Charisma, cruelty, greed: John Sweeney on the ‘dark genius’ of Nigel Farage

The United Kingdom is a princess thinking about kissing the frog. Not believing in fairy tales, I am sceptical about snogging the frog. The frog’s metamorphosis into Prince Charming won’t happen. Frog will stay frog. The question is, exactly what kind of frog are we dealing with here? Is it the common frog, happy to muck about in the ponds of our green and pleasant land? Or is it the poison dart frog, whose venom killed my friend Alexei Navalny in the Polar Wolf penal colony in the Russian Arctic? Or is it worse than that, that the poison frog is pretending to be the friendly one?

Eh?

I have written The Real Nigel Farage because he is a power in the land. Opinion polls go up and down but a country that has had five prime ministers in the last five years is not in a good place. Faced with an investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner, he walks out of the Palace of Westminster and asks the voters of Clacton to back him for a second time. His contempt for the scaffolding of British democracy is real and shared by millions of people who feel betrayed.

True, Farage may suffer public disgrace when the standards investigation finally lands. True, his great political good fortune seems to have run out of puff from late spring 2026. True, he is in greater trouble than he has ever been, his whole career.

Much of the last paragraph could have been applied to Donald Trump when he left the White House in 2020 in disgrace. Four years later, he was back. Here in Blighty, the leaders of the mainstream parties cannot square the expectations of the British public to fix public services with the grim truth, after Brexit, Covid and with an ageing population, that there is not enough money to go around. The bond markets have no plans to be in hock to Manchesterism. Time and money seem to be on the side of the populists; and in Britain, Nigel Farage, by hook or by crook, remains their champion.

Nigel’s life has been a hell of a romp, frequently punctuated with PFLs, Proper Fucking Lunches. He makes the political weather like no one else. He is bold. He was the third MP to suggest that Lucy Letby may be the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice. He has rizz. Paul Moss, a veteran BBC radio reporter, tells me: “I’ve never forgotten joining him out campaigning in an election many years ago. We stopped at a small village in Cambridgeshire where a man pushed through the crowd to tell Farage he was seriously thinking of voting for Ukip. Farage looked at him for just a few seconds and said: ‘Gay marriage not a priority for you?’ ‘Exactly!’ the man shouted, delighted, and another vote was banked.

How did Farage know that was precisely what this man wanted to hear? He struck me as being like a political Obi-Wan Kenobi, almost telepathically able to read the ideological forcefield around him, and to turn it his way. I’ve never seen a political operator quite like him and thought immediately of the mantle usually given to Bill Clinton: ‘The Natural.’ 

His genius at coming across as himself on telly was on full show on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! Fresh from having serpents wriggling all over his face and scoffing kangaroo bollocks, the camera finds him chilling with Gloucestershire lass Josie Gibson. He spills the beans on what it was like to be a Euro MP: “Do you know what? I’m the biggest name the European parliament’s ever had, in terms of international news that I made. I put them on the map, globally. I said to them one Christmas, you should all be grateful to me; I’ve made you all famous.” Josie is a warm and happy woman with a lovely West Country accent who won Big Brother in 2010 with the highest public vote in the lifetime of the series. She is paying him the ultimate homage to the male ego: she cannot stop laughing. It’s not an act. She clearly likes him.

The comments below that YouTube video illustrate his extraordinary success with the public: “The most honest person in that camp was Nigel. Go, Nigel!” And: “All 5 votes went to Nigel tonight.” And: “Nigel has surprised me the most. He seems to be the most surprisingly open, down-to-earth guy there is, and he’s also surprisingly very funny. It seems like he was able to let his guard down and show more of his personality to the world.” And finally: “Nigel rocks.”

The other side of the story? I’ve met someone, who knows Farage very well, who says that his “hail fellow, well met” shtick is all an act, and that he is only truly comfortable in the company of posh folk. My source recalls seeing Farage abusing a working-class bloke in Ukip. When the bloke tried to make the party leader focus on an issue, Farage ignored him by playing with his phone. It was shockingly rude: “Nigel’s guilty secret is what he really thinks about the working class, the very people who have made him who he is. He hates them.”

