The rat speaks, and demonstrates his rattishness

David Irving, behind bars in Austria, has been interviewed by an Austrian journalist. Prison does not seem to have tamed him:

They treat him well in prison, but, Irving confides, he lacks money and equipment: 'Thank God someone sent me some ink.' Then again, when he doesn't show himself off as an innocent victim pursued by the powerful forces of what he calls the 'enemies of truth', Irving likes to show off his wealth. He may have had to sell his spacious Mayfair townhouse after losing the case against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin in 2000, but now, he boasts, he has something even better. 'We just moved into a enormous luxury flat near Downing Street. I did that deliberately in order to provoke.' Irving, it becomes abundantly clear, hates Blair, New Labour, and the multi-coloured society of today's Britain.

His lawyer is appropriate and clueless:

In the afternoon, I meet his lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, who produces a bundle of letters from his briefcase. Kresbach, a smartly dressed, formidable barrister who normally represents murderers and Mafia members, shakes his head at the incoherent and confused hate mail that has clogged his letterbox since he took over Irving's mandate. 'He doesn't understand that himself,' Kresbach says of his client. 'I think he is becoming fed up with these nutty people, too.' Kresbach maintains that his British client cannot be expected to be familiar enough with the Austrian political scene to know where the groups and societies that invited him stand politically. Irving himself claims to be ignorant of the extreme right-wing ideology of his hosts.

Irving is an educated man, and an expert on German history who gets invited to speak by groups of the same type, in the US and Europe, but, apparently, doesn't know anything about them. Indeed, the reporter shows that he's being disingenuous in the very next paragraph:

It is a claim that is hard to believe when you visit Willi Lasek in the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. A balding and softly spoken middle-aged man, the archivist looks every inch the opposite of the bullish Irving as he sits behind his desk in an office crammed to the ceiling with files. And Lasek, unlike Irving, is extraordinarily cautious with his statements. 'I cannot tell you whether Irving actively denied the holocaust recently,' he says as he picks up two bulging files labelled "David Irving" from the shelf, 'but this will show you that his contacts to the Austrian and German neo-Nazi scene go back all the way to the early 1980s.' The boxes reveal a stack of yellowed flyers announcing a 1984 Irving lecture, in which 'the courageous taboo-breaker of history' would reveal 'sensational secrets' about the Third Reich. At the bottom of the page there is a rallying call for 'solidarity with Rudolf Hess', Hitler's one-time deputy.