Nigel Farage is a curate’s egg of a politician: good in parts. The good part, at least for a Brexiteer like me, is that it was his tireless campaigning, more than any other’s, that freed Britain from the clammy grasp of the EU. No one else in politics can match his ability to fire up a crowd and put his finger on the popular pulse. But his fatal flaw is his inability or unwillingness to share power and lead a team. For Farage, it is his way or the highway.
This dictatorial tendency has manifested itself at every stage of his turbulent career. Many have dared to challenge his authority or disagreed with him, and have then either been forced out or meekly submitted to the imperious Farage will. Rupert Lowe is the latest person to cross Farage, but no fewer than 11 others have learned how perilous it is to cross the talented ex City trader. In roughly chronological order, then, here are Nigel’s dirty dozen.
Professor Alan Sked. Sked, an Oxford educated academic historian, is a former Liberal who came to believe that the evolving EU was corrupt, anti-democratic, and inimical to British interests and traditions. After unsuccessfully standing for parliament for the Anti-Federalist League, in 1993 Sked founded the UK Independence Party or Ukip, along with eight others, including Nigel Farage. Sked was the fledging party’s first leader, but in 1997 he resigned, claiming that the party had been infiltrated by the far right and was doomed to stay on the political fringe. He was succeeded as leader by Farage, and has remained a strident critic of Nigel’s ever since.
Marta Andreasen. An Argentine-born Spanish accountant, Marta was in 2001 appointed chief accountant of the European Commission. She quickly saw that the Commission’s accounts were corrupt and wide open to fraud, and after getting nowhere internally with her concerns, refused to sign off the accounts and went public with her complaints in 2002. She was fired by the Commission for ‘failure to show sufficient loyalty and respect’, joined Ukip, and was elected to the European Parliament. However, she soon became a critic of Nigel, accusing him of being a dictator with a ‘Stalinist’ leadership style, and left the party in 2013. She lost her Euro seat and subsequently joined the Conservatives.
Godfrey Bloom. Another Ukip MEP and a friend of Farage’s, the two shared a flat in Brussels as MEPs. But after Bloom described a group of women as ‘sluts’ who should be confined to cleaning behind fridges, and hit journalist Michael Crick over the head with a rolled up brochure on live TV, he was disowned by his old flatmate Nigel and his political career was over.
Douglas Carswell. He defected to Ukip and then stood in his Clacton constituency in a 2014 by-election. He won convincingly, and then became the only Ukip MP to be elected in the 2015 general election. But Carswell and Farage did not get on. Ukip was awash with rumours that Carswell was plotting to take over the party leadership, and Nigel called him a ‘Tory fan boy in disguise’, accused him of blocking his own elevation to the House of Lords, and finally charged him with undermining everything that Ukip stood for. It was not so surprising that Carswell left the party, left Parliament, and left Britain. He now lives in Mississippi. Proving that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, Nigel is the new MP for Carswell’s old seat of Clacton.
Mark Reckless. Reckless was the second Tory MP to defect and join Ukip. Honourably, Reckless resigned from parliament and stood in his new Ukip colours at a by election in his Rochester and Strood seat. He won the election in a famous victory, but then blotted his copybook by claiming that EU citizens might have to leave Britain when we quit the bloc. He was quickly slapped down by Farage, who said this was not party policy. Reckless ate humble pie, remained in Ukip, lost his seat to the Tories in 2015, but later became leader of Reform UK in Wales.
Suzanne Evans. Yet another ex-Tory with ambitions to replace Nigel. She had a prominent role in Ukip and was entrusted with writing the party’s 2015 General election manifesto. But after the election she said that Nigel was ‘very divisive’ and suggested that someone else should lead the coming Brexit referendum campaign. Not much has been heard from Suzanne since.
Lowe is merely the latest in a long line of former Farage fans who have fallen out of love or out of favour with their ex ‘Messiah’
Patrick O’Flynn. Our very own. Patrick, a frequent contributor to this space, was the shrewd political editor of the Daily Express, and another prominent recruit for Ukip in 2014. He became a Euro MEP for the east of England and the party’s economic spokesman. He parted ways with Nigel after labelling him ‘snarling, thin-skinned and aggressive’, though he later apologised for using those words. Farage magnanimously accepted the apology as ‘big hearted and honest’. Their rift and making up has not, however, stopped Patrick from writing home truths about Nigel.
Gerard Batten. In the chaos that followed Ukip’s failure to win more than one seat despite bagging four million votes in the 2015 election, an exhausted Farage resigned the party leadership (not for the first time) saying that after more than 20 years campaigning he ‘wanted to get my life back’. Ukip then ran through a whole pack of short lived leaders, (one, Diane James, only lasted for 18 days). The guy left holding the leadership parcel in 2018 was Gerard Batten, one of the eight men who had founded Ukip back in 1993. By then the party had become something of a national laughing stock with its leadership farce, but although Batten restored some of its support and vote share, as an outspoken critic of Islam, he caused a crisis that November when he appointed anti-Islamist militant Tommy Robinson as his special adviser on the rape gangs scandal. This was immediately denounced by Farage, and nine Ukip MEPs resigned in protest. The remaining three MEPs followed them out of the door in 2019 after Batten described a comment about raping Labour MP Jess Phillips as ‘satire’. After the row Batten resigned and was prevented from standing for the leadership again when Ukip’s national executive ruled that he had brought the party into disrepute.
Henry Bolton. Proof that there may be no one like Nigel fit to lead his causes is possibly provided by the career of the much derided Henry Bolton, a former Army officer who briefly served as one of the four Ukip leaders elected in quick succession in 2017. Henry had a colourful love life, and this brought about the end of his leadership when he deserted his wife and two children for a Ukip member he had recently met. He left her in turn after racist texts she had written about Meghan Markle were revealed. After failing to establish a new party called Our Nation, Bolton is today a member of the Social Democratic Party.
Paul Nuttall. A working class Liverpudlian Conservative Catholic with traditional right-wing views who had been Farage’s loyal deputy leader in Ukip and became leader himself after Diane James’ short lived tenure. But he annoyed his former boss by appointing Patrick O’Flynn and Suzanne Evans – both seen by Nigel as anti Farageists – as his special advisers. All has apparently now been forgiven and forgotten though, and Nuttall is a reformed Reform UK member.
Dominic Cummings. The cerebral independent eurosceptic (who later famously fell out with Boris Johnson as his chief of staff in 10 Downing Street) infuriated Farage when his upstart Vote Leave outfit was recognised by the Electoral Commission as the official Brexit voice in the 2016 referendum campaign rather than Nigel’s rival Leave.eu group. Cummings considered that Nigel and his supporters were political poison to undecided voters. Farage said there was no statistical evidence for this, and condemned Cummings and the other leaders of his group as ‘cretins’. It remains a matter of speculation as to which group was most responsible for the pro Leave vote. Cummings has declared his intention of forming a new political party to upend the two-party system – although Farage may have got there first.
Rupert Lowe. He is merely the latest in a long line of former Farage fans who have fallen out of love or out of favour with their ex ‘Messiah’. This sad history suggests that, for better or worse, there is only going to be one winner in the current dispute between them. Whether that winner is truly the best man for the job is of course another matter entirely.
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