Irving pins cash hopes on lecture tour in US

The disgraced historian David Irving is planning a trip to America where he and other Holocaust deniers will address a three-day conference of right-wing supporters.

Mr Irving will be hoping that the engagement, scheduled for Cincinnati in September, will form part of a lucrative US lecture tour. The disastrous libel action has left him facing financial ruin. The action ended with Mr Justice Gray ruling at the High Court in London that Mr Irving was anti-Semitic and racist and "manipulated historical evidence" to suit his pro-Nazi beliefs.

The judge's words will ensure Mr Irving is regarded as a pariah in the world of publishing, with no prospect offuture major book contracts.

Faced with a bill for costs of £2m, his sources of income would seem to be largely limited to giving talks to those who sympathise with his ideologies.

Mr Irving claimed yesterday to have had 322 e-mails of support despite the damning judgment. He maintains that a mailing list of 5,400 international backers - mostly from the US - have made donations of between $2 and $80,000 to a "fighting fund" worth a total of $500,000 (£340,000).

But the historian admits his unsuccessful attempt to sue the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and the publisher Penguin Books for describing him as a Holocaust denier leaves him facing financial "wipe-out".