Watching the interview with Farage about his behaviour at school, a couple of things occurred to me.
Firstly, he looks really uncomfortable – shifting in his seat, perspiring, switching from defensive to aggressive and struggling to work out how to fix this with his normal approach.
Secondly, he is trying to call out around 20 people as liars whilst categorically not denying that he said those things he has been accused of, only that he did not deliberately intend to cause any hurt.
It raises the interesting question of how much bigotry and arrogance is going to be too much for Reform to retain the current levels of support. Is this Farage backstory going to work in their favour or is it going to be a step too far for those floating voters.
Video in the comments.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cgmnvx87xvwo
In the brave new world of ultra right wing / populist / fascist / lunatic* politics, such a minor indiscretion as rampantly racist name-calling some 50-odd years ago would seem to me almost an irrelevance. Elsewhere in the world** it seems quite the norm for racism, misogyny, corruption, fabrication, incitement and criminality of all kinds to pass practically unnoticed amongst the leadership, almost to the point where they are de rigeur and indeed admirable qualities.
I think Farridge is still a dead cert for destroying British democracy in the forthcoming apocalypse.
*delete as applicable
**select country as appropriate
I agree with everything you say Shaker of Bones. Farage will appeal even more to the Bexidiots.
When he next meets with the orange one wouldn’t it be a huge favour to mankind……
But “Bexidiots” are not in the majority these days. There are a lot of Reform voters who have bought into the nonsense in certain newspapers and want to “stop the boats”, but would be horrified to be accused of outright racism. Most are Reform supporters because they feel (rightly) that their concerns have been ignored by the Labour and Conservative parties. Not all of those concerns are to do with immigration.
Pinning Farage and some of his pals on islamophobia and antisemitism is a way forward for those who wish to minimise his momentum. That and his party’s attitude to the NHS.
The number of racists who are happy to admit to being racists would probably fit comfortably on the head of a pin. Which presumably means that they know racism is bad.
There are a number of disappointingly young people on X who now seem unashamedly racist (a taboo has been lifted), but I do not know if they are with Reform. I still cling to the belief that they are largely a social media event and not truly public opinion.
In 2016 a work colleague told me that one day Nigel Farage would be Prime Minister. I laughed at him. I’m not laughing now.
I would still say he has no chance but I do recognise that he is a slippery fucker.
Let’s not pull punches he’s a cowardly t##t just like his fat orange pal
I think you’re allowed to say twat here. Unless you mean tart.
On the ropes?
He should be hanging from the end of one
We could sell tickets.
in 2014 a Texan neighbour of mine told me that Trump would become president, I nearly laughed her off the face of the earth. I mean, that could never happen could it? Fuck me the world has gone mad.
When we watched the 2015 debates, heard the ‘Access Hollywood’ tapes, sniggered at allegations of lurid kompromat, scoffed at the MAGA morons, it seemed comically absurd to believe that this foul mountebank could actually win the presidency, let alone come back in 2024 and do it all over again. Yet here we are.
No matter how much pressure is applied to the odious Farage now – and having been one of two brown kids at prep school in the early 1980s, I can personally confirm he was hardly an outlier – his base won’t mind. If anything, it’ll be taken as a sign of how ‘desperate’ ‘they’ are to discredit him that they’re dragging up silly, childish banter etc etc.
There are certainly a lot of (I assume) bot accounts reiterating his ‘defence’ which boils down to ‘harmless banter a long time ago which Farage can’t remember and people are only bringing to the public now’. None of which stands up. The alleged comments, which were plainly intentionally hurtful at the very least, reflect behaviour and attitudes which have been well known for years. In 2013 Channel 4 exposed letters from his school days describing him as a fascist.
His problem is that he cannot say, ‘I was a racist little shit when I was younger but grew up’ because it invites the follow up question, ‘When did you stop being a racist little shit?’
He’ll ride it out until it drops from the headlines.
Come the next election he’ll laugh it off saying all that was settled years ago. Why are you bothering to bring it up now? Despite it not being settled.
However our craven media will nod, say yes, you’re right and they’ll move on.
As alluded to above the word ‘banter’ is sure to do a lot of lifting. It’s pretty much a Get Out Of Jail Free card in such matters.
OK, I’ll regret writing this in three or four years time, but hey! my football team won last night…
Fromage will not be Prime Minister.
No one took Trump seriously and certainly not for a second term. I’m surprised that Starmer hasn’t gone after the likes of Farage and The Mail for taxes and financial irregularities. Instead, The Mail is being allowed to buy The Telegraph and Farage gets away with suspect house ownership in Clacton. as well as running a limited company as a political party. We saw in the US what happens when it is assumed that the other side plays by the rules and it doesn’t end well.
This is not the USA, where racism and terror of socialism is deeply entrenched in society and the political mainstream was completely in ruins when Trump popped up.
Our political mainstream is in a bad way, but not yet nearly as bad as the USA.
Agreed but Farage and Tice are out of the same mould as Trump, denying or ignoring inconvenient truths about themselves and their cronies, working on the basis that if they repeat something often enough, it becomes accepted as truth.
