Power walks, snappy suits, even spinach for breakfast. Why Nigel is ‘Mr Newkip’
. . . and here’s the reason he’s looking so chirpy
NIGEL FARAGE is back and topping the polls, but there is something very different about the Brexit stalwart.
Sharper and leaner, he dismays photographers by studiously ignoring a pint plonked in front of him during a campaign stop for his new Brexit Party in an Essex pub.
‘I’ve got a better lifestyle than you do,’ he grins in tailored blue check suit, tanned and slimmer than ever before, despite still smoking his beloved Rothmans.
But an uncharacteristic coyness has emerged in the man who has made a career out of his big mouth: ‘This one is rather snazzy, but I won’t embarrass the maker.’
He seems almost bashful as he explains he has cut down on beer and vowed to live a ‘little bit healthier’ as he ‘very reluctantly’ returns to the political fray to avenge ‘Brexit betrayal’ – his insistence undermined by the hallmark Cheshire cat grin.
His long- time aides have been stunned at his regime of daily 5km power walks and Popeye- l i ke breakfasts of spinach: ‘I was out this morning early walking, yes’.
And why the dramatic change in lifestyle? Is he in love? For once he is actually speechless: ‘ What a ridiculous question to ask.’
But pushed, he admits: ‘ Life’s great. I’m happy, yes. I’m happy. I’m enjoying life.’
Friends tell The Mail on Sunday the 55-year-old is giving it a real go with the French politician Laure Ferrari, 17 years his junior, who was named as his mistress when news of his separation from his second wife went public in 2017.
And speaking candidly for the first time about his battle at the helm of his old party Ukip which he quit last year, Farage opens up about his inner torment: ‘Leading that party was daily misery. The skill was not to show it on the outside but sometimes it did show.
‘One of my fears of getting back involved with this was to get bogged down into the kind of Ukip nonsense that I had to live with,’ he told The Mail on Sunday after addressing 1,500 Brexiteers on Clacton Pier. ‘The whole thing was awful.’
But despite all this, he has come back and invested his own money in his new party that he insists he is ‘running like a company’ to avenge Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s ‘betrayal of the referendum’.
And it seems to be working, with polls showing his Brexit Party on course to dominate next month’s EU elections, as Ukip did in 2014. He said Tory Brexiteers folding to back May’s deal had given him a path back, and he rubbished the chances of Boris Johnson ever becoming PM: ‘Forget it, gone.
‘If you are going to vote for us to become a vassal state, why would anyone think that you could be leader? I can’t believe it.’
There is slick branding, blackedout Range Rovers follow the Brexit Party’s open-top bus and there are suspiciously well-dressed advisers lurking on every corner.
This is Ukip 2.0. It’s Facebookdriven and live-streamed across the internet. And there is clearly a lot of cash sloshing around, with 68,000 supporters having paid £25 each, giving what has been nickname ‘Newkip’ £1.7 million to come back with a bang. Farage said: ‘With this I feel we’ve got the timing right. I feel we’ve got the branding right. I just think the logo, the colours... it just kind of works, so I feel quite content.’
Mr Farage used his own cash built up from lucrative speaking tours in America in what he called the ‘start-up phase’ but is again coy about how much. ‘Not huge sums of money. It’s irrelevant. It’s irrelevant.’ But he’s clearly been spending time in the US because he talks like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur rather than the local bore down the Dog And Duck these days.
‘Once you’ve got the seed capital for a party then what happens is that bigger donors tend to come in. At the moment it is going incredibly well. I can’t think of any other parallels in this country where they use an online platform like this... I learnt a lot from Italy.’
He has clearly drawn inspiration from the populist Five Star Movement which went from the political fringes to government without a politician at the helm. And almost as if convincing himself, he added: ‘We are going to win. Of course we’re going to win. There’s no point doing it otherwise, is there?’