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Nigel Farage: was he a teenage racist?
Farage’s denials have been ‘slippery’, but should claims from Reform leader’s schooldays be on the news agenda?
It is the hectoring, jeering tone in Nigel Farage’s voice that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui, said The Guardian. Farage used the same tone, at Dulwich College, the south London private school that both men attended in the late 1970s, when he would sidle up to him and growl: “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. He would sometimes add “a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”, says Ettedgui, now in his 60s, who was one of the few Jewish children at the school. It wasn’t just Jews the young Farage singled out. “I’d hear him calling other students ‘P*ki’ or ‘W*g’ and urging them to ‘go home’,” says Ettedgui.
Smear campaign
Farage has denied the specifics of these allegations. But The Guardian has spoken to 22 contemporaries and former teachers who say otherwise. They remember him, as a prefect, singling an Asian boy out for detention, for no reason; doing Nazi salutes and chanting “Oswald Ernald Mosley”; and singing racist songs as an army cadet. No one is claiming that Farage still holds such views. “Nevertheless, extreme views in any person’s history matter, particularly if that person may be a future PM.”
“A smear campaign is always a nasty thing,” said Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph. “Deploying rumour and insinuation to taint the reputation of someone you hate – it’s the lowest form of politics.” Obviously, Farage denies these claims, but “there is just something so ominous, so elementally unpleasant about marshalling childhood rumours against a 61-year-old man”. The most recent offence The Guardian accuses him of took place more than 40 years ago. In the case of some allegations, he was just 13 or 14 at the time. “Jim Callaghan was prime minister. The Sex Pistols were storming the charts.”
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Bear in mind, too, that social norms were different back then, said Niall Gooch in The Spectator. “There were not the same sensitivities around racially charged language. It is absurd for this to be an issue in national politics in 2025.”
I agree up to a point, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. We were all idiots at school, and I wouldn’t want to be judged for many things I did as a 16-year-old. But we weren’t all vile racists. Farage’s sort-of denials have been “slippery”. He claims that he “never directly racially abused anyone”, and didn’t engage in “racism with intent”; that it was only “banter”. Even so, surely it’s “revealing” that he apparently chose to make jokes about the Holocaust, and to sing horrific songs about gassing Jews and P*kis. The child is father to the man. Isn’t it fair to suspect that Farage’s teenage prejudices might have an influence on his “grown-up” policies?
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