Within 36 hours of his return from the Australian jungle in December I ran into Nigel Farage at an awards dinner. Well oiled, he had come straight from one of his celebrated PFLs (proper f***ing lunches) in high spirits. I congratulated him on finishing third on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, for a record-breaking £1.5 million fee, and said I couldn’t have stomached snakes slithering over my face for any money. A sudden intensity entered his expression and he gripped my shoulders.
“I used to think that too. Every year since 2016 they’ve tried to get me on to the show and I always thought, no way, I couldn’t.” He leant closer. “But you know what? I always believed ‘mind over matter’ was woo-woo rubbish. But I swear to you, I just told myself, ‘I am not afraid, I am not afraid, I am not afraid.’ And Decca, it worked. I felt no fear at all.”
I first interviewed Farage in 2013, and probably the only thing on which he and I have ever agreed is that had he been killed in his 2010 plane crash — when his two-seater went down in a field in Northamptonshire — our country would still be in the EU.
Despite his politics, as a person I’ve always liked him enormously. This is our fifth interview and he is invariably unguarded, infectiously energetic, warm-hearted and funny. Why his critics were so surprised by his likeability in the jungle was a mystery. How else did they imagine he seduced so many people to his cause in 2016?
All around the ballroom guests were taking their seats, but his gaze remained locked. For once he wasn’t smiling. “I did 23 nights in that jungle. And it changed me. I’ve come out a completely different person.” Epiphanic light blazed in his eyes. “Because I am not afraid of anything now.”
The words sent a chill down my spine. At 59 he sounded like someone only just getting started.
The likeability is on full display when we meet for lunch at the Boisdale, an old Belgravia haunt of salmon-pink trousered Tories. Staff flutter around him, clucking with affection. He is just back from the Republican primary in Iowa, where he paid court to his great friend Donald Trump and caught pneumonia. Having been too ill to eat for a week, he orders the first actual food I’ve ever seen pass his lips — previous lunches having featured only Benson & Hedges and booze. The photoshoot is so effortless that the photographer marvels at his cheerful compliance. “Well, the answer to everything in life is, don’t try too hard. I’m incredibly laid-back.” His young aide — a Brylcreemed blond in a sharp suit and Union Jack socks — looks more ominously uptight, but clears off within minutes.
Since standing down in 2021 as leader of the Brexit Party — now called Reform UK — Farage presents a nightly show on GB News watched by about 150,000 viewers, but we both know that’s not why we are here today. The morning’s news is led by a former Tory minister predicting electoral “massacre” under Rishi Sunak, should Farage become Reform’s leader. A poll a week before our meeting had found Farage the clear favourite to win Clacton-on-Sea for Reform if he stood. That evening a former Sunak aide would warn that if Farage returns to frontline politics, “the Conservative Party essentially won’t exist by Christmas”.
The last time I interviewed Farage, in 2018, he was supposed to be a radio presenter on LBC, having resigned two years earlier — for the third time — as Ukip’s leader. Barely a month later he founded the Brexit Party. He protests that all his political retirements were sincere at the time, but, “for me, politics was always about, what could we do? What could we change? And obviously, the state things are in today, the country is not in a good place. Nothing works.”
Is that what’s pulling him back again now? “Well.” He grins. “I’m not saying I’m back.” Thus begins an elaborate will-he-won’t-he striptease he doesn’t even pretend not to thoroughly enjoy. “Of course I do!”
He says Tory MPs contact him several times a day. His phone pings; he checks and nods. “There’s another one. They’re looking for something, they’re desperate. I’m Uncle Nige. They all want to know what I’m going to do.” Do they want to join Reform, or Farage to join the Tories? “It could be either way.”
His attendance at the Tory conference in Manchester last autumn was his first since he quit the party in protest at the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. He was greeted, he says, “like the prodigal son returning. A lot of people who are engaged in the Tory party now got engaged in politics through me, through Ukip. So many of them have become Tory councillors, the activist base has been redefined by the grassroots base Ukip developed and a lot of the 2019 Tory MP intake are basically Ukip, make no bones about it.”
He predicts a bloodbath for the Tories at the polls, wiping out what remains of the metropolitan, corporatist, centrist Sunak wing he loathes. If so — and my impression of that conference certainly chimed with his account — why wouldn’t he want to rejoin and lead the Conservative Party, reshaped in his own image, after the election?