It feels pretty likely that the allegations against Farage are true, but I don’t think they’ll prevent him winning an election.
15 years ago, these claims would probably have done him serious damage, but we’re in such a different world now. The stigma attached to racism has materially eroded, partly because it’s so much easier to find like minds and a support network for your prejudices online, probably partly because we overstretched the term. Purely anecdotally, I get the sense that the accusation does not carry the same weight it once did, because where once racism meant something truly dangerous and unpleasant, now it also covers micro-aggressions and cultural appropriation. There’s a section of the public that’s grown desensitised to the term, and the concern is that they consequently won’t recognise the immense danger of having a man like Farage – who is very possibly the genuine article – elevated to leadership.
This particular storm also seems likely to blow over because it’s difficult to disqualify a public figure based on things they said and did at 14 years old. I cannot abide Nigel Farage, but in an age of social media we will increasingly struggle to find people who did not say at least something ghastly at that age (albeit not generally as odious as Farage’s reported behaviour), and I think the public probably senses as much.
I would love for all this to end Farage as a political force in this country, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s enough. He’s obviously uncomfortable talking about it, but his primary defence – that it was nearly 50 years ago – is likely to hold. As observed above, the core of these allegations is not new information, and it certainly hasn’t seemed to damage him so far.
I agree that his base will actually be more than happy that he is a racist c*nt. What it might do is make some potential recruits think twice, and it certainly nails Reform as not just another version of the Tories – for all their faults, they wouldn’t have a leader with this background.
A few things have occurred to me – I do believe there is a ceiling to their support and may have peaked too early. The attention to the mess they are making of local government won’t help them. They are finding it difficult moving from being an insurgent party to one who actually has to have coherent and workable polices. They are also totally undemocratic in their setup – the time will come when the ‘members’ will actually want a say. They are also getting a lot of succour and encouragement from Trump and his conies, and they may well not be in power when the next GE comes round.
As it happens, I was was at a school reunion last year and was chatting to a chap I used to know, and he had worked with Farage when he was a commodiies dealer. He said he was actually good at his job, but was a complete arse of a human being.
Being good at his job and a complete arse of a human being is spot on for his Reform and UKIP roles as well.
While you’re right that this might not make much headway with his base, I do think it will ultimately hurt him like it did in Caerphilly recently, where there was a very high turnout, a good chunk of whom were likely voting to keep Reform out. Stories like this are only going to cement that determination
There’s going to be a lot of strategic voting at the next election. You’d better hope the Tories don’t decide to hold their nose and run with Reform.
If they need to, assuming Reform need them to, they will almost certainly do a deal of some sort, post-election.
Labour, LibDems, Greens and SNP may well need to do a deal with each other to stop them. This might actually produce a workable government.
Apart from anything else I find the word “banter” really annoying.
Bants?
Worse!
Bantz?
Top Bantz.
Agreed. It’s an incredibly tedious form of “humour” and why winding people up is supposed to be funny is beyond me.
Top bantz there from the archbishop of banterbury
Well, I like Banter. They’re great for dancing to.
I’m pretty sure I must have made racist comments aged 14 in the 1970s. I probably repeated Jim Davison’s jokes I’d heard on mainstream TV the previous evening. We had one black guy, one muslim and one south East Asian kid at my school. We were all horrible to them. And the ginger kid, and the one with epilepsy, and the effeminate one. So I can’t really condemn Farage for being a product of the same system. For loads of other things, yes.
A black guy a Muslim and an East Asian … a ginger one one with epilepsy and an effeminate one. And you wonder why your stand up career bombed?
It’s a good point until you read the detail of what he is being accused of saying. I’m no angel but I stayed quite a way away from the NF “banter” style of claiming Hitler was right and doing sound effects of gassing to anyone let alone a jewish boy some of whose family did not manage to escape the holocaust.
Generally speaking, I got that Hitler was not right at all., even at the tender age of 14. Although I may have sung songs about him only having one ball – but then I went to a comprehensive in Bracknell and not Dulwich College.
Singing songs about Hitler only having one ball puts you on the right side of history, I’d say…
Goebbels has two but very small if I remember correctly.
You misremember – Poor old Goebbels had no balls at all.
Himmler, had something similar.
From the Independent recently about DNA testing of hitler.
Stories from the First World War suggest that Hitler was bullied over the size of his genitals, with his genetic condition meaning he had a one in 10 chance of having a micropenis.
A 1923 medical examination, uncovered in 2015, showed that Hitler did have an undescended testicle, giving surprising credence to the derogatory wartime song about him.
Shame monorchism doesn’t rhyme with anything.
Dorkism?
cryptorchism or anorchism?
Though a bit circular in definition.
All we are saying
Is give peace a chance.
I knew you lot wouldn’t let me down.
Goering maybe? Someone one had one anyway.
I was never specific but if you say it was on the right side.
