As the allegations of Nigel Farage’s racist and antisemitic school bullying multiplied, it was hard to keep up with his shifting array of responses. At times, in his evasiveness and discomfort, he has looked like that most un-Farage of things: a nervous politician, anxious not to say the wrong word.
Last week, however, he angrily returned to his preferred posture: brimming with indignation at the moral hypocrisy of elites. He lashed out at the BBC’s “double standards” for indulging the allegations, when the broadcaster itself showed racist jokes and skits back in those days. Farage announced it was not he who should apologise, but apparently the BBC that should say sorry “for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 1980s”.
This was undoubtedly Farage’s most Trumpian moment yet, and the reaction from many commentators on the left and centre was shock and ridicule. His dismissal of the many credible allegations was unsettling; his reference to a “lower grade” BBC journalist was nasty; he appeared thin-skinned, incoherent, almost deranged; everyone seemed to agree that Farage should have simply said sorry and sought to move on. But in this understandable distaste, it was also possible to detect a certain complacency: a belief that Farage had overstepped the mark and would suffer the consequences, that any behaviour deemed “Trumpian” was a losing strategy. Farage has every reason to believe that such assumptions are false.
Despite (or because of) the blowback, Farage probably considers his rant a success. It put him back on the attack, transgressing social norms and setting the news agenda. The rightwing media sphere, which Farage knows he can rely on, lapped it up. The Daily Mail splashed the story on Friday’s front page with the words: “Reform UK leader turns tables on broadcaster”. Isabel Oakeshott, TalkTV’s international editor (whose partner is Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader), saluted Farage’s righteous grievance with the BBC’s “outrageous” bias. Meanwhile GB News, Farage’s personal national broadcaster, shared his rant on social media with the tagline: “Nigel Farage destroys the BBC”.
Farage chose his target well: even putting aside the BBC’s crisis-afflicted state, the broadcaster has been a bugbear among conservatives since its inception. But the form of his attack was even more revealing than the target. While he did briefly deny making any offensive statements at school “in any malicious or nasty way” – he also produced an anonymous letter from a Jewish Dulwich classmate who said that despite the “macho tongue-in-cheek schoolboy banter”, he had never heard Farage racially abuse anyone – the main purpose of the tirade was to imply that everyone was as bad as each other. So even if he did say things like “Gas the Jews” or “That’s the way back to Africa” – which he didn’t, or at least not with malice, not that he can remember or that it matters – why are his accusers pretending that they are any better than him?
Nigel Farage demands apology from BBC over racism allegations – video
They are either complicit in the allegations, like the BBC, or – in another of Farage’s favoured rebuttals – “politically motivated”, like his former classmates who have spoken out. In the same vein, the Spectator followed up this week with a defence of Farage that stated “all schoolboys were once obsessed with Hitler” and “so even if the teenage Farage made the sort of remarks attributed to him – and he has denied doing so – he would be entirely typical of his class and generation.”
This strikes at the essence of Farage’s political style, and why he is unlikely to ever apologise. He would rather a country where every accusation of prejudice seems fraudulent. To apologise would be to seek forgiveness, and thus to acknowledge a higher moral authority – whereas his liberating promise to his supporters is that no one has the right to look down on them. Farage knows that it is cynicism and contempt – contempt for the major parties, contempt for the mainstream media and for metropolitan elites – that fuels his rise.
Farage’s degradations of the public sphere are akin to Trump’s, but they follow older precedents, too. Hannah Arendt once argued that totalitarianism thrives not through cunning lies and gullible masses, but by making cynicism pervasive – by cultivating “the essential conviction” that “politics is a game of cheating”. Once this conviction spreads, brazen lies and immorality could be cast as brave and virtuous, because they exposed “the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest”. Arendt noted how the leaders of these movements revelled in allegations of hypocrisy: it was part of “the old game of épater les bourgeois”, shocking the middle classes, what we might refer to now as “owning the libs”.
Applied to Farage’s politics, this insight suggests that he does not want to be innocent: he wants everyone to look guilty. He does not need to be believable; he needs no one to be credible. He does not need to provide hope, only to sow cynicism and contempt. No wonder that Reform, despite its small size, seems to attract so many unseemly characters and allegations. Hardly a fortnight had passed since the news of its former deputy leader in Wales being sentenced to jail for accepting Russian bribes when a former Reform councillor told the police the party spent beyond legal limits in its campaign to win Farage’s seat in Clacton (an allegation that the party denies). If politics is a game of cheating, why play by the rules?
Farage knows anything that deepens the feelings of contempt and nihilism in Britain helps his cause. His questions right now won’t be whether voters care about the school allegations or alleged electoral impropriety, but whether he at least appears distinct from the major political parties that they disdain. The task for Farage’s opponents is not only to sustain scrutiny on his character – the nature of which we have long known – but, more importantly, to find a vision of the country that challenges the nihilism on which Farage feeds.