“Well, first, because Central Office can refuse me membership. And second, because I have a life.” He lives with his latest girlfriend, Laure Ferrari, 43, a French Eurosceptic activist, and likes making money as a media personality. Becoming leader of the opposition “is a five-year-or-plus commitment. So I’d be signing up for something that effectively ends my working life.” He also wonders whether he can wield more influence from the airwaves than Westminster. “You can reshape the national conversation. I’m good at changing agendas.”
Then again: “My financial position is far better than it was seven years ago.” If he really preferred an easier, more lucrative life, I suggest, our pre-referendum 2016 interview would have been the final occasion we met. “Well, yes, if we’re going on track record ”
As if thinking aloud: “So the question then falls into two parts. One, will I play an active role in this election?”
This would mean standing as an MP for Reform in Clacton-on-Sea. The Reform Party has morphed from fighting for a hard Brexit to campaigning against carbon net zero, immigration and taxes. He talks to its current leader, Richard Tice, several times a week and says he “probably does want me” to replace him. But “do I want to be an MP? Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?”
His expression suggests not. Surely the point would be to put him in parliament as a Reform MP, where he could then defect to the Tories. “Patterns of human behaviour suggest I would think that way. But do I want to do it? I’m totally undecided.”
Ukip damaged Labour’s vote in 2015, but in 2024 “what can I actually achieve [by leading Reform] other than making the Labour lead bigger?” He sees the logic that the greater Sunak’s loss, the stronger his post-election position — but worries about Tories then seeing him not as their saviour but their executioner. “Because human beings are quite tribal. So the other option is that I just sit it out and play the longer game. I just don’t know the answer.”
How hard is he thinking about it? “I chuck it around my head every day. I go to bed thinking about it. What is the right thing to do or not to do?”
Clearly he is still thinking and hedging his bets. Thirteen days after we meet, at a gathering of the new Popular Conservativism — or PopCon — movement, Sky News asked which party he wanted to be in. “Oh, Reform, no question about it,” he said, adding, “I do think we face the possibility that this could be the end of the road for the Conservative Party.”
The son of a south London stockbroker, he attended the fee-paying Dulwich College school before becoming a loadsamoney trader in the 1980s, but sacrificed his ambition to get stinking rich for a thankless slog through the Nineties in draughty church halls, rallying straggles of — in his own words — “eccentrics” to the Ukip cause. In Strasbourg as an MEP from 1999 to 2020 he was a pariah; in Britain his party was derided by David Cameron as a ragbag of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. He fought seven UK parliamentary seats and lost them all. His political career cost him two marriages, to an Irish nurse, Gráinne Hayes, and a German bond trader, Kirsten Mehr; family time with his four children, now 35, 33, 24 and 19 (“I do regret that”); and, on election day in 2010, when a Ukip banner got caught in his plane’s propeller, it almost cost him his life.
The global political map today shows the EU elections in June on course to deliver a majority of Eurosceptics to Strasbourg. Populist parties are on the rise from France all the way to Argentina, whose chainsaw-wielding new president, Javier Milei, thrills Farage. “Did you see him turn up at Davos and tell everyone to f*** off? Loved that.” Has there ever been a time when the world looked more aligned with his politics? “Oh, I think it is now. Oh yes.”
It feels implausible that he wouldn’t want to put himself, as he says, “back on the pitch”, when the global goalposts have widened beyond his wildest dreams. “Well, human nature would suggest that I might at some point.”
It’s hard to see how that point is not now, when Farage has no shadow of doubt that the new leader of the free world will be Trump. Coquettishly coy, he won’t tell me what his friend’s name is stored under in his phone, only that he always addresses him as “The Donald” and that he is endlessly fascinated by British politics.
“He wants to know about the characters, the players. Are we really implementing Brexit properly? Are we taking advantage of it? Are we getting the right deal? Very much detailed, boom-boom type stuff.” Does Trump ever ask for his advice? “He has done over the years. I’m a dispassionate friend, in the sense that I don’t want anything from him. I’ve never asked him for anything. I’m not relying upon him for a job.”
One Washington job he would like is the British ambassador’s. Although not in Trump’s gift, that didn’t stop the former president from breaching protocol to propose the appointment last time he was elected. Seconded, improbably, by the former SDP leader Lord Owen only last month, it is unlikely to interest an incoming Labour government, but Farage makes a pitch for it anyway.