Sidelining your drift, it is extremely likely that his descended testicle will have been the right hand one. This tends to hang the lower of the two for most main; this is because of the surrounding blood vessels. (Pauses, as the the majority of the afterword quietly check.) Even with maldescent, the right is likely to make better progress and may thus be palpable or present, albeit maybe riding a little high.
There is absolutely no evidence that any or either of his testicles are in either the Albert Hall of either London or Manchester, it likely remaining, as a cryptorchid, high in his groin, making him at greater risk of developing undiscovered testicular cancer.
This message is brought to you etc etc etc
You sir, are talking bollocks. Very knowledgeably I might add.
Nothing like dealing with the threat of testicular cancer by shooting yourself in the head.
Arfs x 2 to the gentlemen above!
It takes balls that does.
Farage of course really does only have one ball, the other having being removed due to testicular cancer. The diseased organ was presumably treated however surgical waste is normally treated rather than being displayed in an ornate concert hall.
Would that they had kept the diseased ball and thrown the rest away.
The library in which I studied had shelves full of pickled cancerous bits in jars, including testicles.
Don’t tell ‘im Pike!
We had one black guy at our school and he was over 6′, Captain of the rugby team and became head boy so no-one gave him any crap. Off colour racist jokes were common on the telly and we shared them quite happily whilst knowing they were bad, me especially as I had two mixed race adopted siblings. I once made the mistake of telling my dad one of these jokes and suffice it to say I didn’t do it again. I think it’s a really positive thing that this is largely eliminated and Twang Jr and pals are very diverse and wouldn’t dream of sharing such “humour”.
It’s no excuse for Farage behaving like that or worse of course but he’s hardly unique.
We had one black guy in our school (total of 1700 kids), he was teased mercilessly and abused. We also had two Asian girls who faired better, possibly because they were attractive. You were also in trouble generally if you didn’t have a Welsh valleys accent.
Same here, one black kid, a boy again, at my secondary school (8FE at the time, so capacity of 1200). And he had white adoptive parents. I certainly heard racist jokes in the playground but honestly think I didn’t help spread them.
The black lad, Pete, was a mate of mine so I rarely heard jokes which made him the target though I’m sure they existed. I don’t know how much direct racism he faced as despite being friends we never discussed it.
North Wales in the 80s, a pretty grim time. I remember when a kid from Birmingham joined the school, and the sports teachers banter was, ‘You’re from Birmingham? But you’re white!’ As I say, grim.
A few years ago I had a really interesting conversation with my best mate about the banter thing.
As I’ve mentioned before on here, I’m of Latin American descent. Not so much that you can tell to look at me, but half the family are from that neck of the woods. Wasn’t an issue when I lived in London, was an issue when I lived in a small town where everyone was white Anglo Saxon. I got a bunch of racist abuse at school and I reacted very badly to it, partly because it was so unexpected.
Best mate is British Chinese. Far more obviously exotic than I am. Grew up in the North East. I once asked him what sort of stick he got at school and he said that people gave him shit for being Asian, but it never really bothered him because it was a boys school and everyone got given shit for something, that just happened to be his thing.
That conversation was an eye opener for me. It didn’t make me think we should all just laugh off racism, but it was such a different way of looking at two similar(ish) experiences that it gave me pause for though. My mate’s approach probably required a thick skin (and lord knows he’s got one), but it seemed to have been healthier for him than mine was for me. To him, it really was “just banter” and he flowed past it.
This stuff is really, really complicated. The exact same statement can be delivered with different intent, and received with different sensitivities.
None of which is relevant here, because I doubt teenage Farage was being anything other than a deplorable little prick. But as a rule of thumb I always tell my kids to try to discern actual hatred from mere ignorance, because the latter is at least more easily curable and tends to melt away much more quickly.
“I was never directly racist. “
As denials go that’s about as Reform as you can get
Begs the point about what he thinks indirect racism is.
I think his answer to that question is likely to be “acceptable”.
There’s also the fall-out over Nathan Gill being jailed for accepting Russian bribes. Did Gill plead guilty to prevent certain pieces of evidence from being revealed in court?
I don’t think Gill is the type to take a fall to protect others except, possibly, close family.
Not bright enough or savvy enough to cover his tracks at the time, he was bang to rights and he knew it. May have been instructed to watch what he said “for his own good” of course.
Pleaded guilty in the hope of leniency, most likely.
This is possibly a more fruitful line of attack. He worshipped Enoch Powell and thinks Putin is great. He has worked for Russian TV spouting the same sort of support of Russia as Gill.
I would ask him if he disagrees with any of the propaganda Gill was paid to repeat. I’d also like to know if he supports Ukraine or not. I’m not clear.
The third weak spot is funding. Why are oligarchs who live abroad, connected to the oil industry or cryptocurrency, donating huge sums to his party. If I was Labour, I’d cap donations to political parties, but they won’t want to take a hit themselves.
If any of this debacle causes Farage any damage it will not be the allegations of racist bigotry from his teenage days it will be the half-arsed way he and those around him have tried on just about every excuse to get him off a hook of his own making. Nothing will dissuade those of a similar persuasion as him from continuing to support him or his latest political grift of course but hopefully having his pants publicly pulled down may put a few off from lending his odious little project their vote.
