Few of Us Were Perfect As Teenagers, but Farage’s Antics Are Different

Has it been a good or bad week for Reform UK? On the one hand, the natural party of golf club boors got a bonanza donation of £9m from a former Tory mega donor. They’re still first in voting intention polls, and Nigel Farage himself is both the most famous and most popular UK politician (though still more disliked than liked).

But they’re struggling to shake off accusations that Farage was, to put it simply, a racist little shit when he was a pupil at elite private school Dulwich College. And with Reform UK councillors in the spotlight for their own (seemingly irrepressible) bigotry, the question looming for the party is how much racism is too much racism for the British electorate?

A series of Farage’s former schoolmates have made allegations of racist and antisemitic behaviour dating back to his time as a pupil at Dulwich College in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The claims, reported by the Guardian, are based on accounts from more than a dozen contemporaries and describe repeated incidents involving Jewish and minority ethnic pupils.

Central among the allegations are those of Peter Ettedgui, now a highly decorated director, who has said that the Reform UK leader repeatedly directed remarks including “Hitler was right” and “Gas them” at him while they were at school. Farage, for his part, has copped to being “offensive” at school, but insisted that he never made comments “with malice”.

But Ettedgui’s account has been supported by several former pupils. One of them, Nick Hearn, a banker who described himself as “a conservative with a small C”, said he repeatedly witnessed Ettedgui being abused and described the behaviour as “personal [and] vindictive”, rather than banter.

Another former pupil from the same year alleged that in the final years of school, Farage made gas-hissing noises at a different Jewish boy, describing an apparent fascination with Hitler and the Third Reich. Mark Bridges, also from the same year group, said he remembered Farage as “a racist bully” and recalled Ettedgui being “tormented”.

Further allegations relate to comments and behaviour involving pupils of South Asian background. Andy Field, now an NHS doctor, previously said he recalled Farage burning a school roll in a year when there were more pupils named Patel than Smith. 

Richard Flowers, another former pupil, said Farage drew attention to the same issue by pointing at the yearbook and repeatedly highlighting that “the most common name in this school has always been Smith. And now it’s Patel.” The Guardian reported that the school roll for 1980 recorded 12 Smiths and 13 Patels.

A former pupil of Asian background also alleged that Farage used the phrase “Enoch Powell was right” toward him as a form of racial intimidation. He described an assembly in which Farage repeatedly shouted when the name Patel was read out, claiming the intervention was intended to mark the name as foreign or un-English. He said this happened when Farage was 18, and described him as “obsessed with Patels”.

How much does someone’s behaviour when they were at school, and before they were in politics, matter? There are few people who can look back on their teenage years and find nothing to be ashamed of. I, for one, can’t wait until the nerds at CERN finally invent the neuralyzer from Men in Black, so I can wipe out the memory of everything I did before the age of 32.

But there’s a difference between being edgy, insensitive, even obnoxious, and waging a campaign of racist bullying that – here’s the key part – you’re unwilling to apologise for as an adult.

Instead, he and his party have gone on the attack. In a deflection that would make crappy boyfriends the world over proud, Farage tried to discredit journalists asking about his past conduct by shouting about Bernard Manning and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. “I want an apology from the BBC for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 80s,” he thundered at a press conference on Thursday.

Meanwhile deputy leader Richard Tice said he thought Ettedgui was lying, and that the accusations were confected as a political attack. “I think this is made-up twaddle by a whole bunch of people,” Tice said. “These people have a political axe to grind and do you know what, every week, the voters are going out in byelections and they are voting for Reform, because they’re not buying into this leftwing anti-Nigel narrative.”

Can I just shock you? It looks like Tice isn’t being entirely honest. More Brits think Farage is a racist than those who don’t. Ditto those who think Reform UK’s policies and party as a whole “are generally racist”.

And with a Reform council leader being exposed by the Guardian for a slew of racist tweets, including saying that black British lawyer Shola Mos-Shogbamimu should have “F’d off back to Nigeria”, that perception isn’t going away any time soon. Will that affect their electoral performance? We’ll have to wait until the next electoral test to find out for sure.