Nigel Farage: ‘There’s a good chance I will be UK Prime Minister’
Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party are riding high in the polls - above both Labour and the Tories. What makes the great showman of UK politics so popular?
Nigel Farage rolls into Hull like an old rocker on a comeback tour. Last week, he’d played the global Right’s Glastonbury, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in America, where he was “in conversation” with Jordan Peterson on a bill topped by JD Vance, Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, who performed what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Then he’d gone straight to Cornwall in southwest England for a Reform conference to recruit ground troops for May’s council elections; the conference was angrily protested by the Left-wing group Antifa, and the head of security, according to Farage, “got his teeth punched out”.
Now to Hull, a port city in Yorkshire, for a stadium gig. Reform UK people are buzzing. Not only have 2300 people paid a nominal sum (in order to stop protesters grabbing free seats and no-showing) to hear Farage speak, but there will be a huge “reveal”: the announcement of Reform’s candidate for mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire. No one will tell me anything except that this person is “very big in Hull”.
I’m to meet Farage first for a factory tour of Allam Power, founded by the late Egyptian businessman Assem Allam, a former owner of Hull City Football Club. (I assume this means his son Ehab will be the candidate, but he’s equally in the dark.) Farage arrives in a Mercedes with his spokesman Dan Jukes, plus the kind of hardmen-talking-into-cuffs security detail he now requires. I ask about the traffic up from London. “We didn’t drive,” mutters Jukes, an intense, tight-lipped terrier who nonetheless can’t resist hinting that these days he travels by chopper.
Both men are dying for a cigarette, and in the lift up to the boardroom I ask Farage why he still smokes. “I’m not giving the puritans the satisfaction,” he says, with a crackly laugh. So you’re prepared to die to spite them? “You only live once.” Upstairs the invited guests and I sit for coffee: there are two Reform-curious local businessmen, plus Ehab and Johnny Abraham, a financier friend of Farage who, when the MP was debanked by Coutts in 2023, helped secure him an account with Lloyds.
Farage, 60, is slighter than you expect: about 179cm tall, trim, just a hint of a belly. His outfit of Barbour jacket over a blue suit is unremarkable apart from the Union Jack socks: “I have about 20 pairs. People send them to me.” He is instantly on-brand: upbeat, mischievous, full of jokes, interested in strangers, with that key appeal for many British voters: that he’d rather be in the pub if only the country wasn’t going to hell. It helps him hugely that he’s the antithesis of the buttoned-up, serious Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who often seems so fearful of wrongspeak that he can barely say a word.
Farage has reason to be bullish: Reform is polling consistently above Labour and the Tories, with his personal approval rating exceeding Starmer’s. Reform looks poised in May to take hundreds of council seats in Labour heartlands: not just the “Red Wall” of the Midlands and northern England, but in Wales and Scotland too. Yet while Reform now has a bridgehead in parliament, after winning five seats last July, it is still, as Farage puts it, “a concept party”: a vibe, a national mood, a ragbag of positions – notably on immigration, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), cancel culture and net zero – but with no infrastructure to make them happen. So while in London Reform is staffing up its offices at New Labour’s old HQ, Millbank Tower, Farage is on tour building its grassroots by replicating the Liberal Democrat model. “[The late Lib Dem leader] Paddy Ashdown used to say you need ten councillors before you can have an MP,” he says. Farage also fancies a “social element” to Reform, just as Labour emerged from working men’s clubs.
Over coffee in the shiny marble boardroom, with a view of the kind of wind turbines Farage detests, the businessmen trade disaffections. They say energy bills are punitive and Farage talks about the stupidity of shutting Grangemouth oil refinery then importing fossil fuels. (“Reindustrialisation”, a JD Vance buzzword, has become a key Reform tenet.) They worry about the rise in national insurance contributions, and Farage says no one in the cabinet has ever launched a business. They lament Hull’s forlorn shopping streets: “Turkish barbers, we know what they are,” says Farage. “Money launderers for drug dealing.” (No one blinks at this sweeping, unsubstantiated claim.)
They say it’s hard to recruit full-time staff when “the benefits trap” penalises people for working more than 16 hours. Farage says Labour’s workers’ rights bill (which he voted against) hobbles business. Society treats everyone as fragile, they all agree. One man recalls his teacher giving him the strap, and Abraham complains that his kid’s sports day was a “participation exercise” with no winners or losers “in case someone was in tears – but that’s life”. I ask his child’s age. “Six.”
