frustrated at both the lack of political activity and the links to the Conservative Party that were the hallmarks of the LEL, and so left in 1957 to set up the National Labour Party with Fountaine. Fountaine, a Norfolk landowner from a rural landowning family, was officially President of the new group, but was largely a figurehead: control actually lay with Bean. The NLP gained a few minor results in elections, but was always destined to be a small fringe movement, and as a result Bean decided to merge his party with another LEL splinter group, the White Defence League, in 1960 to form the British National Party. Bean was made leader of the party upon its foundation. Early in the group's life, both Bean and former White Defence League leader Colin Jordan were approached by Oswald Mosley, who offered them roles in his Union Movement if they agreed to its subsuming the BNP, but both men rejected the offer. Initially gaining some support in London, the party soon ran into trouble when it became clear that Colin Jordan was emerging as its spokesman. A journalist commented in 1962 that Jordan was becoming the British Adolf Hitler. Bean jokingly responded to the Daily Mail reporter that that made him "the British Joseph Goebbels". Despite this, Bean soon clashed with Jordan over his extremism and before long Jordan had left to form the National Socialist Movement, taking emerging figures John Tyndall and Denis Pirie with him. Matters had come to a head at the party's national council meeting in 1962 when Bean proposed a motion to condemn Jordan's open support for Nazism. It was passed 7 to 5, but the party immediately split as a result, albeit with around 80% of the membership remaining within the BNP. Bean had blamed the associations with Nazism that Jordan and Tyndall brought for the party's marginal position in British politics. At the 1964 general election Bean stood as BNP candidate in Southall and obtained 3,410 votes (9.3%), the highest post-war vote for a minority party at that time. Another BNP candidate picked up nearly 2,000 votes in Deptford. In 1966 he again stood in Southall but his vote fell to 2,600. With BNP membership only marginally increasing, Bean felt the need to try to create a nationalist front with like groups and arranged, with the help of Ted Budden, a private meeting with his