BIOGRAPHY
Dominic Sandbrook
One Party After Another
The Disruptive Life of Nigel
Farage by Michael Crick
Simon & Schuster £25 pp608
Nigel Farage had cheated death
twice already when he boarded
the plane that almost killed
him. When he was 21 he was
hit by a car on a pelican
crossing and suffered serious
injuries to his head and left
leg. Less than a year later he
was diagnosed with testicular
cancer and told that it was
“almost inconceivable” that it
would not have spread to his
stomach. But luck was with
him. He soon recovered from
the car accident, while the
cancer hadn’t spread after all.
Fate had clearly chosen him
for higher things.
Yet, as he waited on the
Buckinghamshire airfield,
Farage was nervous. It was May
6, 2010, election day, and the
plan was for his little chartered
plane to fly a banner urging the
people below to vote for Ukip.
“I just hope the plane doesn’t
blow up and crash!” Farage
joked to his aides on the
tarmac. He took one last
anxious puff on his cigarette
and squeezed into his seat.
Then the plane took off, and
the future of British political
history hung in the balance.
If Farage had been killed
that day in 2010, as the banner
wrapped around the rudder
and his plane plunged to
earth, would Britain have left
the EU? Perhaps not. At the
end of his enormously
readable biography, the
journalist Michael Crick
suggests that, alongside Blair
and Thatcher, Farage was one
of the five most significant
politicians of the past 50
years. With his gift for
publicity, it was Farage who
turned hostility to the EU from
a cranky obsession into one of
the great themes of our
national life. It was Farage,
too, who first popularised the
link between EU membership
and mass immigration, a
crucial component of the
Leave campaign’s success.
No other political outsider,
Crick says, has made such an
impact on British history.
Farage is, of course, a very
familiar figure. But he’s too
often reduced to a caricature,
and one of the great qualities
of Crick’s book is that he turns
him back into a complicated
human being, a blend of
“egotism, arrogance, duplicity,
dishonesty [and] hypocrisy”,but also bonhomie, drive and
“extraordinary energy and
stamina”.
He was born in 1964 in
Kent, the son of a stockbroker.
Even at Dulwich College,
where he is still a regular at
old boys’ events, he was a
self-conscious character. He
wore a striped blazer and a
boater, carried an umbrella
and cane and loudly espoused
views that were hair-raising
even in the late 1970s. One
teacher complained he was
an avowed racist, another
remembered him shouting at
another boy, “Shut up, you
Jew,” and some classmates
recalled him boasting that he
had the same initials as the
National Front. But perhaps
this was just teenage showing-
off. “The picture is confused,”
Crick says, a little generously.
Having become a City
commodities trader after
leaving school, Farage was
drawn into politics as part of
the tiny Anti-Federalist League
(later Ukip), founded by the
historian Alan Sked in the early
1990s. At first politics was just a
hobby, but a key moment came
when Farage volunteered
to help in the Newbury
by-election in 1993, driving
Enoch Powell to a public
meeting. The unworldly Sked
won only 601 votes, but Farage
was smitten. In Crick’s words:
“He loved the selling and
persuasion of the campaign,
trying to charm and convince
total strangers on the street.”
It’s clear that for Crick
Farage’s greatest asset was his
skill as a communicator. He
adored meeting people and
could “speak human”,
distilling constitutional issues
into resonant everyday
phrases. His style might have
been tailor-made for the age
of social media: his infamous
attack on the EU Council
president Herman van
Rompuy in 2010 (“You have the
charisma of a damp rag andthe appearance of a low-grade
bank clerk”) has been seen
millions of times on YouTube.
But like so many successful
politicians, Farage was also
very lucky. As Crick points
out, if the former Labour MP
turned chat show host Robert
Kilroy-Silk had played his cards
more skilfully, then he, not
Farage, might have become the
face of Ukip. Similarly, FarageA joker who
had the
last laugh
Nigel Farage’s impact rivals Thatcher and
Blair, says this hugely readable biography
was lucky that Paddy Ashdown
persuaded Tony Blair to
introduce PR in elections for
the European Parliament,
which gave him a Brussels seat,
with all the perks and expenses
that came with it. Above all,
Crick argues, Farage was
enormously lucky that Nick
Clegg chose to go into coalition
with the Tories in 2010. Until
that point voters disillusioned
with the two main parties had
been drawn to the Lib Dems,
not Ukip. But as Clegg’s star
dipped, so Farage’s star rose.
The paradox is that for all
his boozy charm and public
bonhomie, Crick’s Farage
emerges as a surprisingly
mercurial, anxious, moody
figure. He is a terrible organiser
and has no grasp of public
policy; he makes disastrously
bad decisions and is constantly
distracted by obscure feuds. AsAlmost Dickensian Nigel
Farage in Strasbourg in 2016He would
choose Hattie
Jacques over
Kate Moss
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VINCENT KESSLER/REUTERS20 6 February 2022