Two of Leicestershire's new county councillors have made local political history – but for radically different reasons. Adam Wakelin meets them.

Councillor Jewel Miah is the son of a Bangladeshi immigrant and has just become the first Asian to win a county council seat in more than a decade.

There were a few snakes in the stomach as the returning officer cleared his throat to read out the result of Loughborough East. Jewel Miah, smiling the slightly vacant smile candidates always wear on such occasions, knew he was on the brink of something special, something quietly momentous.

In the next minute or so, Jewel could become the first Asian to win a seat on Leicestershire County Council since the authority parted company with the city in 1997.

Holding Loughborough East for Labour would be some achievement on a day when his party's losses came in with thumping monotony.

So there he stood, brave face at the ready, thinking what his dad might be thinking if he were here to see his son today.

"He passed away when I was 17," says Jewel, reflecting on the events of last Friday. "All my brothers and sisters were really young and I was trying to do my A-levels.

"It was a tough time, especially for our mum. She became a single parent trying to bring us all up on her own."

The stoical face would not be needed. Jewel would buck the odds. He would win. Comfortably. Polling more than twice as many votes as the next candidate.

As a dad of two young children himself, Jewel knows how much that would have meant to his father.

"He would have been very proud, I'm sure," he says. "We've come a long way to get to here."

Lefas Miah arrived in Loughborough East in the 1960s with little in his luggage except ambition.

Mr Miah came here from Bangladesh to build a better tomorrow. He lived on top of 10 other immigrants in cramped little house in Freehold Street. Half of them worked day-shifts in the nearby textile mills, the other half did nights. That was the only way everybody could have a bed.

Not everyone welcomed Mr Miah and his friends with open arms.

By the time he could afford for three-year-old Jewel and his mother to come over from Bangladesh, Swastikas had started appearing on walls. The National Front were on the march, demanding an "England for the English". Restless locals fearing for their jobs as a recession began to bite were in a mutinous mood.

The late 70s were an ugly time in this country's history and a difficult place to begin your growing up for anyone with a brown or black skin.

Now, just a generation later, Jewel is an elected county councillor – the overwhelming people's choice in an election where pinning yourself to a red rosette was almost political suicide.

That feels like progress. At least it would do if the hand of history hadn't also settled on a BNP candidate's shoulder last Friday.

As much as Jewel wants to look forward, he can't help hearing echoes of fear and loathing from the past. The ugly nationalism of an "England for the English" is back, and this time it has a political platform.

Jewel will shake Graham Partner's hand if it is offered when the two meet at County Hall, because he's a "polite kind of person".

The grip and grimace, if it happens, will probably be fleeting and perfunctory.

"I have nothing against anyone," says Jewel. "It's the policies I'm sceptical about.

"I feel very, very uncomfortable with the BNP winning a seat. I represent a very diverse region.

"People from several parts of the world live here now and call it home.

"Asylum seekers are being demonised now. Ten years ago, it was just immigrants. I think they are picking on asylum seekers because they want to be more mainstream. The core message hasn't changed

"Everybody should have the same rights as everybody else. I've read their literature and it says the indigenous people of the United Kingdom are second-class citizens. That's not true.

"People talk about spin and, yes, the major parties are guilty of it, but so are the BNP.

"I've got nothing against anyone, but I don't want to see anyone disappear from this country."

Thirty-four-year-old Jewel and his family are the kind of people whose lives are never bullet-pointed on a BNP leaflet:

Proud immigrant roots.

State schools.

University educations.

Worked hard.

Doing very well.

Good jobs.

Proud of Britain and their contributions to it.

What this country's really all about.

"We've all done pretty well for ourselves," says Jewel, an estate and letting agent and financial adviser. "I think Dad would be pretty pleased with us.

"I'm happy and proud to be someone from a BME (black and ethnic minority) background that has made it on to the county council.

"But I'm not just there for the BME. I'm there for everybody, whatever their background. I hope everybody else on the council will be the same."

It's tempting to present Graham and Jewel polar opposites, the yin and yang of last week's elections: fear versus hope, exclusion versus inclusion, division versus diversity, nasty versus nice.