At Reform, says Farage, everyone does a 100-hour week. I turn to Jukes, 28, who joined the EU referendum campaign at 18. He says he missed Christmas lunch to get Reform’s membership ticker (now at 219,000), which showed the party was bigger than the Conservatives, projected onto Westminster “when no one was around to stop us”. He and Farage have another cigarette then we start the factory tour.
Allam Power builds and sells generators, mainly to African countries with unreliable mains power but also as back-ups for British hospitals or data centres. “I have a generator at home,” says Farage casually, which seems odd since he doesn’t live in the wilds but on the Kent-London border. Later, while dismissing crypto as a bit too libertarian for him (although he’s speaking soon at a Las Vegas crypto conference), he says he owns gold because it’s a tangible commodity in an uncertain world. A generator and a gold bar, I say, thinking of what Elon Musk calls “postapocalyptic warlord potential”. Are you a prepper? “`Yes, I’m ready!” he cries and I can’t tell if he’s joking or doing business. (He was paid £280,000 in December and January as “ambassador” for Direct Bullion.)
Then we hang up our pink hi-vis tabards and return to the boardroom for beef wellington and red wine. (The advance menu had no vegetarian options.) Farage drinks a single glass; “I’ve cut right down – barely a third of what I drank 25 years ago,” he explains. Over lunch we learn he became a grandfather twice during the election campaign. “My first grandson was born on June 23 – Brexit Day!” And that he hasn’t taken a holiday for two years (not that he likes sitting by a pool with a book – “I like to be up early doing things”), although he does get down to Falmouth each summer to fish for bluefin tuna that can weigh 110kg or more. He likes shooting, too, but it’s become too expensive. He keeps fit by walking his labradors, Baxter and Pebble. What colour are they? “Black,” Farage says gleefully. “Black Labs Matter!”
Trump, he says, is “terrific fun to be with. Very real. Makes people feel great. The conversation is like table tennis. Really fast. He grills you for information”. He says Zelensky should take Trump’s minerals deal. “Ukraine needs proper security guarantees.” Even here, the day before the White House humiliation of Ukraine’s president, Farage’s support for Trump is – according to polling by More In Common – an issue where Reform is profoundly at odds with voters. Later Farage tells me: “Yes, I’ve been a supporter of his openly for ten years. What am I going to do, pretend I’m not? Do you want me to be a fraud?” Then he cites Trump’s actions on migration and DEI, saying: “Polling shows a lot of the British public agree with what he stands for, even if they don’t like his personality.”
Someone asks if he plays golf with Trump, and Farage says that while as a young man he had a four handicap, his hand-eye co-ordination was wrecked when he was knocked down by a car in his twenties. That is just the first of Farage’s brushes with death: the second was cancer, in which he lost a testicle; the third was walking away from a light aircraft crash in 2010. Does he believe, like Trump after his assassination attempt, that God was saving him for a purpose? Farage looks sombre. “Someone was,” he intones. It’s interesting that he doesn’t claim special status with the Almighty, but then at CPAC, when Jordan Peterson whanged on about breeding more “Judeo-Christian” babies, Farage replied: “Well, I may not necessarily be the best advocate for monogamous heterosexuality and/or stable marriage, having been divorced twice.” Farage – currently in a relationship with the 45-year-old French politician Laure Ferrari – is more at ease with Maga than the Christian conservative crowd.
Then, since the businessmen press him, he tells the whole plane crash story: how the pilot knew he was doomed from take-off when the Ukip banner it was towing got tangled in the tail. How he broke every rib, punctured his lung and smashed two vertebrae; how his greatest luck was the hot engine bouncing away, so that, drenched in kerosene, he didn’t burn to death. “Then, when I was in the ambulance, my adrenaline, which had been at the highest level it’s possible to be, suddenly crashed. My God, that is the worst I’ve ever felt in my life.” The legacy is back pain on long car journeys and a fatalistic attitude to life. He once announced to a whole Ryanair flight that, thanks to him, everyone was safe, since there were infinitesimal odds of him being in a second crash.
According to Jukes, Farage used to hate speaking about the crash. But now his indestructibility is absorbed into his personal myth. The story he peddles is of a reluctant warrior returning to the fray. In 2021, after Britain had finally left the EU, Farage felt his life’s work was done, resigned as Reform leader and semi-retired. Or, more accurately, cracked on with earning a fortune flogging bullion, presenting GB News and making Cameo videos wishing fans happy birthday. But then, at the 2024 election, he felt a calling – or perhaps a chance, in the Tory collapse – of winning a seat at his eighth try, and stood in Clacton, Essex. He won.
