In her own words, how Laure the waitress served Nigel... who then gave her Ukip job
ATTRACTIVE and vivacious Laure Ferrari first met Nigel Farage when she was working as a waitress in Strasbourg.
It was 2007 and Mr Farage was dining with his friend Godfrey Bloom, then also a Ukip MEP, when the 27-year-old brunette caught his eye.
‘I met these two MEPs and we started talking about politics,’ she later gushed. ‘The two Brits have no hierarchy and neither of them comes from a political background.’
Within months, Miss Ferrari had been elevated to Mr Farage’s inner circle as head of PR for the British delegation to the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group, led by Ukip.
It was quite a dramatic rise for someone who admitted: ‘Before 2005, I hadn’t a clue about politics. For me, it was old men who sat around talking.’
Born in 1979 and raised in Epinal in North-East France, Miss Ferrari moved 90 miles to study English at the University of Strasbourg, and then spent two more years there doing a master’s in communications.
After her studies, she took out a bank loan and opened a clothes shop in Strasbourg called Urban Flavor, as ‘I couldn’t see myself working for someone else’.
But the business did not flourish and financial difficulties led her to work as a waitress in the evenings.
The European Parliament holds meetings in Strasbourg once a month. It was thus that Miss Ferrari met Mr Farage and entered the world of politics.
According to a close friend, the pair became almost inseparable and regularly attended political events and parties together in Brussels and Strasbourg.
‘Everyone says that I am Nigel Farage’s parliamentary assistant, but this is not true,’ she told the EurActiv news website in 2014. ‘I was head of public relations.’
There are subtle clues to her affection for Mr Farage on her social media accounts.
In June 2013, she teasingly tweeted a link to a newspaper article headlined: ‘Why do more women want to bed Nigel Farage over David Cameron?’
Her stock continued to rise among Eurosceptic circles and in 2014 she joined the Alliance for Direct Democracy Europe (ADDE), a coalition of anti-EU parties.
In March 2015, she was appointed executive director for the ADDE’s think tank, the Institute for Direct Democracy Europe. It was around this time she set up an IDDE office in Westminster, London, and moved to Britain.