A life straight out of Fawlty Towers – just don’t look up ‘Farage, alcohol’ in the index!

Will there one day be a blue plaque erected to Nigel Farage on the railway station at West Dulwich? It was there that he would catch the daily train to his posh public school, and there that he perfected his party trick of spitting across the double rails and hitting people on the platform opposite.

As a schoolboy, Farage – who then pronounced his surname ‘Farridge’ – was a show-off. He wore highly polished shoes and had a Union Jack handkerchief. When Brideshead Revisited was on television, he chose to stroll around in a striped blazer and a boater, carrying a cane. He relished the fact that he shared his initials with the National Front and doodled NF on his school books.

Not everyone was impressed. When, in the spring of 1981, his headmaster appointed him a prefect, a number of teachers objected, describing Farage’s views as ‘racist and neo-fascist’. They brought the headmaster’s attention to his propensity for singing Hitler Youth songs. One of them, an English teacher, had thrown Farage out of his classroom for yelling antisemitic abuse.

Forty years on, a contemporary at Dulwich College, who is Jewish and had relatives murdered in the Holocaust, recalls how Farage would sidle up to him and say ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Gas ’em’.

He remembers Farage as an oddball, determined to be noticed. ‘I didn’t feel bullied, and I might have done if he had acolytes bearing down on me as a group… But he had no clique; he wasn’t a classic bully with his gang. He was very much a loner. I kind of thought he was slightly mad, a nutter, as David Cameron later said, or a “fruitcake”.’ Nevertheless, he can’t forget him. ‘Those words, that voice, retain an icy clarity to this day.’

Farage went straight from school to the City of London, where he became a market trader, yelling away in a fancy blazer and then getting sloshed. This was the era of Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney. In 1989, he founded a lunching group for those with what he described as ‘a resilient liver, and a hearty appetite, and a deep mistrust of the European Union’. One afternoon, after a very long lunch washed down with beer, chablis and port, he disgraced himself and was given the boot. ‘I knew that I was unemployable,’ he now admits. So he set up his own company, the ominously titled Farage Futures.

Judging by this brilliantly well-researched and endlessly entertaining, if slightly overlong, biography, alcohol has played a major – perhaps even a dominant – role in Nigel Farage’s life. Under ‘Farage, Nigel’ in the index, the entry ‘alcohol and’ takes up nine lines of numbers, amounting to 64 pages in all.

For instance, if you turn to page 65 you find that, after a meeting of Ukip’s national executive in 1997, Farage took some of his colleagues to a Mayfair strip club, full of women in nothing but g-strings, selling drinks. ‘The rest of us had one drink, and in that time Nigel had half a dozen,’ recalls Ukip’s founder, the earnest academic Alan Sked. ‘He was completely blotto. As I left, I saw Nigel’s head was wedged between one woman’s breasts. He confessed later he had no idea how he got home.’

In the words of another former colleague, Farage ‘treated Strasbourg as one long booze-up’. First he would go out with a large group to a big dinner at a smart restaurant. ‘We wouldn’t be clearing out till midnight. He’d then go p***ng off to a bar and drinking till three o’clock in the morning and sometimes not even go to bed. It was thoroughly irresponsible. There would then be several appointments in the morning that he’d miss. He came in tennish, elevenish, worse for wear, having been drinking all night.’ In 2001 he even missed a crucial vote on the EU budget – a key part of Ukip’s raison d’être – after overdoing it the night before.

No doubt Farage would argue that these ‘former colleagues’ are disappointed souls, bent on pursuing their own personal vendettas against him. But over the course of his career, Farage seems to have turned a disproportionate number of faithful colleagues into sworn enemies. ‘No leader in modern British history can have left so many enemies and casualties among his party colleagues,’ concludes Michael Crick, who interviewed more than 300 people for this book. ‘Dictators worldwide would have admired Farage’s ruthlessness and ability to show no mercy in purging critics and potential rivals.’ On one page he tries to entrap a colleague to ‘test his loyalty’; on another he places a mole in a colleague’s office. The phrase ‘things turned very nasty’ crops up somewhere late in the book, but you could insert it virtually anywhere and it wouldn’t seem out of place.

Behind that grinning, saloon-bar bonhomie he emerges as vain, conniving, egomaniacal and ill-tempered. ‘A totally self-centred, narcissistic, egotistical person,’ says one Ukip stalwart. ‘Snarling, thin-skinned and aggressive,’ says another.

‘He has to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, the baby at every christening,’ says Neil Hamilton, the cashfor-questions reprobate who, to my surprise, turns out to be the current leader of Ukip. Neil Hamilton, indeed! In its short history, Ukip has promoted an unfeasible amount of cranks and nutters to prime positions. For a few weeks Farage heralded the permatanned smoothie Robert Kilroy-Silk as the new messiah, only to turn on him when he started stealing all the attention.

It’s good to be reminded of all those fly-bynight Ukip leaders, some of whom lasted only a matter of weeks. Who can forget Paul Nuttall, for instance, who claimed to have lost ‘close personal friends’ at the Hillsborough disaster, before being forced to admit it wasn’t true. Or Henry Bolton, the ‘safe pair of hands’ who succeeded him, only to be forced out after dumping his third wife by text, leaving her for a busty model who specialised in racist texts.

This book often reads like an over-populated episode of Fawlty Towers, full of doors slamming and trousers falling, false alarms, panicky cover-ups and goose-stepping, passing conmen and cheating couples. At one time, Farage himself seems to have been simultaneously cheating on his wife and three girlfriends.

Yet this book is far from a hatchet job. Crick kicks it off by acknowledging that Farage is ‘one of the most important politi

One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life Of Nigel Farage Michael Crick

Simon & Schuster £25

★★★★☆

cians of modern British history’. He says his own encounters with him have been ‘always a challenge, always fun, never dull’. He generously applauds his skills as a communicator – ‘articulate, quick on his feet, controversial, funny, self-deprecating and often outrageous’ – and his extraordinary stamina. He highlights Farage’s acts of kindness and studiously corrects false rumours about him – for instance, that his father was a member of the National Front.

The intrepid Crick looks less kindly, though, on his hypocrisy. Over and over again, Farage argued against the corruption of the EU, while merrily breaking its rules to channel funds into Ukip. Having thundered against MEPs employing their wives, he employed his own, without telling his colleagues. He promised he wouldn’t join the EU gravy train, and then happily helped himself to every perk going. Ukip MEPs would travel economy rather than business, then pocket the tax-free difference. When he reaches the age of 63, he can look forward to an annual EU pension of £63,400 – not bad for someone who made a career of campaigning against the excesses of the institution.

Nowadays he is the unctuous cheerleader for Donald Trump – ‘the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life’ is the way he described him at a rally – and has his own show on GB News. His suspicion of the Establishment is equalled by his desire to join it. It rankles, says Crick, that he was never given a knighthood or made ambassador to Washington.

In his school days he loved ringing radio phone-ins and voicing controversial opinions. It was a hobby that was to prove the making of him.