Lunch has run on. Farage skips apricot tart and cheese. It’s almost 4pm and Jukes is keen we leave for the Connexin Live centre where an excited Reform crew awaits. Apart from his smooth executive assistant, Victoria, Farage is surrounded by adoring Gen Z men. Farage himself “texts like an old person” and prints out his emails. But not being obsessively online is perhaps a political strength, putting his mindset closer to the average voter’s. Whereas Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, 45, seems frequently distracted by X talking points.
Meanwhile, his young team have built him a social media presence far beyond any other party leader’s, with 5.4 million followers across the platforms. On TikTok, 60 per cent of his 1.2 million are under 30, thanks to Jack Anderton, who is 24, tall, ethereal and clad in black. What makes a hit Farage TikTok? “The most viewed was where he linked immigration with how hard it is for young people to find a house.” Anderton scrolls to a Reform tweet that shows the crime rates of various foreign nationals: Albanians come top. “Ministry of Justice figures,” he says. He tells me that in his home city, Liverpool, his brother won a school election standing for Reform. What would you call your politics, I ask – hard Right, populist Right, far Right? “Right-wing progressive,” Anderton says.
These young men, who chose Eminem’s Without Me (“Guess who’s back!”) as Farage’s election song, remind me of the adoring Momentum types who once clustered around the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Now, the Right has its own Magic Grandpa.
As Farage disappears to rehearse, I worry I won’t get a proper interview, just the lunchtime chitchat. But an hour before the event I’m summoned to Farage’s green room, where one of his boys is making him a G&T. “Denis Thatcher got to 88 on gin and fags.” I ask for water. “Haha! No water, only gin!” For the first time, Farage seems tired – he was up at 5am. I tell him I’m just five days younger than him and ask if he has his Freedom Pass yet. “No, but it’s not safe for me to travel on public transport any more.” He was horrified to receive an over-sixties discount on his annual eye test: “I offered to pay full price.”
I ask Farage to define Reform politics. “I say we’re absolutely at the centre of public opinion. Right of centre.” What about the AfD party in Germany? “Pretty hard Right.” Yet you sat with them in the European parliament, I say. “No, I sat with a couple of them whom I liked and still like. But there are many in the AfD I wouldn’t contemplate working with.”
Farage says Reform is introducing more thorough vetting after the 2024 candidates list was riddled with former British National Party members, antisemites, antivaxers and assorted cranks. Like Ian Gribbin, who fought Bexhill and Battle, who said Britain should have made a pact with Hitler and women were “the sponging gender”; Lee Bunker (Exeter), who thought the black Labour MP Diane Abbott should be deported; and Garry Sutherland (Exmouth), who was prosecuted for kicking a dog.
It was easier to keep out racists when the BNP existed, says Farage, “because that’s where they all went”. I ask what he made of Steve Bannon’s apparent Nazi salute. “I know Bannon very well; I don’t always agree with him. I can only think Steve was taking the mickey out of Elon Musk [who did a similar gesture at a Trump event].” What if someone did this salute tonight? “We wouldn’t have it.”
Would he let Andrew Tate, whom he once described as “part of the conversation” about masculinity, join Reform? “No. He’d be a terrible distraction. But, look, he appeals to young men who feel emasculated. And quite frankly, when lads go to Germany to watch England and are told not to drink more than two pints, what do you expect?”
Nothing has put more wind into Reform’s sails than the announcement of immigration figures under the Conservative Party of 906,000 in 2023. Farage sees it above all as a betrayal of Brexit and the end of free movement. At rallies he speaks of a “population explosion” of ten million migrants in a decade to explain why roads are clogged and people can’t afford a home. Does he understand that this rhetoric makes many ethnic minority people uneasy? “You want to get out more,” he scoffs. “When I was at Heathrow last week, an Indian chap checking me in said, ‘Stop the boats! It’s unfair! We came here, we worked bloody hard for 40 years.’ My good friend Johnny [Abraham, who is black], he’s not offended by immigration talk… the only people who think we are racist are middle and upper-class types, and a few in the media, obviously. Most people, regardless of where they or their grandparents came from, know uncontrolled mass immigration has devalued everyone’s lives.” He claims Reform now has more black and Asian members than the Lib Dems.
Reform’s plan for stopping the boats is first to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and escape its “activist judiciary”, then deport illegals – “All this nonsense about we can’t send people back to Afghanistan. Well, we can and should” – and, when all else fails, “We just dump them back on France’s beaches.” Won’t the French quickly stop this? “We’ve given them half a billion quid, for what?” But Farage retains a classic Boomer suspicion of ID cards – “I don’t want to be stopped in the street and asked to show my papers” – even if they might deter migrants.
