Last week she revealed the Ukip leader lied about their 10-year affair to save Brexit. Now his ex-aide tells MoS: I was THIRD of Farage’s lovers to rush to his bedside after that horror plane crash
PULLED from the tangled wreckage of a plane crash in a remote Northamptonshire field, his face swollen and bloody, his spine chipped and ribs broken, things could hardly have been worse for Nigel Farage.
It would later emerge that the then leader of Ukip had escaped death by a matter of inches. Thanks to a now notorious publicity stunt on polling day of the 2010 General Election, Farage crashed to earth suspended upside down in the shattered cockpit, his head almost scraping the ground.
If that was a miraculous escape, however, Mr Farage’s problems were by no means over.
Because as The Mail on Sunday can today reveal, he would shortly face the arrival of not one but three determined women, all clamouring for his affections and a place by his hospital bedside.
One of them – as she explains today – was Farage’s long- term lover and former political aide Annabelle Fuller, who last week sensationally disclosed she had spent more than a decade as his mistress, before parting company with Ukip amid mental health problems and suicide attempts.
Accusing him of brazen hypocrisy, not just for lying but for breaking his marriage vows despite the party’s strong family values stance, she claimed Farage had instructed her to remain silent about their sexual relationship for the sake of protecting the Ukip cause and Brexit.
Despite her long relationship with a man she came to regard as her mentor, Ms Fuller was by no means the only woman romantically linked to 53-year-old Farage.
And, as she explains, party workers and officials were all-too-well aware of the fact as they battled to ensure that his illicit encounters did not come to light.
Today, describing the true extent of Farage’s tangled emotional life, Ms Fuller, 36, describes how Farage’s well-briefed aides were even dispatched to the entrance doors of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where he was recovering after the light aircraft crash, to ensure she did not come into contact with his German- born wife Kirsten, or French former waitress Laure Ferrari, another woman close to him who has since become his partner.
Not that such rivalries were on Ms Fuller’s mind when, in May 2010, she received a disturbing phone call.
‘Even though our affair was waning, we were still close and I wanted to see him elected,’ ected, she said. ‘A friend rang to tell me about the crash, followed i mmediately by a party official who said that I should make my way to the hospital as no one else was there.
‘ I was shaking with worry by the t i me I got there. I didn’t even make it inside before a woman who said she was his local aide barred my way.
‘We had never met but she must have been waiting at the entrance because she suddenly rushed out and said: “You can’t be here – Kirsten is here. You’ve got to go.”
‘I was taken aback and told her I wanted to see him; to check he was okay for myself. I was clearly very upset but she was a big lady and stood her ground.
‘I’m not a confrontational person and there were several TV cameras present, so I didn’t want to make a fuss. I turned around and went home.’ Farage, she says, later called her from hospital and apologised for how she had been treated.
‘I told him I wanted to come and see him and hold his hand but he said it was awkward. I just assumed Kirsten had ordered my ban.’
Some weeks later, Ms Fuller discovered it was rather more complicated and that she had in fact been prevented from entering because Ms Ferrari was inside, crying uncontrollably.
It would later emerge that Farage and Ms Ferrari had met some years previously in a bar in Strasbourg where she was working as a waitress. She had subsequently found a job in the European Parliament. Now, it appeared, their relationship was more intense.
‘ She must have been already nearby to have arrived at the hospital first,’ says Ms Fuller.
‘I’m told that Ukip members were trying to calm her down and move her out before Kirsten got there. They definitely didn’t want me to meet Laure either.’
Despite the subterfuge, Ms Fuller maintains Mrs Farage had known about and tolerated her affair with her husband for years. At one stage, s she says, there was something of a truce in their understandably embattled relationship. Kirsten even took Ms Fuller into her confidence , explaining she had considered moving to Germany with the couple’s two daughters.
The peace did not last. Amid the euphoria of Ukip’s historic gains in the 2014 European elections, where it won more seats than Labour or the Tories, Kirsten humiliated Ms Fuller by having her ejected from Ukip’s celebration party.
In the months that followed, Ms Fuller’s fragile mental health deteriorated, she attempted to commit suicide and she finally decided to leave Ukip.
In September of that year, Kirsten sent a series of damaging text messages to a senior Ukip official – texts, referring to Ms Fuller ‘as a nutter’. In one, she jokes in response to claims that Ms Fuller plans to write a ‘reveal-all’ book that Ms Fuller knows too much a nd needs to be ‘killed’.
The Ukip official, obviously shocked, responded by warning her not to put things in writing. There was,
‘Politicians groped and harassed with impunity’
Ms Fuller insists, no plans to write a book about the affair.
But the strain on the Farages’ 18year marriage had taken its toll and, earli er t hi s year, t he couple announced their split.
The news came amid reports that Ms Ferrari had moved into the politician’s £4 million Georgian home in West London. Farage later confirmed the relationship. Ms Ferrari is believed to have accompanied him to President Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January.
Today, Ms Fuller feels used and humiliated, saying that, having devoted herself to Farage and Ukip, she has been left with nothing. But then, she says, she is not the only woman in politics, whether in Westminster or Brussels, who feels the dice are loaded against them.
She is also by no means the first to be drawn into a shady sexual relationship with an older, charismatic man. ‘Whether it is in Westminster or the EU, you have a cause you believe in, a goal to achieve and live off the adrenaline of the rollercoaster ride,’ she says.
‘There is nothing much to do in either Brussels or Strasbourg except eat, drink and fornicate,’ she says. ‘You have got to be very, very ugly, impotent or have some kind of nasty affliction not to have an affair.’
Her relationship with the former Ukip leader flourished in this environment because everyone – even those without the conventional good looks and healthy bank balances – was doing the same, she said.
‘What MEPs do have is a killer pension, expense accounts and a budget to hire staff. Add the heady perfume of political power, chauffeured cars, plush hotels and business class air fares on foreign trips and they become like gods.’ She claims, in fact, that European politics is a hotbed of taxpayer-funded impropriety. Although her relationship with Farage was consensual, she feels that the conditions are ripe for harassment, with women feared being labelled ‘troublemakers’ if they complain. Ms Fuller first moved to Brussels in 2004, aged 23, with a long-term boyfriend whom other women would openly flirt with. Many women sought career opportunities or a well- connected husband. But t he men, she concluded, just wanted sex. ‘The casting couch still exists in politics. After work, there were always drinks reception sand parties with bad, warm white wine, and very little food, where older men and young women ended up flirting or in compromised positions,’ she says. ‘ Sexual harassment was a natural by-product. It was endemic. Politicians and their male staffers prowled, groped, stalked and harassed with impunity. They treated women like meat.’ One young secretary, who had been groped by a male MEP, was too afraid to make a complaint, fearing she would be labelled a troublemaker. ‘The men behaving badly do so because they know they will get away with it.
‘It was common knowledge who were the gropers and who were the serial sh***** s, but in the past, those who complained were accused of lying and frozen out.
‘I am not surprised by the sexual harassment complaints coming out of the UK Parliament, just that there have not been more.’
Ms Fuller knows that, without her help, Mr Farage would never have earned his place in history today as a major political player.
‘I created brand Nigel, man of the people,’ she insists. ‘He relied on me, but I feel he kicked me to the kerb when I became a problem.
‘Being a mistress was the worst decision I ever made. It belittled me. It dehumanised me.
‘Teflon Nigel just earned a reputation for being a ladies man – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.’
‘MEPs have killer pensions – they become like gods’