Meet Michèle Renouf, Britain's high society Holocaust denier
The socialite has made a name in far-right circles. But who is she really?
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Today we’ve got a story about Michèle Renouf, the doyenne of Holocaust denial who made an appearance this month at a far-right conference. If you like it, please send it on to a few friends and ask them to sign up — it’s a great way of growing our audience.
A truckie’s daughter discovers Holocaust denial
The pursuit of Holocaust denial as a career tends to preclude all but the most socially maladjusted individuals: the desperately lonely, the sufferers of chronic halitosis. The movement, such as it is, traditionally consists of the sort of Eurocreeps who are banned from within a hundred yards of their local primary school. So Holocaust deniers are proud to have among their ranks a woman of aristocratic bearing called Lady Michèle Renouf. She frequently shows up at antisemitic conferences wearing expensive jackets and elaborate necklaces to speak in a refined accent about how Judaism is “a repugnant and hateful religion”.
Renouf, who is in her mid-70s, is part of the ageing far-right scene that disputes the Holocaust’s historical record with a mixture of junk science, deliberate misinterpretation and ignorance. She champions deniers and neo-Nazis like David Irving (83), Horst Mahler (86) and Fredrick Töben (dead).
So it was interesting to see Renouf appear this month at a conference organised by Patriotic Alternative, the white nationalist organisation. PA, which is run by Mark Collett, the self-described “Nazi sympathiser”, is known for its young, internet savvy membership. The group, despite its ties to organisations like the BNP and National Action, tries hard to present itself not as a bunch of extremists but as a wholesome network that is into exercise, movie nights and camping trips in the Peak District. So how exactly does a committed Holocaust denier fit into that picture? Very neatly, as it happens.
When Renouf took the stage at PA’s event this month, Collett — who at any public occasion wears a black shirt in honour of his idol Oswald Mosley — introduced her as a “personal friend”. He gushed: “She has dedicated the last two decades of her life fighting to protect the rights and liberties of those who wish to question certain things that happened at a certain point in history.”
At this point, Collett grinned and his audience responded with knowing giggles. “In some countries you can go to jail for this, for simply questioning numbers and disputing things that have no real factual basis other than very, very spurious eyewitness testimony.”
This sounds a lot like something a Holocaust denier would say. Questioning numbers, of course, is a reference to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and spurious eyewitnesses are meant to refer to the apparent lack of evidence of genocide (this is a lie: the Holocaust left a paper trial containing thousands of official documents, and there are photographs, letters and the confessions of former Nazis to support them).
Collett’s enthusiastic introduction of Renouf says a lot about what type of organisation PA really is. Behind the photo opps of harvest festivals and cutesy stands selling paraben-free soap, this is a group that smirks at Holocaust denial, members and leaders included.
On the surface, PA’s invitation of Renouf looks like a propaganda victory. The group is trying to unite the various strands of British far-right goondom, who have traditionally spent as much time fighting each other as the immigrants they detest so much. If a high class lady like Renouf throws her lot in with PA, that must surely be a coup. But is she everything she seems?
Renouf would have you believe that she’s as establishment as it gets, the doyenne of denial from the salons of South Kensington. In fact she hails from a beach town in Australia, where a local newspaper described her as a “truckie’s daughter”. Her accent, despite its Tatler-grade cadence, still betrays a hint of Oz.
She insisted that her first husband, a Russian émigré with a tenuous connection to the Tsarist nobility, claim his ancestors’ title, even though he had gone through life happily enough as plain Daniel. So Michèle Mainwaring, a former beauty queen from New South Wales, became Countess Griaznoff. Which sounds like an update to the gag, “Oh yeah? Well I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
After splitting from the reluctant Count Griaznoff, she met Sir Frank Renouf, a financier from New Zealand. Their marriage lasted six weeks until he clocked that she was not a member of the Russian aristocracy, and dumped her on their honeymoon. A woman who marries a knight is entitled to call herself “lady”, and even though they were together barely more than a month in 1990 and split with great acrimony, she kept calling herself Lady Renouf. She’s been trading off this false image as a high society matriarch for decades.
A model and a regular on the London charity circuit, where she tried to serve pork to Jewish guests attending her events, she publicly threw her lot in with the Holocaust revisionism movement during the trial of David Irving in 2000. She supported him in court as he spectacularly lost a libel case against an American historian who accused him, accurately, of denying the Holocaust.
Ever since, Renouf has popped up at events hosted by the “intellectual” end of the far-right. There, she speaks among cranks who think that Jews invented or at least exaggerated the Holocaust to manipulate global affairs, as well as those who believe that if you can prove Auschwitz never happened, then you can rehabilitate the Nazis. Renouf appeared at a bizarre two-day Holocaust denial conference hosted in Iran in 2006 (the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Shoah “a myth” and a “a lie”). In Tehran, Renouf gave a talk titled “On Judaism”. You can guess how that went.
When she spoke at PA’s conference this month, Renouf railed against Jews using her favourite code words: “amoral neo-liberalists” and “anti-gentile globalists”. She spoke glowingly of Richie Edmonds of the BNP and quoted Enoch Powell. She invoked the principles of human biodiversity, the belief that there are immutable differences between the races that ultimately mean they should be kept separate.
Then she outlined a batshit plan to repatriate immigrants from “unproductive countries”, claiming that it is motivated not by racism but by humanitarianism: it would apparently give nations in the Global South a larger labour force with which to pull themselves out of poverty.
Detaching herself further from reality, Renouf described a future in which this convoluted scheme will happen. “Once there is bold talk of a plan for remigration, the intimidated silent majority will take it up,” she foamed. “The people themselves will advocate the plan with irresistible force, and send governments out of office if they do not comply.”
This is pure fantasy, far-right pipe-dreaming. The idea of a mass uprising taking place because the British government refuses to take part in a madcap plot to send every non-white person to their country of origin sounds like bad fiction. It’s about as real as Michèle Renouf’s titles. But when she finished speaking, the audience at PA’s conference gave her a standing ovation.