quote:
Barnbrook, 47, has been married for the past ten years to a well-educated young American who is a decorated, serving officer in the Metropolitan Police force. Not only that, she has several prominent black friends, including the TV presenter Moira Stuart, and loathes her husband's Far Right ideology.
Their marriage broke down because of his "rotten politics". She joined the police force, she says, to do some good in the world and, in part, to make amends for him.
Little wonder, then, that Barnbrook has been so reluctant to volunteer her existence. Now, though, we can shed some light on the strange private life of Richard Barnbrook.
Certainly, if there is a more peculiar politician in the country, he has yet to emerge.
In public, Barnbrook has long favoured what one acquaintance calls a "Stormtrooper" brown suit and matching tie, which even his supporters feel is rather too suggestive of a Nuremberg rally for his electoral good.
"He looks just like Hitler," one person posted on the extreme Right-wing Stormfront website. "Whoever styles him needs a good kicking."
Barnbrook's time in this liberal artistic milieu will always be remembered for his writing and directorship of the 58-minute film HMS Discovery: A Love Story which archives describe as "Marxist Gay cinema".
Naked young men run about, flagellating each other and simulating gay sex acts while homo-erotic poetry is intoned.
Barnbrook, for whom the 1989 piece is an embarrassment among the homophobic Far Right, huffily insists it was an "art film".
Several years after its release he met a young American woman and surely dispelled any of those silly rumours.
She was a wealthy doctor's daughter 13 years his junior who had moved to Britain because, she says: "I didn't agree with U.S. foreign policy."
I met her yesterday, bleary with fatigue having finished her inner-city police shift at 4am. She has reverted to using her maiden name, and cannot be identified because of her job.
She is appalled at the possibility of being recognised as the London BNP leader's wife.
"I was 22 and I fell for him because I thought he was a great artist," she says. "He was different then."
They married a year later, in early 1998, at Lewisham register office. The couple set up home in South-East London and she joined the BBC, as an editorial assistant on Breakfast Time.
Alas, there were few happy times ahead for her. "Richard changed around 1999," she recalls. "That was when his views became very extreme. It was a total shock.
"Marriage means an awful lot to me, so I didn't want to walk away though I hated (their) rotten politics. I stuck with him because I thought I could persuade him otherwise. I thought that if he could change once, he could change a second time."
The Barnbrooks separated four years ago. His wife says: "In the end he said: 'If you don't like my politics you can get out.' So that is what I did.
She adds: "He used me and he has admitted it and apologised. He owes me a lot of money and is just starting to pay me back."
In the next few weeks, perhaps even days, the Barnbrook marriage will finally come to an end when their divorce is made absolute.
"I don't really have any problem with Richard saying he is engaged," she says. "Our divorce is so close now I can almost smell it. I can hardly wait.
"Let's just say that if Simone Clarke buys her wedding cake now, it won't be stale if she marries Richard at the first possible opportunity."
Ah yes, Miss Clarke - the principal ballerina who is said to be Barnbrook's fiancÈe. If his first marriage was dysfunctional, then the omens for Barnbook's second one are hardly more encouraging.
Not least as he will become stepfather to Miss Clarke's four-year-old mixed-race daughter - the product of her previous relationship with a Cuban-Chinese dancer - despite the fact that he has previously spoken out against inter-racial families.
But will the marriage to Miss Clarke take place? There has been talk in Far Right circles of a recent cooling between the couple.
She does not wear an engagement ring - an absence Barnbrook explained by saying it had been stolen in a burglary.
Some have even speculated that the relationship is just a publicity stunt. But Barnbrook's wife does not think so.
"I have met Simone. She was there when I went to see Richard to discuss our divorce. I have to say they did seem to be genuinely in love."
If that's true, then Miss Clarke will hardly have been delighted by the kiss-and-tell story which appeared in a downmarket newspaper-on Sunday.
Finnish-born NHS nurse Annika Tavilampi claimed the mayoral candidate had also proposed to her after they met through an internet dating site. She claimed to have found a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf under the bed in which they had "romped".