Economics beats politics, doesn’t it? From Blair to Cameron, there seemed to have been a consensus to let neoliberal economic policies ruin free and unfettered, (spending freely on health and welfare under Blair and Brown), while putting the focus on political/cultural matters – progressive politics that Cameron paid lip service to. Not to everyone’s taste, but the good times were rolling.
Then came austerity with its partner of quantitative easing, and the rug was pulled out from under an increasing number of people. Who cares about progressive politics if your livelihood is threatened and the UK is experiencing a reduced life expectancy for the first time in generations?
Until and unless the growing levels of inequality are reversed and there are visible signs of infrastructure investment, an economy based on powerful asset holders paying government- subsidised minimal wages, (while bringing on ever greater number of AI replacements) doesn’t look rosy for the majority, however you spin it.
Farage and his party are selling tasty, tasty, ultra processed snake oil. Very unnourishing and health hazardous but more appealing to many, I’m sure than what Starmer is serving up. The acrid racism, from now or then, is an irrelevance, I suspect. It’s the poor performance in positions of power that will damage their reputation more seriously.
It isn’t inequality, it’s lack of economic growth/opportunity.
You can ensure a fair share of an ever decreasing pie and you’ll still find that people are too hungry to care about racism. Or inequality, for that matter. You have to grow the pie (or at minimum maintain it at the same level). It’s the precondition for every other good thing you might want to do.
I’m approaching the matter from the Spirit Level/Dorling approach that greater levels of equality bringing better quality of life for all, rich and poor. The ultra rich suck liquidity and function out of an economy for no good purpose. Growth and opportunity are functions of/outputs from a healthy society, not the necessary causes. To think otherwise is to put the cart before the horse and to expect it to push it.
Hmmm… I think it probably depends what you mean by growth and by healthy society.
We have certainly seen a few societies that have prioritised equality and that haven’t left people all that happy with their resultant quality of life. I don’t think it’s a magic bullet – everyone having nothing is equality but it isn’t an attractive proposition to most people.
I may be wrong here, but it feels like the suggestion is I’m inspired by Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao, with a side order of Honecker.
Greater equality doesn’t mean total equality (of opportunity or outcome).
There’s total inequality, (the sort of technofeudalism the world seems to be moving towards), and there’s total communism, but somewhere between the two, there’s a sweet spot, where investment in good housing, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, transport systems provides the security and launch pad for people of all backgrounds to make the most of their abilities.
I’m thinking more Atlee than Thatcher, Keynes not Friedman.
Not at all, Sal. I know you’re a lovely man and that there’s zero chance your idol is Pol Pot.
I’m just reacting to the statement “greater levels of equality bringing better quality of life for all, rich and poor”. It sounds good, but – clearly – it isn’t always true. You can be more equal and less happy.
I totally agree that there’s a sweet spot in the middle. As usual, I think we agree, we just take slightly different routes to get there. ❤️
Thanks, Bingo. I think you like winding me up, and I quite enjoy it myself, tbh. Makes me examine my ideas and try to come up with some sort of persuasive narrative to justify them.
I do think there’s such a mistrust of government to do anything effective or worthwhile, with a concomitant magic faith in the invisible hand of the market, without realising that the marketplace is either created and rules set by governments, or there’s a laissez faire approach that leads inexorably to monopolies and profiteering.
I don’t expect greater equality to automatically bring greater happiness, which is a quasi-undefinable utopian quality. But I would prefer a society at ease with itself, rather than one in conflict with itself as seems to be the case
^
Most Afterword exchange of the month. Nice work folks!
He could always just rebrand Reform again.
Brexit Party, UKIP, Reform, how many is it now?
NF has a nice ring to it
I see what you did there…
Here is a petition to ask parliament to look into Russia’s influence on our democracy.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/744215
Подпись
I do wonder if Farage really wants to be PM. He’s not stupid and he doesn’t seem obsessed with power like his orange chum. Its a terrible job these days and he would be terrible at it. He likes, and is good at, sniping from the sidelines. He likes his grift. He likes pressure free attention. Those things would be harder to come by as PM. And he might actually have to do some work and his honeymoon period would be short because they would be so shit.
I mean, he probably will win as things stand (and I doubt this will make much difference), though Reform probably wouldn’t without him. But does he actually want to? Maybe a few months, a pension for life, and then he could take to the right wing lecture circuit to recount how the msm and establishment stitched him up. Be more lucrative for him than Truss of course.
I agree with this. I don’t think he wants to be PM at all. Too much like hard work.
May not want the hard work but wants the benefits.
I think he knows that where he is he has as many if not more of the benefits (many of them dodgy no doubt) of that job and zero of the problems.
I’m inclined to agree.
He wouldn’t want the responsibility.
His performance as MP for Clacton shows his lack of interest in actual politics. Disruption, the attention it gains him and personal profit are what he wants.
Why endure the responsibility of actually leading the country when, with minimal effort, he already has the benefits that being an ex-PM could bring him?
