Books Nigel the kingmaker ANNE ROBINSON One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage By Michael Crick
GARY WING
Simon & Schuster £25 Quite a few people – who shouldn’t – have a soft spot for Nigel Farage. You can see why. Funny, quick-thinking, selfdeprecating, authentic. Also egotistic, arrogant and duplicitous. UKIP, which the then unknown 29-year-old joined in the early nineties, was created by the euro-sceptic Alan Sked, an academic and historian from the London School of Economics. Young Nigel couldn’t have been culturally more poles apart from Dr Sked. As the seriousminded Sked soon discovered. After a national executive meeting in London, Nigel persuades Sked and a few others to follow him to a Mayfair strip club. According to Sked, it was incredibly sleazy – ‘full of hatchet-faced women wearing nothing but G-strings, selling drinks’. Sked has one drink to Nigel’s halfdozen. As Sked leaves, he describes Nigel as ‘completely blotto’ and notes Nigel’s head is wedged between a woman’s breasts. No matter: when re-elected to the NEC, Nigel tops the poll. Soon he is promising that UKIP will be great, ‘once we get the right people in charge’. As history shows, the right people – or rather the right person – turns out to be Nigel. The one who regards ‘lunch’ as two bottles of red. The one who, when he discovers there’s only mineral water in the television greenroom before a live debate with Nick Clegg, warns he’ll withdraw unless something stronger is delivered, pronto.
He’s very lucky to have Michael Crick as his independent biographer. Crick is an old-fashioned, first-rate political reporter, who’s produced a strikingly even-handed work. Delicious in its detail. There’s Nigel’s early childhood, spent living in a semi-detached Victorian cottage in a village outside Bromley. The boy who spends hours in the nearby parkland in walking distance of the North Kent Downs, searching for fossils. The day pupil at Dulwich College, remembered mostly for ridiculing classmates when he spots a fragility. The star of the debating society, whose elevation to prefect causes a mildmannered female English teacher to write a strong letter of protest. Who cares? By then, Nigel is dressing like the successful stockbroker he is to become, with no time or desire for further education.
John Major’s decision to join the ERM lights his political fire. By 2006, he’s the leader of UKIP, doggedly fighting for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. The brilliant upholder of democracy who nevertheless runs first UKIP – then, after the referendum, the renamed Brexit Party – as his own personal fiefdom, without any discernible sign of consensus. He’s the Farage who turns emotional when referring to King and Country, or anyone he spots in a Bomber Command tie. Once an MEP, he uses the European Parliament as his personal theatre. Yet when his MEP days are over, he refuses to take the £153,000 severance pay. A chapter headed ‘A Weakness for Women’ delves into Nigel’s affairs when he’s still married to his German, longsuffering second wife. Bang in the The Oldie March 2022 55
