What is Nigel Farage Really Like?

Nigel Farage is often portrayed, by his enemies, as similar to Donald Trump – nothing is further from the truth. I spent extensive time working with Nigel when I founded 'The Brexit Party'. I know him well.

Trump makes an art form of being rude, the epigrammatic put-downs are his trademark: 'Sleepy Joe', 'Crooked Hillary', 'Crazy Bernie', 'Pocahontas Warren', 'Low-Energy Jeb Bush'. I believe that what you see with Trump is what you get. He invites and thrives on conflict. He does not care what people think about him.

Do you remember Farage saying something similar? Never. Nigel has political arguments but thinks politeness is really important.

I realised early on in my dealings with him that he desperately wants to be accepted as a member of the establishment – the nice, funny guy, the liked star of the show. Always perfectly groomed, appearance is crucial to him, but without the casual, intentioned, purposeful humour of the loud tie and baseball cap and Village People shuffle of Trump."

There is something Meghan Markel-esque about him – that big smile, the repeated scripts, a slight vacuousness, the supreme self-confidence and relentless ambition – to get to the top at all costs.

This need, as well as political expediency, has driven so much of what has happened inside ‘The Brexit Party' and more recently 'Reform'.

A while back Nigel was hounded by the left wing media for talking about Romanian men next door. He realised he had made a big mistake. He did not want that type of criticism again and he certainly did not want to be called racist. He also wanted continued access to mainstream media.

Farage has studiously avoided making comments about grooming gangs, Sharia law, cousin marriage or terrorist attacks. There is a fine line when honesty is sacrificed to expediency.

The Brexit Party made Nigel 'nicer', more 'diverse', and less partisan than UKIP. Even Marxist Brexiteers were brought in.

Gerard Batten, former MEP and one of the founding members of UKIP, worked with Nigel for over twenty years. They dislike each other intensely.

He said to me, 'You do not know Nigel.'

He was right.

I did not listen to Batten. I was naïve. I liked and trusted Nigel. I have worked in business, both small and multinational. I was used to agreements being honoured. In trading, your word is your bond.

Nigel almost never writes emails. Emails are paper trails. Nigel is incredibly cautious about what he says. He assumes that there is a camera recording at all times. Every word is calculated. Nothing is randomly done. A single tweet of ten words might have twenty iterations. The email I received offering me the Great Yarmouth constituency was the only email I ever received. I gave Nigel my shares for nothing, in a non-profit trust and it now appears that Yussef has bought them.

I believed Nigel. The second he had the power I gave him, people in the Brexit Party were told to have nothing to do with me, implying that I was a useless administrator, racist and nasty. My husband is black and my children are half Nepalese but such details are apparently unimportant when there is a personal agenda to pursue.

Nigel makes you feel like you are his best friend until the need for power intervenes. He casts people aside like flotsam, without a second thought. Ever wondered why UKIP never got an MP except ones brought in like Douglas Carswell? Anyone who threatened Nigel or who was potentially better than Nigel had their political career ended by him.

Nigel picks up new people like hoes get picked up by punters in Patpong Road. You are his bestest friend one minute and gone the next. He met Henry Bolton on a train and the next moment, he was being promoted by Nigel to be leader of UKIP, despite having previously been a Liberal Democrat with no political experience. As soon as Carswell, a man of great principle, dared to challenge the short money, he was the devil incarnate. Godfrey Bloom, an old friend of Nigel’s and one of the cleverest people in politics, was starting to outshine Nigel as an MEP. One minor joke blown out of proportion, and it was over for him.

There were so many people Nigel got through in UKIP, too many to list. More recently he has picked up Nick Candy, a showy millionaire property developer, to be treasurer – someone who has probably never been to Hull or Middlesborough or slept in a two up, two down terrace house in a slum – let alone having anything in common with the people who live there and vote for Nigel. Even worse is Charlie Mullins, another millionaire who was an ardent, vocal and pretty unpleasant remainer. Out go Habib and Lowe, two of the best, and in comes Zia Yussef, paying to buy himself in as Chairman.

There is something tremendously fragile about Farage. I do not know if it is extreme narcissism or neuroticism: he has a total inability to brook any dissent. Nigel surrounds himself with sycophants and 'yes' men, such as dull as dish-water, failed conservative, Richard Tice, and these men now at the top of Reform are happy to bow down to their messiah.

It is a 'boy's own' drinking club. 'Posh George', George Cotterill, a grandson of Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton is always by Nigel's side despite being a convicted felon in the United States. Nigel's favorite restaurant is Boisdale, where wine can be over two thousand pounds a bottle. He loves famous people despite portraying himself as a man of Jaywick Sands in the constituency of Clacton, an area that looks like something out of a bombed out horror movie surrounded by litter and discarded sofas. It is often ranked as one of the most awful places in Britain. The people there voted for Nigel en masse.

Farage cannot deal with intellectuals or extremely clever people. He would never manage Elon Musk. Perhaps that is why Elon tweeted that Nigel was not fit to be leader and Rupert Lowe would be better. Farage sent one of his young male employees to go and see Jordan Peterson Speak and reported back that it was 'boring.'  Douglas Murray, one of the greatest writers on the threat of Islam to the West is given the same moniker.

I once had a meeting with two senior advertising executives whom I had brought in to help, and were to give a million pounds of free marketing for The Brexit Party.  An hour-long meeting was scheduled. One of them had a notepad. I told her, 'You won't need that.' Sure enough, Nigel proceeded to entertain them for fifty-five minutes with jovial anecdotes about himself and in the last five minutes said thanks for coming. Guidance is non-existent. Farage will tell you what he doesn't like but has no plan for what he does like. He does not do detail.

When I chose a treasurer who was a well respected chartered accountant from Essex with years of experience of doing both political party accounts and company accounts, Nigel said 'Can't you get someone more high profile than that?' I chose people who can do the job competently and honestly, not because they are C List celebrities.

Behind that charm, there is something else – a ferocious anger. I only saw it once when I was going to support someone that Nigel did not agree with. The tone changes, the ruthlessness comes out. The implication is that if you do not do what I want, you are politically finished. This is what he is attempting to do with Rupert Lowe. The difference this time is that Lowe is very popular and a sitting MP but the coldness of these allegations is stunning, with a speed that suggests it was planned well in advance.

People have called Nigel all sorts of names, one being rabble rouser. This is not the problem. Farage's problem is that he can never build good teams or work with people who are better than him and he does not have the intellectual depth himself to develop sound policy.

He will blow in the wind in a way that Trump never would. If that means saying nothing about grooming gangs or Islamic terrorism, so be it. If it means saying it is too difficult to deport illegal immigrants, so be it.

That is why nothing will change even if he does gain ruling power.