Bloody scrounger! Doesn’t want to work but just exist on benefits
I don’t think he’s on the ropes. He’ll rebrand the allegations as desperate – referring to them as ultimately harmless playground events. I can hear him now.
“Yes, I dare say I also probably sang “ring a ring a roses” – I suppose I should be up in front of some inquiry because I was disrespectful to those that died of bubonic plague!”
I knew some shitty people at school and I steered clear of them in later life. Even now, I would struggle to have a pint with them and let bygones be bygones. I’m guessing he was like them, but the attack line must be on what he clearly is now. His mate taking Russian money and being jailed for it is a much bigger story. This is why he’s happy to talk about his school days.
‘A week is a long time in politics’, so said Harold Wilson.
Apparently the latest date for the next election is Wednesday 15th August 2029. That’s a long, long, long (George!) time to navigate… about 200 weeks.
Forget Fromage having half-a-dozen seats in Parliament, effortlessly the most remarkable political achievement this century in the UK is Starmer becoming PM. If I’d come on here after the 2019 election and suggested that he’d be PM in 2024 no one would have given him a prayer.
They’d have been wrong, and he is.
I don’t think Fromage, even with the full might of the right-wing press behind him and Reform, has the stamina or will like Starmer, and he has so many nut-jobs in his party that something will have to derail them… or maybe it’ll just be death by a thousand cuts.
His best bet to become PM is actually to join the Tories.
Given the craven way he backed down on last year’s long overdue
Cutting back of the UK’s out of control welfare system, “will”
is not normally a word associated with Starmer.
He’ll be gone after next May’s local elections if not before.
One advantage Farage has is that most people don’t like or trust politicians. The turnout at the last election was one of the lowest ever, 60%. Labour got just under 34% of the vote, but got a huge majority. 4 in 5 of the electorate didn’t vote for them.
A large turnout at the next election will stop Farage winning, but there is not much to get enthused about.
He is a racist and I will never vote for him.
Just one of the reasons a complete lack of policies being another
The allegations against Nigel Fascist are as far from ‘jokes’ and ‘banter’ as it’s possible to get, and in any other time would be way beyond anything acceptable from the leader of a British political party.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2025/nov/18/deeply-shocking-nigel-farage-faces-fresh-claims-of-racism-and-antisemitism-at-school
I expect he’s been more careful about racism/antisemitism since his schooldays, but I bet he has some more recent skeletons just the same.
Hopefully these current revelations will lead to more recent stuff being uncovered.
Sadly I don’t think he’s on the ropes, and there’s now a serious question of what if any ‘red line’ there is in the level of bigotry/corruption/lying that Farage and his Reform mob can get away with. It’s been a real shock for me to see several people I once counted as ‘normal’ friends, colleagues or relatives who are now repeating the Reform messages in their social media posts and comments. I used to think there would be a point where decent people would eventually ‘come to their senses’ but I fear the UK may be no different to the US in going down the same road of hardline bigotry, xenophobia and populist performative cruelty.
Going to be interesting to see what impact – if any – the Gruan allegation have on Reform’s figures when reactions to Rachel from Accounts’ seemingly not terribly popular budget of. yesterday.
I suspect if anything their ratings will rise rather than fall
In my school of 700 we had a West Indian and 3 Asians … mind you one of the Asians won a Nobel prize
Impressive feat for a schoolboy!😆
At my school, it was said that the Nobel Prize was awarded to the man who invented the door knocker.
That remnds me of the classic:
“Knock, knock!”
“Whose there?”
“Your bell’s knackered.”
Brilliant
I see another colleague of his, David Coburn has been saying nice things about Russia and bad things about the EU and Ukraine. Money may have been involved. Obviously, the thinking must have been anti EU = pro Russia.
If the Labour Party want to have any chance at the next election they will need to run on a ‘rejoin the EU’ manifesto’. Simple way of defeating Farage and his gang of bastards.
Don’t agree it would be a good manifesto item. They should certainly move towards doing it, but antagonising the remaining Brexiteers will only encourage them to vote against it.
I also think embarrassing the many people who voted for Brexit and now secretly wish they hadn’t is not likely to get them onto your side.
Just quietly moving back into union with the rest of Europe bit by bit is the way, I think.
I’m a solid remainer but I agree Mike. It would be incredibly disruptive to negotiate a whole new end to end agreement and then move to it in one go, and take years. We should eat the elephant bit by bit.
The EU is evolving too which is an opportunity.
They won’t though because a decent chunk of Labour supporters are anti EU (“capitalist club” etc). Hence too their dismissal remain campaign despite the efforts of Alan Johnson.
The hard Left are certainly as anti-EU as the hard Right, it’s true.
TBF, there were things about the EU that I disliked when we were in it. Not enough to want us to leave, though.
I agree. Me too. But life isn’t perfect, you have to accept the best option, warts and all and try to improve it incrementally. Rather than the Left approach (destroy everything, start again) or the Right (don’t change anything because it works for us). Very Lib Dem approach (imperfect compromise is OK, work together to improve it).
