Nigel Jones is a writer, historian and journalist.
Ten years ago it would have been laughable. Even five years ago it still seemed incredible.
But now, a maximum of four years out from the next election, and with his latest party Reform UK on 35 per cent in the polls, and 15 points ahead of Labour and all other parties, friends and enemies alike have to come to serious terms with the possibility- perhaps even the likelihood- that Nigel Paul Farage will be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
I suspect that even Farage himself – and he is a betting man – would not have placed a wager on him entering No 10 as prime minister until recent months, but as Kipling wrote: “Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne / He travels farthest who travels alone”.
The Reform leader has always been a loner, and I think his eyes have always been on the next step in his extraordinary political journey rather than on the far horizons, so his sudden elevation to front runner in the 2029 prime ministerial stakes may have also surprised him.
Farage’s essential aloneness is a characteristic that he shares with Boris Johnson, the only other politician of their generation with the same charisma, and an ability to inspire love as well as hate. It is said that Johnson has no real friends but merely superficial chums, and I think the same may be true of Farage; although he has the saloon-bar matey-ness that allows strangers to happily down a pint with him, I feel that he has few or perhaps any real intimates. He may appear to wear his heart on his sleeve, but the reality is that that organ is deeply hidden from prying eyes.
Farage comes from that part of Kent that joins south-east London. Ironically for such a Eurosceptic, his unusual surname has French Huguenot refugee roots, and Nigel also has German ancestry. His second wife Kirsten is German, and his current partner Laure is French.
He hails from the suburban town of Orpington and he has stayed close to his origins, physically as well as spiritually, throughout his life. Educated at Dulwich, an ancient public school whose alumni include the writers PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, and CS Forester, Farage followed his father into the City (although Guy Farage had left his beloved mother Barbara and the family home long before, when Nigel was only five).
Farage was always a political animal; unconfirmed reports from his schooldays speak of him holding right-wing, even extreme right-wing, views, and as a Tory party member while toiling as a London metals trader in the early 1990s, he deeply disapproved of the federalist direction Europe was taking, and he left the post-Thatcher Conservatives to join an obscure pressure group called the Anti-Federalist League, founded by an eccentric academic called Alan Sked. In September 1993 eight men, including Farage, Sked, and another future UKIP leader, Gerard Batten, were the founding fathers who transformed the AFL into the United Kingdom Independence Party, with the goal of removing Britain from the EU.
That aim would remain a distant and apparently unachievable pipe dream for years while UKIP remained on the outer fringe of politics, at first playing second fiddle in the anti-EU orchestra to James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, but the EU issue was moving towards the forefront of politics during the disastrous reign of John Major, culminating in him forcing the Maastricht Treaty down the throats of his reluctant party.
Meanwhile, Farage was putting in the hard yards and learning the bitter realities of politics as he repeatedly stood for Parliament in Eastleigh and elsewhere, and just as frequently lost. All the while he was honing his political skills, and discovered that he had a natural gift as a speaker in the almost forgotten theatre of public meetings. He was also coping with the petty squabbles and faction fighting that have always afflicted UKIP and his two subsequent parties.
These came to a head in 1997 when Sked – bleating about far right infiltration of UKIP, and forecasting that the party was doomed to stay on the political fringe – resigned as leader. It took Farage time to mature his own leadership ambitions, but in 2006 after several forgettable figures had come and gone, he got his first dibs at the top job.
Patience and resilience have always been prominent among Farage’s virtues, and he certainly needed them as he morphed in the 2010s from a little known fringe figure to the most controversial and criticised politician since Thatcher. For the Left and Liberals this was the period when he changed from being the butt of their jokes into a demon king.
His rise to national prominence and his bank balance were both helped when he was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 – a place he retained until Britain left the EU in 2020. His withering attacks on the EU institution itself and the colourless ‘ damp rags’ and ‘low grade bank clerks’ who formed its officialdom won him notoriety in Brussels but hero status among the growing army of EU critics at home.
Farage’s real breakthrough came in 2013 when the steadily increasing drip of UKIP’s polling numbers forced David Cameron to lance the boil and promise the ‘fruitcakes’, ‘banging on about Europe’ the Referendum that they were demanding. Dave was entirely confident of winning the battle, but, as so often, he was entirely wrong.
