Warning: you may find the opinions
expressed by the controversial American
pundit Candace Owens and her English
fiancé, George Farmer, offensive.
Can you imagine? Two intelligent,
articulate, politically involved millennials- he, 28, she 30, both ‘Bible believers’ –
who say things like, ‘the Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie.’
And ‘#MeToo? It cheapens the suffering of real rape victims.’ And: ‘A lot
of women who haven’t had children by the age of 40 seem to go crazy. If
you don’t use your eggs, you get scrambled.’
Over breakfast, these all come from Owens, the Connecticut girl who
was raised in what she calls ‘gross’ social housing, suffered racial harassment
from the son of the mayor of her town and was once a pro-Democrat
who interned at US Vogue. Now she heads up the ‘Blexit’ movement,
which aims to convert African-American and Latino Democrats to the
Republican cause.
The Guardian calls Owens ‘ultra-conservative’ and ‘inflammatory’. Yet
despite holding such challenging views she wields some serious influence.
For one, as a well-known Trumpist blogger with 1.3 million Twitter followers,
she has the ear of the President. And she’s had celebrity endorsement
from Kanye West, too – last year, the rapper tweeted, ‘I love the way
Candace Owens thinks.’ And though West has since distanced himself,
there are plenty of others willing to eat up her
rhetoric – a whole soup of online voices clamouring
that she will surely be president one day. This
April, Owens made an impression at a congressional
hearing in Capitol Hill on the rise of hate crime
in US politics, accusing democrats of a ‘plantation’
mindset as well as ‘fearmongering’. Commentators
on the right trilled that, ‘Candace Owens has
shown us the way.’
For now, as well as heading up ‘Blexit’,
Owens is Communications Director of Turning
Point, the US nonprofit that fights for the
freedom to discuss conservative values on
college campuses. The Daily Mail brands her
‘the breakout black conservative star,’ while
The Sunday Times calls her the ‘President’s spiky new darling.’ Jacob
Rees-Mogg declared, of a recent Owens trip to London, that it was
‘a great pleasure’ to meet her.
Her fiancé, the English hedge funder George Farmer – another Turning
Point operative, ex-Bullingdon Club member and son of the self-made
commodities baron Lord Farmer – comes out with his own zingers, too.
Like, ‘The best life-chance that a child can have is to be born in wedlock.’
And, ‘There are only two biological genders. It’s a scientific fact.’ But what
really rouses Farmer – who got a first in theology at Oxford – are the mer-
its of low-tax, low-regulation British capitalism and the inequities of the
European Union. ‘It’s a toxic, socialist, genocidal superstate,’ he declares –
with some vigour, considering it’s only 8.30am. (He was ‘talking to Nigel
[Farage]’ earlier, so maybe that fired him up. Indeed, he’s now a candidate for
Nigel’s Brexit Party in the European Parliamentary elections.) ‘As the last
president of the USSR said, it is a mystery why, after the fall of the Eastern
Bloc, the EU wants to recreate the Soviet Union in Western Europe.’
Farmer has clout – in 2016, he became the youngest-ever member of
the Leader’s Group, who donated a minimum of £50,000 a year in
return for access to the Prime Minister; and last year, he chaired the
Tories’ lavish Black and White Ball. He has passion too. A ‘pretty close’
friend of such Leavers as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ben Bradley and Bernard
Jenkin, Farmer says that the Brexit debate ‘reactivated’ the student
campaigner in him. Not all his friends have been enthusiastic: ‘There’s
one who won’t meet me in public, in case we’re photographed together.’
But Farmer and Owens are together – very together. For fun, they
‘read The Spectator’ and talk politics to each other all day long. There’s
not a Rizla between them on anything from Israel to immigration – you
can probably guess where they stand – and both declare President
Trump to be ‘a genius’. The only thing they differ on is Farmer’s conviction
that ‘gorillas have eternal souls.’
Still, it’s the perfect morning for their provocative patter: we meet on
29 March, the date the UK is scheduled to exit the EU, and Farmer and
Owens have flown over from the States to attend the day’s Brexit rally in
Parliament Square. We’re in the plush surroundings of Mark’s Club in
Mayfair, where he will be hosting a Leavers’ party that night (he’s on the
club committee), and snatching an hour to talk about their convictions,
their aims – and their whirlwind romance.
They only met last December, at the soft launch of Turning Point UK.
A small reception had been planned at the Royal Automobile Club in
Pall Mall, to be hosted by the colourful John Mappin, a friend of the
US First Family and scion of the silver and jewellery dynasty. Except it
wasn’t so small. Mappin ended up dispensing champagne to 200 guests,
among them Royal insider Lord Plunket. Such immaculate social figures
as Robin Birley and Amanda Eliasch squeezed in with ragged-trousered
reactionaries like Rod Liddle and James Delingpole to hear Owens
proclaim, ‘We are in the midst of World War Three... It is an ideological
war we are fighting for Western values!’ Farmer
was there, and Farmer was smitten.
Three weeks later, they were engaged and
now they’ve rented an apartment together – ‘nothing
special’ – near Mount Vernon, Washington. They
will marry this August at the Trump Winery
near Charlottesville; and since the town is the
birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the recent
scene of murderous, race-related violence, Farmer
admits with a chuckle that it could be seen as
‘epic trolling’.
Still, those who live by the troll must die by
the troll. Due to his Turning Point links, Farmer
has received his share of abuse from left-wing
bloggers over his membership of the Bullingdon
and for going on a Bullingdon grouse shoot in Africa by private jet. He
shrugs off the criticism as partisan. ‘They never attack David Dimbleby
for it and he was a member, too.’ But raucous dining societies apart, the
old St Paul’s boy seems a presentable chap, in a sharp suit with livid red
lining from Scabal on Savile Row. And Owens is truly striking in electric
lime. Sitting close by her, he strokes her ankle, and raises her hand to his lips.
All very Mills & Boon, but how come their paths have brought them together?For Candace Owens, it all began in 2007, when she was 18
years old and living with her grandparents in Stamford,
Connecticut, because her parents had split up and home life
was chaotic. When she reported threatening, racist phone
calls, they were traced to a car in which the 14-year-old son
of Stamford’s then-mayor was a passenger; legal action resulted in a
$37,500 settlement. Owens subsequently developed anorexia and an
abiding interest in current affairs, initially as a standard-issue, pro-choice,
oppressed-feminist Democrat.
She clearly had drive. By 2012, she was an intern at US Vogue in New
York. (The nicest thing she’ll say is that it was ‘kinda boring, not cere-
bral enough for me’. Her eating disorder, she jokes, helped her fit in.)
But since the work ‘was never going to pay off my student loans’, she left
for a private equity firm and subsequently dabbled in internet activism.
PHOTOGRAPHS: INSTAGRAM/@REALCANDACEOWENS; JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS; OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY ANDREA HANKS In 2016, she became ill – it’s unclear why – which led to several months ]‘We are fightingan ideological war,’Candace Owensproclaimed. GeorgeFarmer was there –and he was smittentatler.com Tatler July 2019 9306-19WELL-GeorgeFarmerKC.indd 93 03/05/2019 15:27