A good article on how Farage’s teenage antisemitism has influenced his adult politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/28/nigel-farage-antisemitism-allegations-us-maga
I was born in 1965 to a German mother and Indian father. For reasons I’ve never really understood we lived in Southend, Essex, and at a time when the war was still very much a ‘live’ issue for relatives of my classmates, my background was almost machine-tooled to annoy the natives.
I don’t think I had a secondary school day when I didn’t receive some sort of racist abuse, either for being German or a fucking Paki.
The 1970s were an incredibly hostile time, at least where I had the misfortune to live, and once I left for poly in the mid 1980s I rarely went back.
In my lifetime p, today is the closest I’ve seen to the 1970s in terms of racism. The normalisation of casual, everyday abuse, is something I thought was long gone. During the Blair years especially I think, racists were pushed back into their living rooms – saying their crap in private once it became socially unacceptable to say these things in public. Social media changed all that of course and the online has bled all over political life.
This stuff won’t harm Farage I suspect; lots simply won’t care, plenty will agree with him, and many will remember their own youthful racist high jinks.
I’ve no idea what the answer is. I feel desperately sorry for our young people – my generation has not left the place better than we found it, on this issue at least.
I sent to school 1963-1976 in North-West England. Exceedingly few non-whites there but my grandma hated Germans and the P and N words were bandied around like confetti. It was a relief to go to university in Birmingham. I remember going up the escalator at New Street Station and thinking, wow! It was a different world entirely.
It’s depressing that fifty years on, things are worse. We live in hateful times.
It’s taken me a day or so to respond to your post. It is, fundementally, utterly disgusting that the progress has been undone. The fact that you didn’thave a school day that wasn’t subject to abuse should be enough to stop anybody from thinking that this is acceptable.
I was thinking that the olden days version of racism was a lack of understanding, knowledge and an abundance of stupidity, whereas todays flavour was a more polarised version. But I suspect, deep down, it really has reverted to the same problems for the same reasons. Zero progress.
He’s not on the ropes but the punches are beginning to land. Sadly the racism won’t harm his standing with his base but Nazi sympathies won’t sit well with WW2 obsessed “patriots” and if closer links to Russia emerge he will start to look like a traitor in their eyes.
He’s kept a reletively low profile during the budget talk probably because he’s out of his depth on that topic. Reform are making a bollocks of most of the Councils they won. Maybe there’s a dawning realisation that he’s not temperamentally suited to leading a party let alone a country.
I feel he’s just trying to make as much money as possible now in his ‘career’ as an mp. He’s certainly trousering ample amounts of cash.
Will he still stand in Clacton for the next election? I think by the time the next election comes round the people of Clacton will be heartily fed up of their absent mp.
It would certainly be interesting to see how he dramatically ramps up his visibility on the ground in Clacton in the year leading up to the next election, to ensure an easy glide into No 10.
Can you imagine that Reform win the general election but Farage loses his seat in Clacton? I’m trying to think if that is worse than Farage being PM. I really don’t know.
That would be an interesting scenario, I don’t think he could move to a different constituency he needs disaffected voters of the main parties which Clacton supplied.
Now they know what he’s like as an mp would they continue to vote for him? If he tried a different constituency would they vote for him? I know his rabid followers would, but he can’t rely on just them he needs to appeal to a wider group.
I don’t think he’s on the ropes either. The news cycle in this current age rolls on so quickly this will be forgotten in a month. And if not, overlooked/downplayed at the next election.
Though I agree with others that I don’t think he wants to be PM. He’s a rabble rouser and a con artist. He is massively thin skinned and easily bored, becoming visibly tetchy and angry when held to real account by the likes that loathe him in the media. James O’Brien for one.
Plus, if he was to become PM (whether he wanted to or not) he’d be absolutely shite. His own thinness of skin and boredom would do for him in some way and he’d leave office. Jumped or pushed won’t matter.
Having said that, look at Trump. A thin-skinned con man with no interest in governing a country or representing its citizens and we’re almost a decade into his cess-pool of influence.
Nah, he’s slipped off the ropes. No one really cares. Now, if only he’d called Hamas his friends, he’s be toast.
Harsh truth but a lot of the Fromage’s potential voters are very, very old.
One lady (85?) came on Nick Abbot’s show last night and he politely talked her through why there are more boats now than there had been before, and that her Brexit vote had gone a long way to making it happen.
‘Oh, I didn’t know that’.
How, the f*** did she not know that!
‘Oh well, it’ll be up to Nigel to put it right. I’ll still vote for him’.
It’s not unreasonable that come 2029, she won’t have the opportunity.
Even if Remain get that far, she might not.
I suspect the two nutcases interviewed the day after the Brexit vote at Romford market (‘Oh, Romford was luvly twenty years ago’) are both now dead.
Not all Reform voters/Brexiteers are oldies.
Plenty of building tradesmen, man-with-white-van traders, small shopkeepers and café proprietors, pub licensees, garage mechanics etc. -and the wives/partners of all of these- are looking to Nigel to “Stop The Boats” and send all the foreigners packing.