The reality is probably a bit less black and white.

Both men say they are committed to their local communities and both have demonstrated a willful streak which refuses to slavishly tow the party line.

Jewel, a card-carrying Labour supporter since the age of 18, resigned from the party in 2002 in protest over the war in Iraq.

He climbed into bed with the Liberal Democrats and even stood for the party in Loughborough East in four years ago.

"I didn't agree with going into Iraq and I think the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction proved me right," he says.

"I've always been active in the community and I had an approach from the Lib Dems to join them. Sometimes you make mistakes in life and you have to hold your hands up. I was just a paper candidate in 2005.

"The Lib Dem policies weren't for me. They weren't what I believed in, so I rejoined Labour."

Last Friday was dire for Labour, the worst week since the week before that for a party skewered by division, expenses scandals, an unpopular leader and a serious recession.

No-one could have been too surprised at the scale of the party's devastation as the results began to roll in from draughty sports halls across the county.

Only one area managed to hold out, Loughborough.

So how did it remain an island of red – just one seat lost – against a tidal wave of Tory blue?

Jewel believes his success was underpinned by years of hard work for local community groups.

When he appeared on doorsteps voters gave him both barrels for Labour's failings nationally, but they didn't hold him personally responsible. They believed he was a fundamentally decent bloke who lived locally and had exactly the same concerns as them. That's why they turned out to support him.

"People know me, they know what I'm all about," he says.

"I live in one of the most disadvantaged wards in the whole of Leicestershire. I told them I would speak for them, and that the poor and disadvantaged should be given priority.

"What we need now is unity in the party. I think the economy is beginning to level off now and low interest rates are helping a lot of people.

"Gordon Brown is the man to lead us into an election in 11 months time and, hopefully, things should be picking up by then.

"I'd like to think the success of the BNP is a short-term thing. Everything has got on top of everybody at the moment, but things will get better. I'm hoping so, anyway."

****************

Councillor Graham Partner is from Whitwick, and has just become the first member of the British National Party to be elected to the county council.

Everyone likes to be liked, so it can't be easy feeling bullied, betrayed and despised. "Just put a picture of a monster in your paper," says Graham Partner. "I'm a monster. That's what lots of people think."

Leicestershire's first BNP county councillor is not a monster. Misguided maybe, deluded perhaps, but monstrous? Not in this interview.

There might even be something admirable about a politician who says what he really thinks, whether you want to hear it or not.

I've got a grudging respect for that, even though his party wants to pay people like my brown-skinned wife thousands of pounds to go home.

Suits me. It's only a couple of quid on the bus to Rowlatts Hill.

It's easy to laugh at the BNP and its cretinous polices of racial purity and repatriation.

No-one was laughing at them a week last Friday, though, were they?

Last weekend, the laughter turned to jeers as Graham claimed Coalville for the far right.

"I didn't mind the boos," he says. "That was the Liberal Democrat crowd, the great unwashed.

"I don't take any notice. People come up to me in the street and say 'I don't want you'. I say, 'Fair enough. Don't vote for me'."

It's easy to lose touch with objectivity in an interview like this. There's a temptation to tell it like it is, sod professional detachment and start piling in to a party led by a Holocaust denier.

So it comes to pass. It's not long before one of us is calling Nick Griffin a "prat" and questioning the BNP's back-of-a-fag-packet economic policies.

On reflection, Graham may come to regret that.

"Griffin is a prat," he says. "It won't be the first time I've called him one. Saying that about the Holocaust is rubbish.

"Did he watch World At War, see those skeletons and think they were actors?

"He shouldn't say stupid things that he regrets, or should come out and say that's what he really believes and not deny it later. I've no empathy for him at all if he did say that."

Some of the economic policies on his party's website are "little headline-catching things", he admits – "someone from the BNP trying to think off the top of their heads"… "not that clever".

"If we ever get into government, we'll have civil servants to work out what's feasible."

This newspaper has never had much truck with extremist parties before. So why give space to Graham now?

