Just as I was starting to write this column, an email alert popped up on my screen. “Punters back Nigel for prime minister after Keir Starmer,” it read, placing the Reform leader second in the odds market after Wes Streeting. What a weird, dissonant duality this is. Nigel Farage is in his fourth week of revelations about alleged racist behaviour at school, and yet, here we are. This is one of those twilight-zone moments in British politics, where it seems something is going to “cut through” any minute now. For a moment it seems as if it absolutely will. And then, there’s a loss of momentum and a return to the status quo. In my mind it manifests like a battle of physical forces, acting on one another. Journalistic investigations, testimonies, whistleblowers, all as a sort of storm that blows on a political actor who may be knocked off his feet, but still manages to cling on by his fingernails, until the gale blows over.
Up scrambles Farage, a few pieces and more than a few polling points knocked off him, but still in place. This is, so far, what he is managing to survive – the testimonies of some 28 of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich college who have told the Guardian that they experienced or witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour when he was a teenager. Jewish students were taunted; “gas them,” Farage said, “Hitler was right”. A black student, much younger than the then 17-year-old Farage, was told: “That’s the way back to Africa.” The allegations amount, in my reading, to a sort of obsessive campaign against minority students, pursued with the kind of bewildering commitment that anyone who has ever been bullied will feel in their bones.
Farage’s response to the painful and, in the circumstances, considered reflections of those who say they experienced or witnessed his behaviour, is to heap salt into the wound. He is a man clearly shaken by the allegations and scrutiny, and has gone on the attack. He has denied claims, refused to apologise, attacked the BBC for airing the allegations, cycled through every insulting excuse in the book about it being just the sort of thing people said in those days, nothing more than “banter”, and, his most humble defence to date, “never directly, really tried to go and hurt anybody”. I guess we’ll just have to swallow the risible notion that when he apparently waited for the black student by the lower school gates “to repeat the vulgarity” it wasn’t meant as directly hurtful, more the sort of thing that casually happens in one’s youth. Let those among us who have not made their way to an entirely different part of the school to show a student in a lower year the way back to Africa cast the first stone.
But you know what, maybe it will be swallowed. Because the only action that is appropriate and proportionate to not only the allegations, but his response to them, is that Farage’s entire role in public life, let alone as possible next prime minister, be called into question. If that sounds dramatic to you, then perhaps that is because of the novelty of the notion. Because if anything, the opposite of that has happened. Calls for Farage’s resignation or for him to consider his position are broadly absent. Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer and a group of Holocaust survivors have made demands for apology. But even that entirely reasonable demand has not been picked up and repeated by either his party members or, most notably, large swathes of the press. Parts of the rightwing media actually appear to be excited that he has come out swinging, venting his “fury” on the BBC, and how he has “destroyed” the broadcaster and “demands” an apology.
One reason for that, of course, is the nature of Reform and Farage. Both can be seen as vehicles for the sort of xenophobia that sets the bar for outrage at allegations of racism much higher. But another reason is just how much the discourse on race and immigration has both evolved and become intertwined. The allegations about him come at a time when the gap between Farage as extremist aberration and mainstream politics is closing. The Tories, Labour and Reform engage in a deportation numbers bidding war. Labour boasts that it has deported 50,000 people so far. Reform pledges to deport 600,000. We raise you 750,000, the Tories say. Labour blames illegal immigrants “tearing the country apart” for the rise in racism, rather than being troubled by the racism itself; it talks about the country as an “island of strangers”; relentlessly focuses on deportations and turns the screws on asylum seekers and others who come to the country to work. Against that backdrop, Farage’s alleged actions land in a more hospitable climate, one in which he is at one end of a continuum, rather than an outlier.
And more broadly, Farage now operates in a country where historically large far-right rallies are taking place, politicians such as Robert Jenrick are emboldened to complain about “not seeing another white face” in a neighbourhood, and anti-immigrant rhetoric takes on the language of racism while using concerns about immigration as an alibi. In a moment of chilling convergence of the two, Badenoch said that the country needs to be kept safe from murderers and sexual predators, and that those deported should “go back to where they came from”.
Farage has become the embodiment of the success of such dog-whistle politics. That constant vilification of minorities – non-white faces on a “breaking point” poster; kids who don’t speak English as a first language as a sign of the “cultural smashing” of the UK; claims that immigration has left Britain “unrecognisable” – all are claims plausibly rooted in not racism or xenophobia, but simply a worry about social cohesion and what we can afford. That is why the school claims are so rattling for him: there is no way they can be slipped disingenuously behind an innocent mask of “legitimate concerns”, they are racism pure and nasty.
It has all taken on nightmarish proportions. Farage feels more sinister and malevolent than ever, an expression not just of his own politics, but the enabling of prejudices that cannot be named because they now hide under all sorts of ducks and dives –security, taxes, integration! – that come as a result of hanging it all on immigration. He draws his power not from the sheer force of his arguments and personality, but increasingly just how recklessly the immigration issue has been handled by the political establishment. If he survives, it will be a colossally tragic let-down to those who have come forward. And it will be because there is now a little bit of his poison everywhere.
