family and fellow BNP members. He ends by asking for “serious constructive criticisms” of his “good, standard, traditional British fare”.

Watch the full video below: