by Nigel Farage
Even as we celebrated our election victory, Carter-Ruck were locked in a battle with Rupert Murdoch and News International which could easily have escalated into a bloody – and bloody ruinous – war.
It was Michael Gove, a Times columnist who has since become a Tory MP, who stepped between these two pawing and snorting herd-bulls and insisted that his newspaper end the deadlock. I owe Michael one for that. An apology was duly printed (at the bottom of page 2) and the whole business closed. I still reckon that that Times article, though fanciful, cost us seats in Yorkshire and in the north-west.
On the night of the election count, it was eighty-seven minutes into the programme before David Dimbleby deigned to notice our existence, and, as we excitedly awaited results of immediate importance to all present in Winchester Guildhall, Bruce Parker of BBC South approached me with a microphone. He demanded, ‘So, Mr Farage, we see that M. Le Pen’s party is doing well in France. You must be pleased?’
I usually try to nurse a drink on such nights, but this fatuous, malicious lie posturing as a question sent me seething to the bar where I ordered several large gins before painting a smile back on my face.
I suppose the ease with which I took to the broadcast media was the consequence at once of nature and of nurture. My mind teems with opinions and jokes, I like people and I have always made it my business to understand my opponent’s point of view and to observe his or her ‘tells’, as poker-players call them – the telltale signs of confidence or nervousness.
The diversity of my interests too – ridiculously rare in an age of ‘professional politicians’ – enabled me to answer questions about business, sport, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and other subjects of more interest to the discerning public than the intricacies of some impertinent bureaucratic Brussels directive.
So although Question Time is easily the scariest programme of the lot, I love it. We genuinely do not know what questions are to be asked or how the audience will react. Again, at first I had to battle against ignorant preconceptions. The producer and his team treated me as an unwelcome token guest, there on sufferance and to be regarded with circumspection, much as if I bore some vile ideological contagion.
On one of those early appearances, I was arguing that the tenuous peace which Europe had enjoyed since World War II owed nothing to a united Europe but a great deal to NATO. A member of the audience, plainly untroubled by the strains of excessive cerebration, gave it as his opinion that a largely British and American alliance all seemed to him ‘rather racist’. I confess that I dumbly gawped at this intervention.
At dinner afterwards, David Dimbleby expressed the concern which made the programme so nervous. He said, ‘Of course, the BNP question hasn’t been answered.’
Nor is it likely to be unless it be asked, but then, save in the minds of the BNP and the BBC, there is no BNP question. There is also, so far as I know, no Girl Guide, Flat Earth or Holy Roller question. We have nothing in common with the BNP. They are racist. We are inclusive. They are authoritarian. We are anti-authoritarian. They hate Europe, to be sure, as they hate all of the rest of the world and a large percentage of Britons. We love Europe but happen to reject the EU.
The all-important fact to them is that we are successful where they are not. They therefore want to be associated with us.
They are not. They never will be.
At the private post-production drinks party that evening, the man with the strangely tranquil brain who had thought NATO racist was drinking with the producers.
To be fair to Question Time, they too had been the victims of lies and garish headlines and were, I suppose, nervous. They genuinely believed that, beneath the surface charm and the professed cause, there must be another, secret, nationalistic or racist agenda. Convinced and passionate amateurs were simply a novelty to them.
I resolved then that I must just be myself, express my love of life and my belief in people and so, by degrees, persuade the general public and Question Time that we were what we seemed – representatives of millions of ordinary, hardworking people who resented unelected government and would quite like to get back to running their own affairs.
You think that experienced politicians look confident up there on the stage? Like hell they are. They know, as do I, that it is the one programme on British television which causes people to stop you on the street and challenge or congratulate you. So they pace and fiddle and check their notes. They consult their policy advisers to discover just what it is that they think. They mutter retorts to imagined heckles.
I was in the Green Room before my third or fourth Question Time when I suddenly realised that I was in fact the least terrified person there.
The professional politicians had to please their masters without alienating the public and vice versa. The celebrities from television or show business – barring the stand-up comics like Marcus Brigstocke – had little experience of thinking on their feet. I had been facing random questions and vigorous heckling for years and I was concerned to please no one. I have, I confess, made a point since then of ordering a gin and tonic rather loudly and chatting to the bar-staff about just about anything as the audience gathers. I am sure that it makes my fellow panellists feel more relaxed.
Slowly the truth sank in. I had no secret agenda.
I had another advantage. It has long been a staple of the established parties in such forums to make sincere assurances which mean nothing. So the Tory, for example, pledges with tears in his eyes that his party will, if elected, cap immigration or reclaim British fishing-grounds. His Labour opponent knows full well that this is gibberish because no British political party has such power. They have all signed it away under the terms of the various European treaties. He will say nothing, however, because he is about to outline his own exciting but entirely fictional immigration or employment policy.
I know the exact terms of the treaties which prevent such autonomous action, and I have no interest in pretending that these lies are even potentially true. I flatter myself, then, that Question Time tends to be more interesting when I am there. Politicians look askance at me and shuffle in their seats. They have to tell something akin to the truth.
I have made some unlikely friends (David Blunkett, for example, enjoys a few glasses of red with a Eurosceptic and is himself deeply mistrustful of European institutions) and have enjoyed some right royal barnies (with Alistair Darling on compulsory metrication, for example).
I have even, though reluctantly, made enemies. I suspect that David Davis may never forgive me for challenging him over his gallant ‘stand’ on detention without charge for twenty-eight days. He was posing as a champion of freedoms because he opposed the government’s proposed 42-day suspension of civil rights. I simply asked him, ‘Do you stand for habeas corpus?’ to which he had no reply.
I have appeared regularly over the last decade. I knew, I think, that I was accepted when I gave it as my opinion that, after a snowy spell, people should be back at work. Will Young accused me of puritanism. I protested that I was no puritan and David Dimbleby, with a grin, said, ‘Ye‑e‑s‑s. Well, before we go too deeply into that…’ The audience laughed spontaneously. David now looks to me as a source of cigarettes as soon as we leave the stage rather than of extreme views when we are on it.
After that first successful European election, I got myself into more trouble. Paul Henley from the independent film company Mosaic wanted to make a documentary film, funded by the BBC and Arte, about the workings of the EU. Since this exactly reflected our aims in being there, we agreed. For four months, Paul followed us wherever we went in the course of our duties.
The resulting film, The Enemy Within: Desperately Seeking EUtopia, was entertaining and hugely instructive. It demonstrated (at huge expense to the licence-payer) the total futility of the intricate system of pseudo-government which (at huge expense to the tax-payer) kept all those thousands of Brussels functionaries in business and put so many thousands of British sole traders and small enterprises
out of it.
The BBC did not want to show the film.
Oh, it was shown to acclaim in every other EU country and in the United States, but in its country of origin it was shelved without explanation.
Lord Peter Shore raised the subject in the House of Lords. By what right did a public service broadcaster charged with instructing and entertaining the public presume to censor – to ban – a film made at the public’s expense which did just that?
The BBC declined to answer. They conceded. Sort of. They showed the film to the two women, one man and one West Highland terrier with cataracts who watched BBC Knowledge.
And, just in case the terrier was of a sensitive disposition, they issued a solemn warning before it was shown. ‘Viewers should be warned that Mr Farage expresses extreme views as part of this programme.’
I did, too. Like ‘Have you ever seen so much money thrown away on so little?’ and ‘No matter what these people do or say, the elector cannot remove them from office’.
Please ensure that no young or impressionable people are in the room as you read this page. Here is an example of my extremism: ‘Whatever your vision of the future, you are not going to be able to attain it or even aspire to it unless and until you are free to go your own way. For as long as we are part of this intrusive and ever more powerful Soviet, we can’t make decisions for ourselves or determine our own future. What we do with our freedom once we have won it remains to be seen, but we are demanding that we be allowed to take that first step and reclaim responsibility for our own lives.’
Is the suppression of such dissident ranting in the national interest? Or is it pernicious, Soviet-style censorship?
I grew angry. It was not just the production team who had put a lot of effort into the making of the film. We too had done many interviews and had had our first steps in Brussels and Strasbourg dogged by Paul.
I taped the film and, from my office in Redhill quite openly sold the VHS tape at a not-for-profit £5 a throw for the information of our members only. One punter who turned up claiming to be a party member from Portsmouth then revealed himself to be an officer of Surrey Trading Standards Authority, tipped off by a sorry and chagrined former member.
Since the film had otherwise sunk without trace and its makers had not instituted proceedings against me, I had had no idea that I was breaking any law. I merely thought that it was the same as taping an instalment of a favourite television programme for a friend. Apparently I was transgressing four separate Acts of Parliament.
A long, expensive and wearisome battle with the authorities ensued. In the end, it was accepted that I had acted in ignorance and had made no profit so no further action was taken.
The next pre-election assault from the press came in 2004, this time on the Sunday before the election, when the Mail on Sunday ran a double-page spread headed, as far as I remember, The Wild, Drunken, Womanising Existence of Nigel Farage. For myself and for UKIP, I was unconcerned. In fact, my response was, ‘I only wish it were all true’.
We had never set out nor claimed to be plaster saints, after all, but normal people with normal weaknesses, and I have perhaps more normal weaknesses than most. What I did not have was one half of the strength or stamina required for my alleged excesses. Still, I have on occasion behaved a little wildly and I have enjoyed the odd drink from time to time, so what the hell.
My sole reason for concern was that our principal backer at the time was Yorkshire millionaire businessman Paul Sykes, a determined, ascetic man of high moral principle who had consistently urged me to behave better. Monday’s edition of the Mail carried still worse allegations.
I need not have worried. On the Tuesday morning, Paul rang to tell me that he and his wife were ‘right disappointed’ that there were to be no more instalments.
In January 2006, I blundered into my very own media embarrassment. Just one week after the Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten was exposed as having rented a fastidious Polish former ballet-dancer called Tomasz for ‘a gross act of humiliation which only a few punters ask for … quite revolting really’, the News of the World printed a story about me.