I ask if Reform has a woman problem. (Apart from Victoria, the only women I meet all day are serving food.) Farage says the men/women split in July was 58/42 per cent. “A bigger male propensity. Not huge, but significant. What’s interesting is, of those that have become Reformers since the election, it’s pretty much 50/50.” Farage says that’s because “men tend to buy in to new ideas more quickly than women, who are more cautious. That’s why men make more mistakes.”
I ask if he finds Tory leader Kemi Badenoch a disappointment. “She will be lucky to survive past June. Even if she was supertalented, even if she worked hard, was an amazing communicator, she wouldn’t do well because the party is split down the middle. Half of them should be in the Lib Dems and about 30 per cent should be with us. The Tories are done.”
He thinks Starmer is rattled by Reform, illustrated by him repeating his line that “Farage is fawning over Putin”. (Any hint of pro-Kremlin sympathy, as Corbyn found after his response to the Skripal poisonings in 2018, is repellent to British voters.) But I point out that in 2014 he said Putin was the world leader he most admired. “This is a load of cobblers. I said it when he was a widely admired figure by many politicians… I also said I wouldn’t want to live in Russia.” It’s odd, I say, how political hardmen are drawn to each other regardless of ideology. “I don’t think I’m a hardman. Do you?”
Does he think he will be prime minister? “There’s a good chance, yes.” What are the odds? “About 35 to 45 per cent at the moment.” Then he has to prepare for his speech. Are you nervous? “I’m thoughtful.” Do you enjoy performing? Farage’s eyes gleam: “I bloody love it.”
I head for the press balcony and watch the conference hall start to fill. The crowd skews male, is mainly late middle age and almost entirely white. I go down to chat with the audience and find that most grew up in Labour households, but all voted Brexit. (As did 68 per cent of Hull.) Apart from an enormous man in a Union Jack suit, they seem ordinary voters. And on this freezing weeknight, 2300 of them have driven for up to an hour just to hear Nigel Farage. How many would come for Badenoch or Starmer? But then, who would cross the street to meet Richard Tice or any of the party’s other MPs? (Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, has been suspended by the party and referred to police over allegations of “verbal threats” against Reform’s chairman, which he denies. Lowe’s office is also facing bullying allegations, which he refutes too, accusing Farage of a “vindictive witch hunt”.)
Farage is the big draw, a celebrity, but he also reveals the thinness of his party’s batting order. He is introduced by one of Reform’s 78 local councillors, Maria Bowtell, who decries the “uniparty” of Tories and Labour – a popular Reform phrase – and then he bursts onto the stage to fireworks, wild applause and a sole cry of “Rule, Britannia!”
Farage speaks, as always, without notes or autocue, pacing the stage like a Saturday night variety compere. Some material sounds well practised. He commends former EU president Jean-Claude Juncker “for making me realise I didn’t have a drink problem”. Keir Starmer’s name gets a deafening boo. Farage tells his audience they are getting poorer, that crime is raging, and he talks of small boat crossings; then he asks, with a tinge of Trump, “Why don’t we start putting Britain first in everything?”
Five years ago, this would have been incendiary; today it is increasingly mainstream. Farage says he’s surfing a popular wave, but I wonder if it has broken too early for him, four years before an election. “Wokeism” is in global retreat; Labour has started to echo Reform on deportations, defence and aid cuts. Maybe by 2029 Labour will fit squarely in the British political sweet spot of Left economics and social conservatism – once described as “fund the NHS, hang the paedos” – better than a gold bullion salesman.
Now finally, the big moment. A screen rises, revealing a boxing ring in which a young man pretends to spar. Clambering under the ropes is mayoral candidate Luke Campbell, bantamweight gold medallist at the London Olympics. A local hero, married to a model with three kids. Yet after this coup de théâtre, Campbell makes a faltering speech – “I am not a politician…” – and later admits Reform only recruited him six weeks ago. What are his priorities as mayor? “Er, I will ask the people of Hull.” Maybe fame is enough to get him elected, and this is a figurehead post with few powers. But Campbell exposes the problem in building a party from scratch with “ordinary” people: they lack even basic political experience. Up close, Reform is just the Farage Show and a bunch of Post-it Notes saying “details to come”.
As the crowd leaves, I look at my phone and see that Starmer has just aced his White House encounter with President Trump (starting a chain of events that will position him at the head of a European “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine, and boost his ratings). I try to seek out the Reform leader for his verdict. But Nigel Farage has already left the building.
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