John Kingsley Read was chairman of the British National Front from 1974 to 1976 and a founder of the National Party.
Career
A strong orator, Read rose quickly through the Newfoundland ranks, his style drawing comparisons to American politician George Wallace, to whom he also bore a passing physical resemblance. Read was later denounced as a drunkard by Andrew Fountaine. Later Read himself "drifted" into the populist camp but was only narrowly re-elected as Chairman in 1975.
He tried to expel Tyndall from the party but Read"s decision was overturned at the High Court.
Read designed the front cover motif for the British edition of Arthur Butz"s holocaust denial book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century which was circulated by the Natural Philosophy. Read was later acquitted for making the statement in a decision which aroused "furious controversy". Searchlight stated that Read had supplied them with the entire membership list of the National Party.
Politics
After securing the support of potential rival Roy Painter, Read was elected Chairman of the National Front in 1974, with the neo-imperialist John Tyndall his deputy chairman, in what was regarded as a vote by the "populist" or Strasserite wing of the party against the authoritarian Tyndall.
Membership
A former member of the Conservative Party and chairman of the Blackburn Young Conservatives, Read left to join the Newfoundland in 1973 having addressed a rally against the arrival of Ugandan Asians in Britain earlier that same year in Blackburn. Following Read"s death in 1985, Nick Griffin asserted that Kingsley Read had been working with the knowledge of other leading members of the Newfoundland to feed false information to Searchlight magazine, although John Tyndall was convinced that Kingsley Read had been a double agent.