Bottlefield buccaneer

On polling day in the 2010 general election, a light plane carrying Nigel Farage crashed into a field in Buckinghamshire at around 80 miles an hour, coming to rest with Farage upside down in his seat watching his blood drip on to the grass a few inches below him. He might easily have died – the list of his injuries included a punctured lung, several broken ribs and a fractured sternum. The question is, had he died, would we be living in a different place? Would the United Kingdom still be inside the European Union, or least the Single Market? Would the unions with Scotland and Northern Ireland be more secure? Would we be a less divided society? Would the country have avoided its new international status as “Billy No Mates Britain”, the phrase Nick Clegg used in his television debates with Farage in 2014 (which Clegg lost so badly)?

Michael Crick’s biography makes a good case for a qualified Yes to all those propositions: which is to say that the UK owes its present political condition – and its foreseeable future – more to Farage than any other individual, including the Europhobes in the Tory government, the cleverest and most popular of whom, Gove and Johnson, came late to the party.

Not even Nostradamus at his cutest could have watched Farage crawl from the wreckage and made such a forecast. Consider the psephology. In that day’s general election, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 3.1 per cent of the vote; Farage, in between his two terms as party leader, polled the highest of any UKIP candidate, but he managed only third place in Buckingham with 17.4 per cent of the vote compared to the 47.3 per cent for the sitting candidate, the House Speaker John Bercow. His five previous attempts to enter the Commons had also failed, as did the one that came after. In terms of elected public office inside Britain, he has never served on as much as a parish council. And yet, within no more than seven years, the Tory government had bent to his Europhobia; another two years, and the parliamentary party had been reshaped more or less in his image. “A rather engaging geezer,” Boris Johnson said in 2013. “We Tories look at him – with his pint and cigar and sense of humour – and we instinctively recognise someone who is fundamentally indistinguishable from us.”

It was this that had begun to scare them and went on scaring them until they elected as their leader someone who could out-Nigel Nigel. Someone who shared the same quick-wittedness and humour but also, in Crick’s words, the same abundant egotism, arrogance, duplicity, dishonesty and hypocrisy, as well a similar appetite for women and drink. A campaigner not a governor, a card and a cad. Like Farage, Johnson is easily bored. Neither is much interested in policy, both are poor organisers and team managers. According to Crick, Farage would be admired by dictators worldwide for his ruthlessness: “No leader in modern British history can have left so many enemies and casualties among his party colleagues.”

The difference between them boils down to class. No Eton here or Oxford, no china-smashing Bullingdon Club; instead, aspirant versions of all of them. Farage, the son of a stockbroker and a typist, grew up in the London Borough of Bromley, in a village that managed to combine the convenience of the suburbs – red buses, frequent trains – with some of the best-loved institutions of English country life: a 13th century church, a village hall, two old pubs, a cricket club. To complete the image of a place worth fighting for – “Scramble, boys, scramble!” – the neighbouring Kent countryside includes Chartwell, Churchill’s home, and the celebrated Battle of Britain airfield at Biggin Hill.

But it wasn’t Eden. His father was often absent and often drunk, and his parents separated. Nigel went to two prep schools and then to Dulwich College, where his behaviour divided opinion. “A real character, very confident, articulate, forthright,” is the memory of one contemporary. “He was a racist. Wherever you draw the line, whatever the definition, he was racist,” is the recollection of another. A Jewish former pupil remembers how Farage would sidle up to him and say “Hitler was right” and “Gas ‘em” (the victim adding “I didn’t feel bullied…He was very much a loner. I kind of thought he was slightly mad, a nutter…”). The only documentary evidence comes in the form of a letter from a young teacher, Chloe Deakin, who in 1981, a few weeks after the Brixton riots, wrote to Dulwich’s headmaster protesting about Farage’s appointment as a prefect, citing his “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”. She had often heard the headmaster tell the senior boys that they were the nation’s future leaders, she wrote, therefore “it is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate”.

Farage’s defence, supported by some school contemporaries, is that he has been misunderstood: that he was just a wind-up merchant; that it was banter, the light side to his more serious struggle for unfashionable causes. He likes the idea of himself as a nonconformist, even a rebel. “Whenever I encountered interventionist authority, I was at the forefront of the dissidents,” he wrote in a memoir. “I had discovered in myself a passionate loathing for received opinion.”

But not for received behaviour. Nigel strove to be the smartest cadet in the school’s cadet force and, when not parading in boots, had steel protectors nailed to the heels of his school shoes so that they clicked even when he sauntered. Aged 15, he joined the Tory party after a visit to the school by Thatcher’s guru, Keith Joseph. He formed a passionate admiration for Enoch Powell and was given a job on the London Metal Exchange by a senior broker he met at the West Kent Golf Club. The City was on the brink of deregulation. He made money and drank a lot – port, mainly – and made tours of Western Front battlefields with a group known as Farage’s Foragers, who would scrabble in the fields for old shrapnel by day and get plastered in French restaurants at night. They called them the “bottlefield tours”.

At 600 pages, Crick’s biography is indispensable to any student of Brexit. Names appear that one had never expected to see again – Godfrey Bloom, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Paul Nuttall – as Crick recounts UKIP’s wayward journey to its high tide of popularity in 2014, when it won more votes than any other party in the European Parliament elections and sent 24 MEPs across the Channel to an institution that, for them, was both despicable and a nice little earner. Post-referendum, Farage reached an even higher water mark when his newly formed Brexit Party won 29 seats out of 73 at the 2019 European elections, while the Tories achieved four and Ukip, now Farage-less and chaotic, failed to win one. But by then its work of terrifying the Conservative Party into the hardest of Brexits had been done.

Of course, it wasn’t all Farage’s work. The European Parliament’s system of proportional representation, originally resisted by UKIP as a foreign outrage like the kilogram, increased the party’s visibility enormously: first-past-the-post would have denied it any MEPs. And immigration, a quiescent issue for more than a decade, became controversial again with the Blair government’s decision to allow unlimited migration from the EU’s new member states in Eastern Europe, underestimating its consequences. (Settler numbers of between 5,000 and 13,000 a year were predicted; seven years later, 850,000 had turned up.) Farage made the most of it. Long before Dominic Cummings took the credit, Farage was urging audiences: “Let’s take back control of our country…our borders.”

That apart, why did Farage loathe the EU so much? Crick, in his otherwise excellent study, gives the question no real examination. We are left with Vimy Ridge, where his grandfather was shot in both legs, and Biggin Hill, where Farage went even as an adult to collect autographs from old Spitfire pilots at air shows. Out of such glorious memories came the grand illusion.