‘Why I’ve left the Conservatives for the Brexit Party’
Former model Nikki Page has abandoned the Tories after 45 years for Nigel Farage’s Brexiteers. She tells Cristina Odone why
Clad in skinny jeans and a casual top, an ex-model of a certain vintage sashays into a west London café. Every man looks up. Who says you can’t be a blonde bombshell at 63? Nikki Page – an astonishingly youthful former Conservative councillor who turns heads as easily as she once grabbed headlines (more on that later…) – has been unveiled as a candidate for the Brexit Party in the European Elections on May 23.
But before I can ask a single question, she notices that I’m wincing because of a painful shoulder and instantly orders cannabis tea. Not many politicians would have noticed my discomfort – or dared suggest such an unorthodox solution. But then, Page has always sprung surprises: during her four years on Westminster city council, she won Labour’s approval for her policies on social housing; as a candidate for the London mayoral race in 2002, she sought a referendum to abolish the mayoralty altogether as a layer of superfluous and costly bureaucracy.
Today, as she takes her place within Nigel Farage’s group, alongside dotty Ann Widdecombe, “red” Claire Fox, and posh Annunziata Rees-mogg, she is surveying the wreckage of her former party following the recent council elections. With the Tories down more than 1,200 seats and Labour losing six councils when it had hoped to make substantial gains, she must be feeling vindicated in her new allegiance. “The council elections show the electorate are equally furious with both main parties. It is clearly time for a major change, not a small change.”
She continues: “You don’t have to be ashamed of having voted for Brexit. We are suffocating in an atmosphere where people are frightened to say what they want to say, on campus, in Westminster or in the workplace.”
Page positively pops with indignation: “I was talking with a group of twentysomethings. I admitted that I was pro-brexit. There was silence – I feared the worst. Then, one by one, these young people whispered that they were Brexiteers, too. How can it be that they felt they couldn’t voice their real opinions?”
She answers the question herself: “Because of a smug establishment that doesn’t understand what real people care about!” The glamourpuss has morphed into a blonde Boadicea, eyes ablaze, voice throbbing with passion. “We want our country back! What’s wrong with wanting to take back control of our laws and our money?”
But why is she convinced that Farage’s party is the one to deliver her wish? After all, this is a team hastily cobbled together for an election no one was expecting.
“Claire Fox is a former Trotskyite with nothing in common with Ann Widdecombe or me. But Claire and Ann see this as a question of democracy. So do I – 17.5million people are being told their vote didn’t count. You can’t stand by and let this injustice happen. Some of our campaigners have given up their jobs to do this: I’m taking leave from mine at Variety, the children’s charity, to stand.”
She admits she has met Farage only once, but liked him tremendously: “It feels like you’re getting the real deal, not a career politician.” She enthuses about his “charisma”, “humour”, “optimism” and, above all, his fight for this country’s sovereignty.
She stresses this is not “xenophobia, or racism, or any of the other insults that are regularly hurled at us. I love Europe, and am a Francophile. I have European friends. When we get together, we just avoid the ‘R’ word.”
It must have been a wrench to abandon the Conservatives, a party she had belonged to since she was 18. “It was hard, but it isn’t my party any more. It no longer seems to represent strivers, the backbone of this country who work to make better lives for themselves and their families. It doesn’t even seem remotely competent.
“I thought after the referendum – when I spent my weekends delivering thousands of leaflets – that the Government would work towards Brexit. But the Government has totally botched it. I’ve known Theresa May off and on since the Nineties. It was always incredibly difficult to know what she really believed in, but I am baffled by how she could get this so completely and utterly wrong. No one out there trusts her any more.”
“Out there” is where Page has her roots. She was raised in Leicester, in a house without central heating. “My parents were strivers. They were from Birmingham, which is why I chose to run in the West Midlands. My values are Midland values – fairness, common sense, common decency. And I have a Brummie sense of humour.”
Page left school at 16 to work as a fashion buyer, but she was spotted by a model agent who brought her to a girls’ hostel in Bayswater, west London, where boys were not allowed past reception. Her then-boyfriend, an influential record producer, shielded the Twiggy lookalike from hands-on mentors and predatory photographers.
In that pre-metoo era, they must have been legion? “You learned how to handle it,” she shrugs, then remembers when “a peer of the realm sidled up to me at the hotel bar during party conference and pressed his room keys into my hand, whispering: ‘See you later.’ I just stuck out my arm where everyone could see me and dropped the keys, saying loudly: ‘I think you are looking for these…’”
Her feisty persona drove a varied career. Weary of the catwalk, and after a few stints on the BBC’S Sale of the Century game show, she landed a job in property. She became the first female executive at Bovis, the building firm, before being elected to Westminster council, where she rose to be housing chairman. She is now ambassador for the charity Variety and recently set up events company Ripple Effect.
Along the way, she married and divorced three times. She shakes her head ruefully at this track record: “I know! But two were very brief when I was young, and my third ex-husband and I were together for 22 years, and remain friends.” She says the greatest political influence in her life remains John Redwood, the Tory grandee and veteran Eurosceptic for whom she worked as chief of staff for 10 years. When their respective marriages broke up in 2002, they dated for a year, becoming an unlikely society couple.
At the time, the All Souls intellectual and the cover girl were, she says, “inseparable”, and shared the same agenda: “Small government, low taxes, sovereignty.”
Any suggestion of an affair before they became free agents, as was widely reported at the time, is speedily rebuffed: “If people didn’t know me, they should at least have recognised that John is utterly incapable of duplicity.”
Page claims surprise at being considered “a femme fatale”, though admits to dating much younger men. How much younger? “Well…” – a mischievous smile – “let’s just say the only thing I like about Emmanuel Macron is that he married Brigitte.”
Actually, Page looks a lot younger than 66-year-old Madame M – so, what’s the secret? She reels off a long list of vegetables and an even longer one of banned ingredients – red meat, dairy, gluten, alcohol… Given her restrictive diet, I’m surprised she has the energy to do anything other than drape herself across a light-blue Brexit Party placard, but in fact she practises yoga and pilates daily, power-walks everywhere and, at weekends, attends a dance class. Could Strictly Come Dancing be in the offing if she fails on May 23?
“We’ll do phenomenally well,” says Page. “That vote will be the first proper chance everyone in the country has to show their anger at the non-delivery of Brexit. What matters is that everyone gets out there to make it clear to the Conservatives, Labour and the establishment that they will not be bullied into giving up.”
But afterwards? I remind her that most polls show Brexiteers are now trailing Remainers. Page stretches herself to her full 5ft 9in and looks down at me: “I’d dispute that. The Brexit Party is thundering up the polls. And support for Brexit is even higher than people think. It’s just like when Margaret Thatcher was around: people were made to feel bad for voting for her. So they didn’t admit it to the pollsters. But when the time came, they did vote for Thatcher. Remainers, be warned.”
‘17.5m are being told their vote didn’t count. You can’t let this injustice happen’