“Is it a job I would do? Yes, of course I would. Yeah. Very, very important job. And Starmer has a problem. His government will be filled with people like [the current shadow foreign secretary, David] Lammy, who’ve been so negative towards Trump. They may need a friend there. But we’ll see.”
Last year Farage told Newsnight that “Brexit has failed”, but he backtracks slightly today. “We made a bit of a balls of it, frankly, and I think there is a very wide perception among Brexit voters that Brexit has failed. Has it been a failure overall? No. It’s not delivered what we wanted. Doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do, though.” He claims Brexit has made “our standing in the world much higher. What the Brits think matters much more than it did.” I ask for an example. “The direct attacks on Putin from the British government. We took a very strong individual lead.” But if Trump becomes president again, will he really care “what the Brits think” about Putin and Ukraine?
I ask what he has changed his mind about. “The death penalty — I’d have been a strong advocate 25 years ago. And I used to think unfettered free trade was absolutely the only way, but I think with China [which he pronounces “Chay-nah”, like Trump] and everything else, it doesn’t really work any more. There’s a bit more economic nationalism in me than there was before. And I think an understanding that society needs to look after those that haven’t got the same advantages. That means actually caring about individuals and community and society and things like that.”
For someone often called the most influential person in British politics this century, his policy positions beyond Brexit and anti-woke grumbles have been vague. He didn’t even bother to read his own party’s 2010 election manifesto, and hoots at a Ukip campaign promise to make the London Underground’s Circle Line circular, so I ask what he actually believes in.
“Oh, I’m the radical. I want huge, radical reform to the whole system. The ruling establishment doesn’t want any change at all. If you said to most establishment figures in the last 500 years that there are people dying in the gutter out there, they’d say, ‘So what?’ ” He sounds closer to Jeremy Corbyn than Sunak. “Not Corbyn. But I might feel closer to Bernie Sanders. Definitely.” Like Sanders, the left-wing senator who challenged Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nominations, he talks about the rampant power of big corporations, the pernicious influence of lobbyists and the “people left behind”. So what would a Farage manifesto contain?
“Immigration. It’s the number two issue with the public, with no senior political figure even discussing it.” What? It ranks below the economy and health in polls, and Westminster has talked about little else since November. “No one’s discussing immigration,” he repeats. Is he joking? “Other than petty games in the Tory party, there’s no real debate.”
He would not have voted for the Rwanda bill. “No chance.” Will it achieve anything? “Nothing at all.” He says we have to leave the European Court of Human Rights and declare the small boats a national security issue, to “focus the mind. We can’t be an El Dorado for everybody.” I point out that we are taking in fewer than most comparable countries. “We have to get a grip on numbers. I don’t think the Geneva Convention is even relevant any more. If you’re telling me we should take in five, ten, twenty million, I’m sorry, the answer is no.” But nobody is suggesting that. “The population has risen by more than ten million since Blair came to power.” Not ten million refugees.
“Solving legal immigration is easy,” he breezes on. “I’d have zero net immigration for at least five years — to give us some chance for housebuilding to begin to catch up with the shortfall.” So, if I were to appeal to Prime Minister Farage that after ten years as a widow I’d fallen in love with, say, a nice white American stockbroker and finally had a chance at rebuilding a family life if only he could join us — but I can’t force anyone to emigrate, to free up a space — Farage would just say bad luck? His expression instantly softens. “Hmm. He might qualify. He might.”
A charming east European waitress bounces up to our table and Farage greets her effusively, full of concern to hear how her introduction to her English boyfriend’s parents went at Christmas. His face fills with sympathy as she explains to me that she’d worried they would be iffy about a Lithuanian joining the family. When she mentions visa dramas he looks even more sympathetic.
I remind him that two years ago we couldn’t fill up our petrol tanks due to a shortage of HGV drivers, forcing the government to allow foreign tanker drivers into Britain. “We have to live with fewer baristas,” he retorts airily. We’re talking about petrol, not coffee. “The market sorts all this out. If you pay people more money, they work. Wages have to go up. Part of the point of Brexit.”
Wages have gone up, I point out, and so have prices. Middle-class professionals are struggling to make mortgage repayments. “Yours is the argument of despair.” The Bank of England won’t lower interest rates if wages keep going up. “No, monetary inflation is caused by money-printing.” That’s not what the monetary policy committee is telling us. “We’re living in a whole series of illusions that everyone’s bought into,” he offers gnomically.
“I mean, look, dealing with things like immigration numbers, none of it’s going to be easy.” He’d just said it was.
