Hotel's horror at being duped into hosting 'notorious neo-Nazi' and far right conference

A hotel manager has spoken of her shock after discovering that a room hired out to host a party for armed forces veterans was actually staging a far-right conference. It was an event that even ended up with baseball bat-carrying security guards on the door.

The Samlesbury Hotel near Preston unwittingly ended up as the venue for the annual gathering of self-styled “racial nationalist” group Heritage and Destiny earlier this month – with police ultimately being called to bring the event to an end. The organisation – whose magazine is edited in Preston – had told those travelling to the private function to meet at “redirection points” in the city, as the location was not publicised in advance.

On the group’s yearly get-together on September 9, attendees were coming together to commemorate figures like the 1930s founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the late ‘White power’ musician, Ian Stuart Donaldson. Neither that itinerary nor the list of speakers at the event – which it has since emerged included a Spanish neo-Nazi who is banned from Germany – was known to management or staff at the highly-rated Samlesbury Hotel, one of its senior managers has said.

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The independently-run venue, on Preston New Road, had reserved a conference room in good faith for a purported reunion party for veterans. That had led the hotel’s operations manager to expect guests wearing poppies – not bearing baseball bats, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has revealed.

Liz [who did not want to give her surname] told the LDRS