His appearance on I’m a celebrity a couple of years back also did wonders for his social media profile
It’s interesting to think of where Reform would be without Farage – his takeover of the leadership before the last election was certainly a boost and he continues to be a charismatic figurehead.
Here is a counter factual for you – if he hadn’t survived that plane crash before the Brexit vote, would we still have marginally voted leave? An even if we had, would Reform even exist..?
I’d forgotten about the plane crash. If only etc…
It’s interesting to reflect that at the time he was still seen as a bit of a joke, another Kilroy-Silk basically (though he was no doubt already grifting very effectively for himself as an MEP). I’d have to google to remind myself of what the brexiters were calling themselves then. And yet for 10 years he’s been the most influential bastard in UK politics.
I don’t think Reform stand a chance of winning an election.
But I thought the same way about Trump and Brexit, so what do I know.
Update…
Fromage’s best chance is to be a Tory – as if he hasn’t always been a Tory anyway.
I said that above, and whaddya know where I go the media follow.
All they’ve been talking about today is either the Tories joining Reform or vice-versa, in a potential four – count it, that’s FOUR – years before an election.
Hold yer nose Keir, I certainly will be, don’t panic, see out yer term, and we’ll do all the numbers in 2029.
Meanwhile, anyone remotely sane should be watching Anthology and listening to the Beatles.
It’s blindingly obvious that if either of Kemi Badenoch’s Tories or Nigel Farage’s Reform can’t form a government by themselves at the next general election, they will either formally become a coalition or they’ll form another alliance of some sort.
Just watch ’em.
Badenoch will be gone long before that.
Whoever replaces her will be just as nasty and useless and will strike a deal with Reform if it gets them into government. Return of Boris, anyone?
I suppose it’s possible that Farage will quit before the next GE. If that occurs, because he’s received a better offer elsewhere, Reform will quite rapidly disintegrate.
Just watched Farage at a live Press conference. To say he was “prickly” on the issue of his schooldays would be a gross understatement. His line of atttack on the ITV journalist was that they had Bernard Manning on TV at the time he was in school. So double standards, yadda yadda. I didn’t think Mr Manning was standing for public office?
Bernard Manning was a pretty horrible individual but I don’t recall him ever taunting jews about concentration camps and making hissing gas noises.
Not going too well for *Public School Nige is it?
Only 190 weeks till the General Election.
[*A public school significantly lower in The Times top schools list than my own. What a complete oik, and they give people like this a platform!]
I’m increasingly thinking that Farage won’t make it to the next election as leader. He is demonstrably uncomfortable with what has emerged from his schooldays (and I think I mentioned above that I coincidentally met an old school friend of mine last year and he told that he’d worked with him in the city and he was a horible human being – I suspect more will come out), and Dubai loving Dickie Tice is no help, branding them all as liars when….er….he wasn’t there. He is notoriously thin skinned and that is like a red rag to a bull with journalists. Not talking to the BBC or ITV? Good luck with that during an election. And then there’s the Russian connection….
In avoiding the question about Tice’s unhelpful intervention, Farage apparently referred to interviewer Emma Barnett as “one of the BBC’s lesser journalists”, a move straight out of his orange chum’s playbook. Such tactics won’t go down in the UK anywhere near as well as they do in the US. Maybe his support has peaked and we’re at the start of a long descent back into irrelevance.
I watched Question Time last night with the odious Zia Yusef making one of his regular appearances on the show. It was an “immigration special” and I think Yusuf felt this meant he could really get into fifth gear and put his foot down.
His manner veered between hectoring, peevish, nasty and patronising. When he coldly began a reply to a retired NHS doctor with “Well, if you’d bothered to read our manifesto…” eliciting boos and a telling off from fellow panellists for rudeness , it was a telling moment. This is who Reform are, and once everyone’s had a grumble about them lads on the boats coming over or them foreigners wearing veils and speaking funny, will they really vote en masse for an outfit as fundamentally hateful and unpleasant as Farage’s mob?
From what I could tell, the Dover audience was quite a spread of views, but Zia Yusuf made no friends last night. It is obvious all they have is the ability to whip up division and fear, to exploit people’s problems and offer a Hitlerian “well, blame X,Y and Z on the migrants”.
If Farage does bail before the election and I agree with NigelT that this is a viable prediction, I wonder if they’ll force the unhappy Yusuf into the top job, controlled by Tice from his sun lounger in Jumeirah Beach Towers.
Trevor Phillips ( The Times 8/12/25)
Whether Nigel Farage’s critics are aware of Aristotle’s maxim about boyhood — that the essence of a man’s character is formed by the age of seven — they are certainly applying it with a passion, dredging up testimony from former classmates to damn the Reform leader as a teenage bully, antisemite and racist.
I have no difficulty in picturing Farage as a modern day Flashman: brash, swaggering and cruel, with a coterie of toadies. But I think the present campaign will unwittingly strengthen his hand in the battle for political power. And I find it infuriating that those who slavishly supported the Corbyn ascendancy have only now discovered their inner Simon Wiesenthal.