His reticence to re-enter politics at the very point when the Tory leadership could be within reach possibly suggests self-awareness. The prospect of accountability for actually implementing his bluff saloon bar rhetoric must be sobering. He can’t even enforce it in his own family. His children are now adults, yet he can’t bring himself to make them all fund their own lives. “I should do so. Too weak, too weak — that’s the reason, without a doubt.”
He’s much happier blaming others than being accountable for solutions or forging alliances. Farage fell out with almost every senior colleague in his Ukip career, and when asked to name this century’s best PM, flashes back: “Well, [Theresa] May’s at the bottom.” He is kindest towards the least successful PM in modern history. “I felt a lot of what [Liz] Truss and [Kwasi] Kwarteng were saying was right, but mishandled in the most amazing way.” Boris Johnson “ballsed the whole thing up”. The Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, “doesn’t even have half a brain”.
Farage wouldn’t vote for a single serving Tory MP. “A bunch of charlatans and liars.” What about his friend and GB News colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg? “Oh, he’s a very nice bloke, but he’ll always do the wrong thing in the end.” Lee Anderson’s vote for the Rwanda Bill provokes a snort of contempt. “I thought he was a miner. I thought miners were tough.”
He “can’t think of one” government policy passed this century, other than the Brexit act, that he supports. If he was 18 today he would emigrate. “If you were young, you wouldn’t stay in this country.” Where would he go? “Portugal is very attractive. Milan is quite attractive — a lot of deals being done there.” Without a trace of irony, “European countries are being competitive, we’re being anti-competitive. It’s extraordinary.”
In three hours he doesn’t offer one coherent, detailed, positive proposal for anything. His aide was keen for us to discuss his legal action against NatWest after its subsidiary, Coutts, closed his account last year in part due to his political beliefs, but Farage doesn’t bring it up. Is he really mounting a mass class action against the bank, as he claimed on X last year? “It’s not easy. It’s a massive undertaking. Not ruling it out, but it’s not an easy thing.” He seems more focused on getting his legal bill — “hundreds of thousands” — reimbursed and pursuing compensation.
His debanking battle has picked up one supporter. Hours after we met, Trump promised a New Hampshire rally, “We’re going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you [for] your political beliefs. They wanna debank you.” The American media wondered what he was talking about.
Trump is the only politician Farage unequivocally praises. When asked to name a single person who should be running the country, he racks his brain. “I don’t know. I wish I did.” Which brings us back to Farage.
He had always turned down I’m a Celebrity because “I thought you do the jungle when you’re on your way down, when the career is ebbing”, and last year was “one of my best ever years”. But in August he began “messing about on TikTok, and I realised the power of it. Gen Z are very, very different. They’re not buying the stuff they’re being told at school.” They’re more resistant to woke orthodoxy, more receptive to his message? “Absolutely.”
When ITV called again, he thought, “There’ll be a mass of people watching that programme who were, like, 11 when the referendum happened.” Farage finished behind Sam Thompson from Made in Chelsea, who won, and the boxer Tony Bellew, but he dominated most of the show’s press coverage.
His chief worry was “being humiliated. Fear of showing fear was a big thing. I thought, I can’t go in and start screaming and shouting. Those who do like me look up to me — they wouldn’t want to see that.” So before entering the jungle he visited the TV hypnotist Paul McKenna, who taught him mental techniques to conquer fear.
Farage spent three years following the referendum “frightened of walking out onto the street” due to public hostility and threats. “It’s better now than it was, but I still don’t take many chances.” He employs eight former Royal Marines as bodyguards during election campaigns, would feel “incredibly uncomfortable” if he had to walk a city street alone on any day, never uses public transport and has a full-time driver always waiting outside. “Bloody expensive. It’s just the cost of life. But I think the jungle has improved things.”
The “detoxification” achieved by his jungle performance has given him, he says, “probably five million voters out there, before I even try”. Not potential “viewers”, I note, but “voters”. He is up at 5am, works an 80-hour week, and drinks and smokes a lot less than he used to. What is the ultimate point of all this, if he isn’t planning a return to politics?
“I had exactly the same conversation with a close friend of mine at 10am this morning. I honestly don’t know the answer yet. My life at the moment is at a very interesting juncture. There is no specific goal in quite the same way that there was with the Brexit thing.”
Presumably the goal now wouldn’t be a single policy, but power. “Exactly.”