These were the days when I got to meet and observe Nigel as a UKIP Europe and Westminster Parliamentary candidate in 2014 and 2015. I thrilled to the oratory, laughed at the jokes, and marvelled at the head turning charisma of the man. Meeting him by chance at a First World War cemetery where I was guiding a tour and he was visiting as an LBC presenter, I couldn’t help noticing how everyone in my party , whether they were besotted Brexiteers or staunch Remainers, wanted a selfie with the man. He was the star of that and every show. Small in stature, you just couldn’t keep the limelight off him.
But the pathetic battles for favour among those who thronged good king Nigel’s court reminded me of nothing so much as the howling wolves scratching and biting each other around Henry VIII in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy. Playground politics and fear and loathing were the hallmarks of the UKIP brand.
When the Referendum was fought and won, the stuffing seemed to momentarily leave the leader. He sagged, wilted, and gave up UKIP’s leadership to a squabbling set of nonentities and loons who succeeded each other with bewildering rapidity. A man who had been running on adrenaline for a quarter of a century suddenly found he had no more fuel in the tank.
But, as it turned out, the fight was not over and won by a long chalk. Betrayed by May and botched by Johnson, the battle for Brexit grew into a wider war for Britain’s very survival as a recognisable and coherent nation. Farage returned to the fray with two more vehicles – the Brexit Party and Reform – to drive the struggle towards undreamed heights of ambition.
As he retook the leadership of the cause once again to fight the 2024 election, a new seriousness and even a hunger for power seemed to possess Nigel. He grasped the 21st century’s levers of power – social media and celebrity culture – as to the manner born, and even reached out to a discontented and lost youth with his usual knack of getting straight to their point with a language that they understood and related to. He was not going to allow himself a graceful retirement with his grandchildren and his deep sea fishing – at least not while the fishing grounds were ploughed by crowded rubber dinghies. Nigel returned to aim for the biggest catch yet.
Nigel Farage is something of a medical miracle, since a lifetime of smoking and drinking has so far left him apparently unscathed, but he has also survived three close brushes with death. Aged 21, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and yet beat the beast, going on to father four children with his two wives Grainne and Kirsten. Then in 1985 he was hit and knocked into a coma by a speeding car, suffering multiple injuries, and finally, and most spectacularly, during the 2010 general election – when he was fighting then-speaker John Bercow’s Buckingham seat – his light plane tangled with the UKIP streamer it was displaying and nosedived into the ground.
Astonishingly, Farage staggered from the wreckage in one piece, battered but unbowed. His injuries, however, were grievous and included multiple broken vertebrae, sternum and ribs, which left him in constant pain. The humour and courage with which he dealt with these blows from fortune might have caused even his many foes to grant him a modicum of respect, but didn’t. I think, though, that these strolls in death’s shadows heightened Nigel’s natural tendency to be a risk taker, and gave his already advanced confidence in his ability to survive anything that fate might throw his way a further enormous boost.
For, and this barely needs saying, Nigel Farage has an ego the size of a house – and his rubber ball record of bouncing back from any setback has reinforced his tendency to view those who disagree with him, even or especially in his own parties, as enemies to be crushed under the wheels of his juggernaut. With Nigel it really does seem like ‘my way or the highway’.
The list of former friends and allies who have fallen out with him is so lengthy that if I named every one, they would take up the rest of this article, but a few must be mentioned, such as Marta Andreasen, the EU accountant who exposed that organisation’s distinctly dodgy finances – and was fired for her whistleblowing. Douglas Carswell, the Tory ideologue whose defection to UKIP was the party’s first major Conservative scalp, and of course, most recently, Rupert Lowe. Throw in a score more lesser lights and we see that Nigel Farage has loved and lost them all – but their departures, enforced or otherwise, seem to have hardly dented the sheen of his overweening trust in his own star.
So if Nigel is notoriously not a team player, will his autocratic ways be the fatal flaw that brings down a tragic hero?
As the latest incarnation of his formidable political will gathers in Birmingham this week for Reform UK’s party conference, all eyes will be on Nigel who will strut the stage as usual in the full blaze of his power and pomp. The man who has already single handedly upended British politics forever can take justified pride in his achievement, and wonder whether even greater prizes lie ahead.
But we all know where pride can lead. What awaits Nigel Farage – Gehenna or a throne : it is for the British people to decide.
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