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Around August 2014, I got in touch with Nigel Farage at his office in Strasbourg requesting an interview. His then-party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), had been described by UK Prime Minister David Cameron as “fruitcakes, clowns, and closet racists”. At his May victory in the elections to the European Parliament, wherein UKIP had swallowed 27% of the UK – sending 24 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Brussels – Farage had boasted, “Bring on the clowns.” A departure from the Westminster orthodoxy appeared imminent – UKIP was the first party other than Labour or the Tories to win a nationwide election in the UK since 1906.

Farage responded generously, connecting me with his man in London, Roger Bird, who was to arrange the meeting and who, in our correspondence, kept referencing Farage as “The Leader”. I booked to fly from Johannesburg in December, but a week before the interview Roger Bird was suspended from the party for rogering a bird, specifically, his UKIP colleague Natasha Bolter.

Things like this happened to Farage and his parties. They were fun. The year before I was meant to interview him, a colourful incident had occurred at UKIP’s Autumn conference in London.

It involved a lively character called Godfrey Bloom, who had once complained the UK welfare was being sent to “Bongo Bongo Land”. Bloom, whose grasp of finance remains strong to this day, was in a playful mood at a conference Farage hoped would enhance UKIP’s image as serious and statesmanlike.

At a fringe event entitled “Women in Politics”, a woman aspiring to be in politics took exception to comments Bloom had made in 2004, when he complained that women do not clean behind fridges. Bloom defended himself by saying he was only talking about his own housekeeper, whom he dismissed at the same time as slovenly and useless – and when the attending women shook their heads at this excuse, Bloom called them all sluts and stormed out.

Things got worse. A self-righteous reporter called Michael Crick confronted him as he was descending the venue’s steps – about the lack of “black and brown faces” on the party’s conference paraphernalia. Bloom took a programme, rolled it up, and started beating Crick on the head. The scuffle prompted another reporter, the homosexual head of politics at ITV, Paul Brand, to intervene, whereupon Bloom threatened him that he’d get it even worse if he wrote about what had happened.

Echoes of Victory

A fortnight ago, Farage’s party, Reform UK, echoed the UKIP and Brexit Party successes of the teens with a thunderous grab of nearly 1 500 council seats in local government elections, taking advantage of the nation’s repudiation of Keir Starmer. It was a welcome boost for his party, beloved by the superannuated of Middle England, and increasingly God’s waiting room for failed or washed-up former Conservative Party members.

But one of those failed or washed-up former Conservatives is a woman called Nadine Dorries, now one of Reform’s most prominent personalities. Dorries lives in free speech infamy: it was under her direction that the UK government introduced the Online Safety Act, easily the state's most pernicious censorship tool. Dorries was warned: do not do this – pull out now, but she didn’t listen, and pig-headedly dragged the awful thing over the line.

On Monday Reform’s spokesperson for home affairs, Muhammad Ziauddin “Zia” Yusuf, previously the largest individual donor to Reform, flooded X (formerly Twitter) with an urgent squeal. Yusuf had filmed a video of himself near the Seven Sisters chalk cliffs in Eastbourne complaining about the number of immigrants entering the country via small boats from the southeast – which TikTok had swiftly banned. When asked why they did, TikTok said it was because the video had breached the Online Safety Act. Then Dorries got wind of what had happened, and quickly made her own video: “We need to cancel the Online Safety Act immediately,” she said. “Seriously, it's getting out of control.”

Packing up in London last week, I discovered the old Moleskin where I had drafted the questions I wanted to ask Farage back in 2014, centred on his knowledge of finance. He had once worked in the city as a trader – I had wanted his feeling on the UK’s bail-outs of its banks in 2008 and 2009, with supporting questions about Alistair Darling, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer under then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown. When these men left office, cumulative quantitative easing (QE) stood at £200 billion, which would later be increased to £375 billion by David Cameron and George Osborne – all this before the Covid-19 reflex witnessed the UK’s Asset Purchase Facility (AFP) peak at £895 billion in 2021.

Electoral success, particularly in Farage’s Brexit and Reform parties, has been accompanied by media scrutiny of his financial affairs. Some of it is trite, some is concerning. None reads well.

Desperate Attempts

It started in 2016, with reporters’ desperate attempts to conflate Farage with Russia – even the bogus allegation that former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey’s stragglers were eyeing him as a person of interest. Then came the revelations of largesse from a friend and former Reform donor, Arron Banks, prompting the European Union’s Parliamentary Advisory Committee – bearing a grudge – to call for the strongest possible sanction. That issue somehow vanished. In 2019 Farage took fire for the Brexit Party accepting PayPal donations – a mechanism, according to Gordon Brown, that could see blacklisted Russians theoretically sponsoring the party without the party knowing.

In 2022, Farage became the UK’s most high-profile victim of de-banking just before Coutts’s CEO confessed to the British Broadcasting Corporation at an event that Farage’s views were “not aligned to the bank’s values”. Thousands of people had suffered the same injustice, but Farage had media firepower. Coutts buckled, sacking its CEO and reinstating his account but the incident, in which he paraded as the aggrieved party subject to unfair practices of a woke bank, would only insulate him until one of Reform’s candidates in Wales was jailed for accepting Russian bribes last year (Nathan Gill).

The latest allegations – a £5 million personal gift from Bangkok-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne in 2024, which Farage said was intended to cover personal security costs, alongside a separate £9 million donation in 2025 to Reform UK – has not breached any tax or registration technicality (according to experts The Common Sense consulted), but were occasioned in a cost-of-living crisis. Either way, Farage loses.

So, it should come as no surprise that he has been telling friends, in light of the mounting concerns, that he won’t contest 2029’s elections. House-training those who felt ignored then grooming them for respectable participation, dismissing the orthodoxy, withstanding waves of insults from the establishment, and being accused of destroying your country are things that happen to outsiders. But of all suspicions, allegations of financial chicanery endure longest, and impact hardest.

Defence

In his partial defence, Farage didn’t authorise 2016’s referendum over whether to leave the European Union (EU), which many claim – without foundation – destroyed the UK. Within this misunderstanding, there is no view of member states’ economies, which have themselves cratered since 2016. Until it is proved that the UK was so central to the EU’s fortunes that its departure would wreck constituent parts, reasons for Brexit’s failure must be sought elsewhere.

If it is true that Farage no longer possesses the minerals to accommodate more scrutiny, he won’t just be remembered for UKIP or Brexit or shifty finances. More potent will be the abiding memory of the present – his expulsion of former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, who registered Restore Britain in February, then won all ten seats up for grabs at local elections in his Great Yarmouth constituency. The basis for Lowe’s expulsion – a moving target – is Farage’s greatest political mistake to date.

Lowe is in the ascendancy. At Saturday’s Unite The Kingdom march, political representation of citizens attending – men, women, black, white, young, old – was overwhelmingly attached to Restore. More, when it's Lowe’s turn to feel the glare of media scrutiny on his finances, the transparent way he lives, the transparent way he’s made his money are the only types of bulwarks capable of frustrating sly UK media.

Farage may wish to return to the days when his greatest challenge was to scold a UKIP octogenarian for buying three wives from Laos, or he may lament his transition from the effective outsider to the complacent insider. But he will almost certainly regret what he did to Lowe, and regret underestimating the sentiment that continues to propel the new outsider.

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for him. Almost.