This time it was a 25-year-old Latvian girl named Liga whom I had met in the local pub one evening when I was far too well lubricated to occasion a similar effect in her, but I had been flattered and foolish enough to accept her invitation home for a drink.
This is because I am a male of the species and so easily flattered, for which I apologise. She claimed that I was a beast in bed and ‘we must have had sex about seven times’. Given the amount that I had drunk on the night in question, the former statement was probably accurate – or would have been had I got to a bed. The second was a physical impossibility.
She was, as far as I remember (which is not much), a sleek and seductive creature, and I will not splutter and expostulate that, after the first bottle, I would necessarily have behaved like Galahad in full armour and been immune. I hope that I would have, but I can give no guarantees.
There are, however, occasional merits to excess. On that night it saved me. I fell asleep on her sofa where, by her no doubt truthful account, I ‘snored like a horse’.
But of course, as any nineteenth-century maiden could have told me, protestations of innocence will avail you nothing if you have spent the night with another. The altar or the scandal sheets await you. Liga wasn’t screwed. I was.
I don’t think that this fantasy did our election prospects any harm, not least because none of the UKIP faithful believed a word of it. It did get me into fearful trouble with Kirsten. She did not find Lothario Nigel after a hard night’s drinking credible, but she was furious at me for being so bloody stupid and inconsiderate as to pass out three miles from home. That made two of us.
There have been media heroes in the UKIP story – journalists and broadcasters who, even if not unquestioning supporters, have been open-minded enough from the outset to acknowledge that we represent many of their readers, listeners and viewers and that our cause is just.
Booker and Jamieson knew enough about the EU and its workings and had met enough of its victims to become involved in their own story. They have been crucial elements in our development.
Simon Heffer has always given us a fair crack of the whip and has shared a platform with me at every election in which I have stood. Kelvin MacKenzie has given me good advice; James Whale and the late Mike Dickin of TalkSport gave our message a priceless platform when those serving themselves or the metropolitan elite declined to do so. James, who is now with LBC, even wanted to stand as the UKIP candidate in the London mayoral election, but Ofcom informed him that he could not be mayor and a broadcaster, and the notion of James sans mike was unthinkable, the thing itself probably dangerous.
Of the national columnists aside from Booker and Heffer, Quentin Letts of the Mail, Stephen Glover and early Eurosceptic Andrew Alexander have all been fair and sympathetic to our libertarian message and respected our sincerity. Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun and Michael White of The Guardian have always treated us as a serious party with a genuine, dedicated and therefore important following.
That seems to me a pretty distinguished roll of honour. In fact, if it had been left to the bright, bolshy, opinionated columnists whose business it is to see sub specie aeternitatis and to understand the moods and movements of the nation, we would have had favourable or at least fair coverage from the outset.
It has been the time-serving trendies, more anxious to impress their fellows than to serve truth, who have consistently prejudged us.
We have often been outspoken and careless. Real people often are, particularly when they are angry. We have, however, always tried to answer questions rather than evading them and, if we don’t know the answer, to admit it.
But for all my occasional idiocies and those of my fellows, I believe that we have an authenticity and sincerity alien to the professional politician. Maybe one day it will change and we too will be infiltrated by those more interested in glory than in the freedom
of the British people.
For now, however, I think that we can assert with certainty that no one who has battled through the years of routine calumny and derision, squabbling and monetary sacrifice, negligible election returns, wilful neglect by the media and empty meeting halls has done so from anything but conviction.
I think too that such authenticity has nowhere been more clearly seen than on the most democratic and largest platform of them all, more immediate even than Question Time and accessible to millions who would never watch a BBC political programme or attend a village hall meeting.
On YouTube, my speeches can be seen for what they are, spontaneous outbursts from the heart – or the spleen – unpolished, unfiltered by sneering comment and captions. I am now daily hailed in person or receive encouraging emails from people of my children’s age, here and abroad, who have seen me on the web.
Of course, the other parties have a much larger and certainly a much more professional presence online, but they cannot compete with us. Why? OK. Sincerity? Energy? Roughness round the edges? Anger? Marginalisation? Occasional excess alcohol? The thrill of the unquestionably authentic?
Maybe it sounds absurd to those who merely look at the ages of some of our party faithful, but Clapton and Stephen Stills are sixty-five this year and Jimmy Page sixty-six. Janis Joplin would be sixty-seven.
Labour is over-produced prog-rock with full orchestra, lasers and interminable dreary solos. The Tories are a made-up boy-band doing cover versions for the weenie-boppers and the grannies. The Lib Dems are Enya, an indoors, studio-enhanced celebration of fictional nature.
What you are witnessing and what I feel up there, with all its absurdities, all its strutting, all its occasional discords, is something very closely akin to real, live rock and roll.
*
Those who in future follow in our footsteps and attempt to storm the fiercely guarded citadel of the established parties can rest assured. Play it straight, roll with the punches, shed liabilities as fast as possible – and the jury of press and public opinion will at last give you a fair hearing.