Because he has been democratically elected to Leicestershire's most powerful authority and he will be helping to make decisions on things that impact on hundreds of thousands of lives.

The people of Coalville have spoken and we thought you might like to know a bit more about what they voted for.

For the record, Graham is 54, he has two grown-up daughters, he lives in Whitwick and he runs a drainage and plumbing business.

"My wife's gone," he says. "That's what they do when they get fed up with you."

He joined the BNP five years ago after becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Labour Party he says he voted for most of his life.

"It wasn't an overnight thing," he says. "Like everybody else, I thought the BNP was the National Front under a new name.

"I started to read the literature. I didn't agree with all of it, but I agreed with the majority. The people were nice – not what I expected."

He was elected to North West Leicestershire District Council as member for Hugglescote two years ago.

Getting on to the county council was not a complete surprise, but he is a "bit overwhelmed".

Graham likes to present himself as a reluctant politician, referring more than once to his forthcoming stint on the county as "another four-year sentence".

So why is he there?

The desire to get one over on the "great unwashed" who spent the past two years cold-shouldering him on the district council is one reason.

"My mum thought it was a Nazi thing, a fascist thing," he says. "She was a bit uneasy. I'm not a Nazi and I'm not a fascist.

"I've no idea what Hitler said or thought. I'm not interested. Hitler was a lunatic."

"I'm not saying my family support me. They're probably worried to death.

"If I wasn't in the BNP my daughters wouldn't be interested. They're not members and they don't come to meetings."

Graham sees himself as a political Joe Bloke – someone standing up for the let-down, the powerless and the discriminated against, a common man who happens to be white.

I don't recognise that person when I look in the bathroom mirror of a morning. But more than one in 10 of the Leicestershire people who took the trouble to vote last week obviously do.

Graham says he did not say anything different on his election pamphlets to what he used to say down the local to nods of agreement over a pint.

Those views are forthright and consistent with anyone aspiring to be Al Murray Pub Landlord without the laughs.

Immigration is out of control, people are coming in and taking our jobs and council houses, the Government needs to stop telling us what we can think and say and the EU is a Franco-German conspiracy to fleece Britain out of billions.

It's an "are you drinking what I'm thinking, squire?" political philosophy that has carried him all the way from the margins to two council seats.

"People supported me from what I said in my leaflets and from knowing me," he says.

A key part of his manifesto was a pledge to oppose thousands of new homes and an incinerator coming to Coalville.

"I never promised I'd stop them. I promised I'd vote against them," he says. "I told the people of Coalville I'd listen to what they wanted."

Graham insists he's not racist, even though he believes you can't call yourself English if you're black or Asian.

"English, to me, is genetic. English is Anglo Saxon. It is going back as far as you can and not knowing you've got any relatives from anywhere else.

"If I found out I'd got a great-grandfather who was Asian, I would say I'm one-16th Asian. I don't think I have."

If Graham came out with that kind of guff on our doorstep, my wife would tell him where to stick it, after she had finished laughing. So would I.

"It's not that important," he says, backtracking. "If you go back far enough we're all from Ethiopia. I was never that bothered until 'English' disappeared from the Census form.

"There's no English and I believe that is a Government policy to break us up into federal regions of the EU."

Graham has no intention of asking my wife or new Asian county councillor Jewel Miah to go anywhere. Repatriation is another stillborn BNP policy, he believes.

"That's not going to happen," he says. "I don't care what Nick Griffin says. I only believe in repatriating people if they are here illegally."

For a BNP representative, Graham seems strangely willing to distance himself from some of the party's darker statements.

So why did he join them?

"Most of the policies written down are policies I more or less agree with," he insists. "I don't think I'd have got anywhere as an independent."

If Jewel offers his hand, the new member for Coalville says he will shake it. If a black or Asian constituent comes to Graham for help, he will oblige.

"I don't consider myself a racist because racists think some people are inferior to you," he says. "I don't think that.

"Immigration is a problem because of the numbers coming in now and they're not being melted in. If they come here they should be spread around.

"I've got no highfalutin' idea of how to run the country. I think there's been a serious decline in the country and we need some different policies."