Among those who cheered Farage’s vulgar assault were plenty of Tory M.P.s at Westminster. They are openly rebellious and disloyal to Prime Minister David Cameron and close to UKIP in spirit. Cameron has placated them by promising a referendum on whether or not to stay in the E.U. after the next election.
After the warm-up speeches, a hush of expectation fell. The Forum in Bath is an Art Deco movie theater now used mostly for concerts and evangelical services, and on the last Tuesday of April, it had the air of a revivalist meeting. In the foyer, they were selling books, button badges and even tea towels, while inside a lively, if middle-aged, audience nearly filled the former cinema.
They had come to hear Nigel Farage, the loquacious, dynamic, bumptious, bibulous, irrepressible leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, who was touring the country ahead of the elections to the European Parliament later this month. He has himself been a member of that body for 15 years and will doubtless be re-elected, although he belongs to it only to attack it, and his party exists to destroy it, or at least British participation in it and in the European Union.
That still seems quite a remote prospect, but these elections, separate from national elections, could have a drastic impact on British politics. As yet, UKIP doesn’t have a single member of Parliament, or M.P., in the House of Commons at Westminster. But if the polls are right, UKIP will come out on top in the European elections, ahead of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, who at present govern the country in uneasy coalition, as well as the opposition Labour Party. Even if UKIP doesn’t believe in the E.U., winning in the European elections will greatly enhance their position back home.
‘Of course I said some ridiculous things,’ Farage says of his schoolboy days with a grin and a shrug, ‘not necessarily racist things.’ Grinning and shrugging is something he does often.
Maybe because he thought he was about to upset the political apple cart, Farage had a swagger in his step as he took the stage at the Forum to thunderous applause. He spoke easily, at some length, with no notes or prompter, relentlessly hammering away at his theme: The country threw away its independence and is now governed by the Eurocrats of Brussels, who have let in a flood of immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania. All will be well if the United Kingdom leaves the European Union.
Outside, there was a knot of demonstrators as well as a BBC television truck: Farage is news. Two protesters held a banner that said (incorrectly as it happens) “Nigel Farage is a banker,” and one woman had a small handwritten placard reading, “They called Hitler charismatic too.” If the comparison is hyperbolic, she’s hardly alone. For all his apparent geniality, Farage is seen by plenty of people as a pernicious figure and his party as a danger to the political health of the nation.
In addition to an egg thrown at him as he was walking through Nottingham three days later, a deluge of criticism and scandal has recently washed over him and his party — from allegations of financial impropriety to a concerted campaign to brand UKIP as racist, an accusation that some of its own activists have done nothing to discourage. And all of it is laughed off by Farage with cheeky bravado. At his peroration in Bath, he said that he had received a letter from a 92-year-old former bomber pilot: “Nigel, you only start getting flak when you’re near the target!”
He likes to dish out flak as well as take it. In February 2010, Farage gained a measure of international fame, or notoriety, when Herman Van Rompuy, a Belgian politician who was the newly appointed president of the European Union, was in Strasbourg, France, to address the Parliament. Farage told Van Rompuy to his face that he was a man with “the charisma of a damp rag” — those tea towels on sale at the UKIP meeting in Bath bore Van Rompuy’s face and the words “Genuine Belgian Damp Rag” — and that no one outside Belgium had ever heard of him. It left Van Rompuy in stunned silence and quickly became a YouTube classic.
Among those who cheered Farage’s vulgar assault were plenty of Tory M.P.s at Westminster. They are openly rebellious and disloyal to Prime Minister David Cameron and close to UKIP in spirit. Cameron has placated them by promising a referendum on whether or not to stay in the E.U. after the next election.
But here is a tangle of paradoxes. Many voters — British and otherwise — use the European elections as a way to vent their spleen against their governments, and conventional politics in general, but then return to the mainstream parties in national elections. However well it does in these European elections, UKIP is still not certain to win any seats at the British general election in a year’s time. And because Labour and Liberal Democrats are opposed to a referendum on European withdrawal, one will be held only if the Conservatives win an absolute majority at Westminster. That doesn’t seem very likely at present — and what makes it less so is the prospect of UKIP stealing votes from the Conservatives and handing the election to Labour.
Although UKIP has the E.U. as its central obsession, its support stems from discontent with much broader social and cultural change — a fundamental disquiet with the rapidly shifting face of England. Farage delights some and disgusts others, and yet no one is quite sure what to make of him, or even knows for sure who he is.
Nigel Farage was born in 1964, the son of a stockbroker who overcame alcoholism but ultimately left his family. Farage grew up in a village on the North Downs of Kent, where he still lives “within a mile or two,” and not far from Chartwell, the home of Winston Churchill. His is an incantatory name. Like Ronald Reagan and Benjamin Netanyahu before him, Farage enjoys nothing more than to be photographed in front of a portrait of Churchill, who is continually invoked by UKIP speakers — four times in Bath, by my count.
Farage went to Dulwich College in south London, an excellent private school with the distinction of having educated P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. By his own account, Farage was a noisy and annoying boy, and a letter from his school days recently returned to haunt him. When he was chosen to be a prefect, one of his teachers wrote an objection to the boy’s offensively right-wing opinions. “Of course I said some ridiculous things,” Farage says with a grin and a shrug, “not necessarily racist things.” Grinning and shrugging is something he does often.
–Cullrd From Reuters
