THE BNP’s new smart suits don’t fool anybody.

Leader Nick Griffin would still look the perfect oik even if he were decked out in silk and satin. I’m glad he is not going to go to that Buckingham Palace garden party. Can’t you just imagine his conversation with the Queen? “Ah, good afternoon, Mr Griffin. And tell me, how is the rabble-rousing business these days?”

He and his loathsome party are trying to cash in, so to speak, on the MPs’ expenses scandal. I hope no one, however disgusted with mainstream MPs, will vote BNP. Last week, Mr Griffin said: “We don’t break the law. We never will, you know, on financial things. Don’t mind breaking the odd race law, or being accused of it, you know, inadvertently.”

So, he’s lost none of his charm.

But here’s a strange thing: the Church of England has banned clergy from voting BNP.

Very few would vote for the fascists anyway, but it’s outrageous that the hierarchy should try to instruct its priests in the matter.

Priests are installed in their parishes because the Church deems them morally competent.

It would be a strange business if the bishops were to appoint people they considered morally incompetent. And no morally competent person would vote BNP.

The BNP are a bunch of thugs and louts, but they are never going to get the votes of anyone beyond the lunatic fringe. Two or three seats here and there is the most they can ever hope for. It’s rather tiresome, then, to see the bishops, the BBC and much of the press comparing this nasty, squalid, shambolic outfit to the Nazi party of the 1930s – a drilled national party with fervent support from a large section of the German people.

Actually, the BNP loves to be likened to its heroes, the Nazis, but National Socialists have never done well in British politics and there is no sign they are about to change that.

The ban on voting BNP reveals the bishops’ mindset, though. If they had wanted to instruct the clergy not to vote for a really dangerous party, why did they never demand that no parson should vote for the Communist Party? For 70 years after the Russian revolution of 1917, the British Communist Party actively supported enemies of our country.

For this, it received large amounts of foreign money, mainly from the USSR.

The Communists had an ideology just as repulsive as Hitler’s – and they were more successful at putting it into practice. It is generally agreed that Hitler exterminated about six million people, mainly Jews. Horrific and appalling as that slaughter was, it amounted to only a fraction of Stalin’s genocides.

The Russian dictator is reckoned to have murdered more than 40 million in a campaign of terror he ran from the moment he came to power. He imprisoned further millions in the camps of the gulag, yet the bishops never issued a ban on voting Communist.

There was even a rabid Communist in the church hierarchy: the so-called “Red Dean”, Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Manchester, later promoted to Canterbury. For his unstinting support of the Soviet Union, he was awarded the Joseph Stalin Peace Prize in 1951. The Stalin Peace Prize? You might as well imagine the George Best Medal for Sobriety.

The Church of England has long hated Conservatives while waxing sentimental over international communism. George Orwell had a phrase for such hypocrisy: “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.