Yet as Westminster obsesses over the unkindness of public schoolboys half a century ago, childhood tragedies that should truly shame us are visited on minority children in our cities every day, every week, every year, virtually unnoticed.
It’s not as though the stories about the Reform leader are actual revelations. I am not one of Farage’s many apologists. But I really don’t think anyone needs to go back 50 years to comprehend his character. As I told him to his face on TV last year, I regard the accusation of his being a racist as well wide of the mark. He’s worse than that.
He bathes in the approval of bigots and is content to deepen his support with the cold calculus of political advantage. He is a cynic, heedless of who is damaged by his project. Unsurprisingly, he has never again agreed to be interviewed by me.
For those who do not want him to prevail, the case against him has to be prosecuted based on evidence and put in context. It is not enough to call him names, however merited, or to throw mud. So far the attack has failed to move his followers even as it outrages what he would call the elites. To see why, instead of starting with Aristotle we should look to Napoleon’s dictum: to understand the man you must know what was happening in his world when he was 20.
The Reform boss has silenced an initially gleeful BBC by pointing out that by the time he is alleged to have been tormenting other boys at Dulwich College the corporation was still transmitting The Black and White Minstrel Show in prime time. He might have added that the BBC had already spent ten years teaching an entire generation of British children the racial lexicon of Till Death Us Do Part, a wildly successful comedy. The words “yid” and “nig-nog” tripped off the tongues of primary schoolers before they’d learnt to ride a bike.
That show starred two revered actors, both dyed-in-the-wool socialists. Warren Mitchell became a household name for his portrayal of Alf Garnett. He was Jewish. His “scouse git” of a son-in-law, Mike, played by Tony Booth, was to become even more famous as Tony Blair’s father-in-law. Adults may have seen it as satire. But ten-year-olds didn’t get the joke. They just copied the cruelty.
And I wonder. Did none of those now pointing the finger ever think about turning off the common room TV when this series, or Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour or Are You Being Served?, none of which could be transmitted today, was on? Or did they just laugh along with the crowd?
Then, there are tiny details that make one wonder about the soundness of those memories. Is it really plausible, as one claimed, that there were more boys called Patel than were called Smith at the fee-paying Dulwich College in 1976? Most of the Gujaratis who carry the name will have arrived from east Africa in the early 1970s with virtually nothing. It would be at least a couple of decades before these families acquired the wealth that now makes them a fixture in public schools.
Third, it’s hard to believe that Farage was uniquely horrid; the behaviour described by his accusers was pretty standard in London schools at the time. Over at my Tottenham comprehensive on White Hart Lane, just ten minutes from Spurs’ stadium, antisemitic slurs were part of the school’s argot, some of it far worse than what is reported by the Dulwich boys, though I assume that must be a social class thing. We were just rougher.
The half-dozen of us who were not white among 1,500 or so pupils learnt that you can’t fight everybody, every day, over every thing. One teacher, overhearing other boys’ chatter, assumed he had misheard my name. For weeks, he addressed me by the nearest equivalent to the sounds he had heard. I became Nicko.
To repeat, I make no excuses for Nigel Farage. But the outrage being directed at the past of Old Alleynians could more usefully be directed at the cruelties visited right now on too many British children under the noses of the authorities we pay to protect them.
I was left shaken by my valedictory interview for Sky News with the recently retired chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner of Margravine. The headlines in recent days have focused on her criticism of ministers for, as she put it, “abandoning” women’s rights in favour of the demands of so-called gender ideology activists.
But yesterday, with tears in her eyes, she cited the case of ten-year-old Sara Sharif, murdered by her father and stepmother in 2023. The child had been beaten and tortured over a period of years; a post mortem revealed 70 separate injuries including 11 fractures of the spine, burns inflicted with an iron, and strangulation. Sara wore hijab to disguise her injuries.
Falkner claims that fear of being denounced as racist or Islamophobic were likely to have held back the interventions that could have saved Sara. An impending government-backed definition of Islamophobia, she said, is likely to make social workers and teachers even more cautious.
I was taken back for two reasons. First, because Falkner’s words precisely echo my own of 20 years ago as then chair of the EHRC after the virtually identical murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie. The subsequent inquiry also suggested that professionals had failed to stop the torture partly because of “cultural sensitivities”.
I had hoped never to hear those words again. And second, I know the investigation into Farage’s childhood may well pay dividends for fellow journalists and politicians. Someone will win a prize. Reform’s enemies will repeat the stories again and again.
I sympathise with those who feel they have suffered. I feel their pain. But to put it brutally, nobody actually died at Dulwich College. Yet no media organisation as far as I know has commissioned the film or documentary that hunts down each and every social worker, teacher or council worker who might have saved Sara Sharif.
Who is weeping today for that little girl? And indeed, who still weeps for, or even remembers, Victoria?
He will be long gone before any general election occurs, pocketing donations to his limited company, sorry, political party, and leaving useful idiots to continue the cause / grift.