Seven reasons why Farage should not be Prime Minister

Content warning: This article contains racist and antisemitic language that some readers may find distressing.

Martin Shipton

So much stupidity has been brought to the Senedd by members of the Reform UK group that it’s sometimes easy to forget that their presence in the Chamber is attributable almost entirely to their cult leader.

Nigel Farage’s visits to Wales are less frequent than they would have been if Reform had won the election in May, and his absence has pointed up the paucity of talent in what is the second biggest group in the Senedd.

Most of their contributions consist of petty point-scoring, often accompanied by a gratuitous tone of offensiveness aimed at pleasing the most knuckle-dragging of their social media followers.

But underwhelming as the Reform Senedd group may be, we must never underestimate Farage’s potential to recruit support for the party he leads.

This shouldn’t be forgotten at a time when Reform is going down in the polls and seems less likely to be in a position to win a general election. If anything is certain in these unsettled times, it is that things can change both unexpectedly and quickly.

It’s timely, therefore, that the engagingly idiosyncratic journalist John Sweeney has just published a book called The Real Nigel Farage.

Sweeney’s personality is part of everything he writes, as it was when he worked for the BBC. This is a style that doesn’t work for everyone, but more often than not has worked for him. Who can forget how he literally roared when encountering officials of the sinister “Church” of Scientology?

In the introduction to his book, Sweeney writes: “I suspect that I caused Farage more misery than anyone else in 25 years in politics because my reporting pointed out the real-world consequences of his actions and, above all else, he hates that.”

Farage will also hate Sweeney’s list of seven reasons why he should never be Prime Minister.

He pulls no punches. His first reason is that while at school, Farage was a Nazi.

Racist views

Altogether, 34 of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College in London have come forward to say that the future politician espoused racist, antisemitic and neo-fascist views, and bullied classmates and younger boys from ethnic minorities. Some recalled that Farage sang a neo-Nazi song with grossly offensive lyrics which began: “Gas ‘em all, gas ‘em all, As off to the showers they crawl. We’ve gassed all the Pakis, We’ve gassed all the Yids, We’ve gassed all the niggers and their fucking kids.”

While most male teachers at the school sought to play down the significance of his racist behaviour, passing it off as “schoolboy banter”, one of the few women teachers, Chloe Deakin, wrote a letter of protest to the headmaster when Farage was made a prefect, referring to an incident when he and others had marched late at night through a quiet Sussex village shouting Hitler Youth songs. Deakin also alluded to another incident when Farage was thrown out of an English lesson for telling another pupil: “Shut up, you Jew!”

Secondly, while a UKIP Euro MP, the party for which he was the public face was lax in its vetting of candidates, leading to a situation where two MEPs were jailed for financial crimes.

Tom Wise, an ex-policeman who had also been an undertaker’s office manager, billed the European Parliament £36,000 a year for his researcher while only passing on one sixth of the money to her. According to Farage, Wise “had always been fat and greedy” and having him as an MEP was “like Billy Bunter being let loose in a confectionary factory carpeted with postal orders”. Yet he had been selected as a candidate.

Ashley Mote, another UKIP MEP, was jailed for nine months after claiming £67,000 in income support and housing benefit for six years while earning £4,000 a month from his businesses. He had been committed for trial two months before his election, but UKIP either didn’t know or kept quiet about it so it wouldn’t damage the party’s election chances. Later, Mote was jailed for a further five years after being convicted of wrongly claiming £500,000 in European Parliament expenses.

Unfaithfulness

Thirdly, Sweeney discusses Farage’s serial unfaithfulness towards his lovers, saying it caused suffering and is evidence of a cruel nature. He interviews former UKIP researcher Annabelle Sanderson, with whom Farage had an affair. She tells Sweeney: “Today I’m in my forties and I’ve never married and part of that is because I’ve been so scarred by what happened with Nigel. When I did try to have relationships with people, he eroded my confidence. He said: ‘No one else will ever treat you as well as I treat you. No one else will hire you. No one else will give you a job.’ You start to believe it. And it took me years of therapy to deal with that. Still to this day I am sometimes riddled with self-doubt because it’s learned behaviour.”

Another reason why Sweeney argues that Farage should never be Prime Minister is his incitement of racial tension for political gain. A week before the 2016 Brexit referendum, Farage unveiled an advertising lorry in Westminster showing a photograph of a crowd of men at a border in the Balkans with the caption “Breaking Point”. In the main, the men were Syrian refugees fleeing from the Assad regime which had used poison gas on its own population, although that was not mentioned. There was a rise in acts of racist violence and a Polish man named Arek Jozwik was punched in the head in Harlow New Town, suffering a severe brain injury that resulted in his death. Farage claimed that Jozwik had himself engaged in racial abuse, but that was not corroborated by evidence at the trial of the 15-year-old later convicted of manslaughter.

Ten years later, Farage adopted a different stance after a Polish man was killed by a Sikh, saying he was a victim of anti-white racist aggression.

Sweeney wrote: “Should Farage be Prime Minister? The fourth charge against him levelled by this book is that by demonising one innocent dead Pole and celebrating another, he shows himself to be a man who milks other people’s tragedies for his own ends, that he is an engine of chaos.”

The fifth reason for Farage’s unsuitability relates to the dubious nature of the source of funds for him, the cause of Brexit and his successive parties. One example cited by Sweeney is the £8m donation made by Farage’s friend Arron Banks to the Leave.EU campaign fronted by Farage at the time of the referendum. The money came from an Isle of Man company whose ownership is secret. British police were unable to trace the origin of the cash, despite speculation that Russia was involved. Sweeney wrote: “The fifth grave charge levelled by this book against him is that when a rich man gives him a lot of money, he takes it and not enough questions are asked.”

Nathan Gill

Farage’s appointment of Nathan Gill as leader of the Brexit Party and then Reform UK in Wales is a further reason given by Sweeney. Following Gill’s guilty plea to being bribed by Russia and receiving a sentence of 10 and a half years in jail, Sweeney tried to find the answer to an unexplained question: who had introduced Gill to the spy who corrupted him? Because of Gill’s guilty plea, a lot of detail was left unexplained.

Sweeney asked Farage for a candid account of what he knew, but none was forthcoming. Sweeney wrote: “If people are thinking of electing Farage to be our Prime Minister, or putting him anywhere near serious power, they should consider the sixth charge this book levels at him: that he was grossly irresponsible in his choice of party leader in Wales and has held his tongue on how a Russian spy got to turn his henchman to the dark side.”

The seventh charge levelled against Farage by Sweeney is that despite the compelling evidence that he was a Nazi at school, attested to by 34 witnesses, 12 of whom Sweeney had met, Farage continues to deny that he was – thus, says Sweeney, demonstrating that he is a liar.

Sweeney builds a convincing, multi-faceted case against Farage, delving far beyond the superficial and ill-informed opinion of many that he is a decent bloke that it would be great to have a pint with.

The book also exposes Farage’s personal greed in promoting the crypto-currency interests of his major donor, Christopher Harborne. Farage also has a vested financial interest in crypto himself.

If crypto was granted a beneficial tax rate in comparison with conventional capital gains, it would wreck sterling and diminish the revenue needed to keep our public services going.

Farage is a total charlatan and his malign influence on our politics needs to be recognised more widely.

The Real Nigel Farage by John Sweeney is published by Headline Press at £22.

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