Nigel Farage is not generally seen as one of nature’s diplomats. Yet the Reform leader is proving to be a formidable force in the international arena. This is most obvious in matters of transatlantic interest, with Donald Trump’s return offering Farage the chance to try and derail Labour’s Chagos Islands deal. But last week showed a different side to the Clacton MP on a sensitive overseas matter.
On Tuesday, Farage met with Mandy Damari, the mother of the last remaining British captive in Gaza. Her 28-year-old daughter Emily was kidnapped on October 7 last year and has now been a hostage for 430 days. The pair were hosted in one of the Commons committee rooms, with Farage subsequently a video of support calling on David Lammy to do more for her. Variations of that message have now been viewed more than 750,000 times across different social media platforms.
Damari met with a succession of senior politicians, including Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Lammy, but insisted after meeting the Foreign Secretary ‘I came for solutions, not sympathy’. Indeed, despite addressing 100 government MPs at the Labour Friends of Israel meeting on Monday, she says that of all the politicians whom she met, it was Farage who impressed her the most.
She told LBC that he was ‘so amazing’, declaring that ‘the first really positive sign [from the trip] was meeting Nigel Farage who sent out an amazing tweet about Emily… he was actually doing something’ adding that Farage’s video of support ‘was action, it wasn’t just words of sympathy.’ Damari also expressed her gratitude at his promise to raise her daughter’s case with President Trump. There has since been an exchange of letters between Farage and the family. It is understood too that the case has since received renewed attention in Washington too.
Mrs Damari’s poignant words are all the more striking when contrasted with the excitement of the Farage-mania of the past fortnight. For all the fevered talk of pacts and polls, this was a desperate and heartbroken mother, who turned in her hour of need to a politician who – lest we not forget – leads barely a handful of MPs in parliament. The fact that his words seem to contain such comfort for Damari is testament to the soft power which he is believed to now wield.
One former government aide attributes Farage’s ability to spur action in the international arena to his very lack of institutional experience. ‘He’s not been captured by the Foreign Office’, she says. ‘If he had been, he’d be totally different.’ His efforts in this case – and others – might offer a revealing case study in how power politics and modern diplomacy work in the TikTok age.
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