Revealed: Yorkshire Tory council hopeful once shared stage with Enoch Powell
Anthony Murphy was kicked out of the local Conservative party in 1989 after handing out anti-immigration leaflets warning of a ‘civil war’ in Bradford
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A Tory candidate in next week’s local elections once shared a platform with Enoch Powell and was turfed out of the local party after handing out an anti-immigration pamphlet referring to “civil war” in Bradford, Hyphen can reveal.
Anthony Murphy, a candidate for the Duchy ward in the newly formed Harrogate town council, hopes to be elected councillor on 1 May.
But concerns have now been raised about his suitability for public office, and the Conservative party’s vetting processes, following revelations about his past.
In a photograph newly uncovered by this website, Murphy is seated next to Powell at a table adorned with a Union Jack, watching the infamous far-right politician as he delivers a speech on 22 April 1989 — two decades after his inflammatory “rivers of blood” address, in which Powell claimed that “in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. Powell was kicked out of Edward Heath’s Conservative shadow cabinet over the 1968 speech.
The photo, originally published in the Telegraph & Argus, a Bradford daily, shows Powell addressing a public meeting in Ilkley organised by the Yorkshire Monday Club, a rightwing pressure group that Murphy chaired, while Murphy looks on.
Murphy himself had already been booted out of the Tory party — where he had been treasurer of the Bradford South branch — earlier in 1989 after handing out leaflets in Bradford city centre calling for an end to immigration.
At the time, as now, Bradford was home to a significant Muslim and South Asian population, recalled Robert Schopen, a former local government reporter at the Telegraph & Argus who covered the leafleting row at the time.
Community tensions were heightened amid Muslim protests in Bradford over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses and a row over a local headteacher’s criticism of multiculturalism.
But more generally, said Schopen, such scandals were exceptions. “I suppose it was attempting to try and cash in or create that division,” he said of the leaflet.
A Telegraph & Argus report from the time features a photograph of a young Murphy posing with the offending pamphlet, headed “Civil War in Bradford?”.
Murphy, then 24 and an office manager for the Yorkshire Post newspaper in Bradford, had outraged local moderate Tories with the leaflets. Council leader Eric Pickles — a future government minister — told the local paper: “The Monday Club has nothing to do with the Conservative party and it does not reflect the views of the Bradford Conservative group.”
According to The Pickles Papers, a book by local historian Tony Grogan published in 1989 that chronicled Pickles’s own controversial leadership of the council, the leaflets “demanded an end to immigration” and used press cuttings “to raise the fear that the Asian community would pursue their concerns through violent means”.
Pickles was likely to have been instrumental in getting Murphy kicked out of the Bradford party, believes Schopen. The Conservatives, he said, had made gains in working-class areas such as Bradford South but still needed to appeal to Asian voters across the city, which the row risked jeopardising.
During a Bradford town council debate in February 1989, members of all parties slammed the leaflets as “disgusting, distasteful and racist”, the Telegraph & Argus reported at the time.
But the following month, Murphy hit back and was quoted as saying: “I find it almost beyond belief that any Conservative could be disturbed at all by so tame a leaflet, let alone being so disturbed as to deem it worthy of wishing to throw a fellow member out of the party.”
The revelations risk further damage to Murphy’s local election bid. They come after The Stray Ferret, a local news outlet in Harrogate, revealed his history of homophobic posts on social media. Murphy told the outlet: “I have changed, and those comments could not be further away from my views now.”
In an email to Hyphen this week, Murphy said: “I am most certainly neither a homophobe nor racist, as those who know me — of all political colours and none — will attest to.”
He also said he had never been expelled from the Conservative party and had continued to attend party conferences as a full member until 1994.
Murphy’s recent career appears to have been less controversial. In 2017, he founded the Lumen Fidei Institute, which describes itself as “an association of Catholic lay people engaged in cultural and educational matters”. Its website states he is the founder and editor of the Catholic Voice newspaper, a fortnightly title printed in Ireland.
Grogan, 69, of Shipley, recalled seeing Murphy in the town in the 1980s and alleged the young man had been “mixing with out-and-out racists” at the time.
He said he’d instantly recognised Murphy when he saw his face on recent Harrogate town council election literature.
Murphy denies having met Grogan.
During his 1989 Monday Club address, Powell commented on the protests in Bradford and lobbied the government to publish “future population” statistics. Murphy, according to the Telegraph & Argus, reportedly said the Monday Club was the “radical conscience” of the Tory party, but that some local Tories appeared to have “lost their backbone”.
Zahed Amanullah, a senior fellow at counter-extremism thinktank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and a prominent member of Harrogate’s Muslim community, said he was unsurprised that someone who had once been expelled from the Tories for his apparent views on immigration was now running for office with the same party. “The way the current debate has been framed on the right between Reform and Conservative, you are going to have people who have had associations with divisive public figures or divisive politics being drawn into the political scene, because that’s the centre of gravity on the right,” he said. “The anti-immigration thing works — it gets people elected.”
Amanullah, a Harrogate Radio presenter, added: “Based on a decade of living here, people in Harrogate are very open-minded, very welcoming. They’re very understanding and they don’t take kindly to people trying to import negative views about their neighbours.
“The most support that we’ve ever had was when external parties tried to sabotage our effort to have a mosque — and that’s when everyone rallied around us, because they took great offence at outsiders trying to stir up hatred.”
The Conservative party did not respond to requests for comment.
Editor’s note: this story has been updated to include a response to the allegations from Anthony Murphy, and to clarify that his expulsion was from the local Conservative party in Bradford.
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