A FORMER British National Party (BNP) election candidate plotted to make bombs because he predicted a civil war between Asians and white people, a court heard.

The wife of Robert Cottage, 49, from Talbot Street, Colne, said her husband's involvement with the BNP had made him "really radical" and destroyed their marriage.

"He just lost the plot, he just started acting really strange," Kerena Cottage, 29, told the jury at Manchester Crown Court.

"What he was saying, it sounded to me as if he was delusional."

She said: "He thinks there's a war going to happen with the culture, the Asian culture and the white culture and that Tony Blair and President Bush are scheming against people.

"Our relationship before the BNP, it was brilliant," she added.

Giving evidence via a videolink, Mrs Cottage said her husband had become friends with BNP leader Nick Griffin during his three-year membership of the BNP.

Boxes of chemicals that could be combined to cause a dangerous explosion were found at Cottage's house, the court heard. He had bought them online in September 2006 - four months after he stood for the second time as a BNP candidate - on his co-defendant David Jackson's instructions, prosecutor Louise Blackwell QC told the jury on Monday.

Police were alerted to the men's alleged plot after Mrs Cottage, who told the court that she understood the chemicals were intended to harm the Government or anyone who came unannounced to their home, told her social worker she was scared they were going to test the chemical bombs in countryside in Preston.

Cottage and dentist Jackson, 62, of Trent Street, Nelson, who became friends at BNP meetings, both deny conspiring to cause explosions intended to endanger life.