Reflecting on what Farage says about the gravy train that flows to power, I know about a dozen MPs and politicians well: I’ve talked Scientology with Tom Watson, the former deputy Labour leader, in the Dog House in Kennington; walked arm in arm in Kyiv with Johnny Mercer, the former Tory veterans minister; and my partner works for Manuela Perteghella, the Liberal Democrat MP for Stratford-upon-Avon. Like Farage, Manuela is a 2024 newbie; unlike him, she was not born British. She sits next to his Reform posse in the Commons. Tom, Johnny and Manuela do not talk like Farage about what they get out of what they do. They did not enter politics for the lobster buffet.

Farage sells not snake oil but dark nostalgia. He trades futures in reversing time. Things were so much better in the old days. Vote Farage and, lo, your sundial will wind backwards.

Throughout his life, Farage has mourned our country’s terrible losses in the first world war as if that were the thing that killed his notion of an Edwardian paradise. He regularly goes on trips to the first world war trenches and uses his storytelling gifts to convey the agony and the hopelessness set out in Wilfred Owen’s great poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

Our long peace, from 1815, with Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, to 1914, was broken not by a pointless conflict but by a necessary war to stop the Kaiser’s Germany from stealing another country’s land by force. Under Hitler, ultra-nationalism in Germany resurfaced and after a second and more terrible world war, after so much more blood was spilt, what eventually became the European Union was set up to prevent Europe from going to war against itself ever again. The damage was done in 1914 and 1939 by the cancer of ultra-nationalism, not its cure. In my book, Farage has spent his entire political life mistaking cure for cancer.

And that category mistake doesn’t simply mean longer passport queues for those of us, unlike him, who don’t have European passports. Brexit has cost the British people something like £250bn and counting. Covid was a second economic hit, also estimated at around £250bn, and again Farage is on the wrong side of the argument, saying in 2026: “I believe in vaccinations when they’re vaccinations” – and the ones developed for Covid, he suggests, are no such thing. This is dangerous nonsense.

Trump’s stupid war against Iran is a third savage blow to the world and the British economy which Farage, to start with, backed full square. And then there is the proper safeguarding of public money. Vetting candidates for office to exclude crooks and thieves and people who endanger public harmony is an essential task for democracy to be trusted. Time and again, Farage has shown a contempt for the processes that protect British sovereignty, laws like the Theft Act 1968 or the Defence of the Realm Act 1914.

I asked Jonathan Gebbie to produce a spreadsheet on Reform candidates or holders of office who have stepped down because of criminal convictions or public disgrace. Jonathan, my oldest friend, became a rocket scientist and wrote the software that put a tin can on Mars. On the Reform Crooks spreadsheet, the cleverest person I know texts me: “Can’t keep up with the scandals!” Three of Farage’s members of the European parliament have gone to prison, two for stealing, one for something just shy of treason.

The spooky thing is that Farage is wrong about Brexit, Covid, Trump’s war and keeping public money safe, but the greater our economic decline, the greater his political success. The traditional framework of a politician’s biography fails to capture Farage’s quicksilver. We’re dealing with a dark genius, one who has helped tank the British economy, walked away from political party after political party, washed his hands of Brexit and flounced out of parliament to fight a byelection against an immigrant from outer space.

This is a political leader who acts without suffering the consequences of his actions. True, Farage has created his own political fortune, but like his golden idol on the other side of the Atlantic, he is surfing on a new far-right wave in the west, as the generation who fought the second world war, who knew where dehumanising the Other can lead, dies out. The old heroes are dead; and their places in forging a new politics have been taken by a tiny handful of billionaires whose control of social media slides towards conflict. Their algorithms dig trenches. Or do I mean graves?

As it happens, I’ve met and challenged in person three of the Great Horsemen of the 21st-Century Apocalypse: in order, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage. Trump is a toad, all puffed up; Putin a cat, surprisingly effeminate; Farage a frog, though which variety, common or poison, is the question. Farage feels like the most human of the trio, the most relatable, the most fun. Years ago I watched him on Question Time and tweeted that I might like to spend some time with him down the pub, listening to him croak. That makes him the most troubling too.

For sure, Farage fizzes with main character energy. I interviewed him for our BBC Panorama programme “Trump: The Kremlin Candidate?” In early 2017, we had fixed to meet him somewhere fancy in central London, but a tube strike almost scuppered our plans. We couldn’t get a taxi for love nor money and there was no way that we could lug our camera op’s heavy lighting gear on the tube. But early that morning I bumped into someone I knew who had an electric cargo bike for her kids and, for a bob or two, we borrowed that to get the kit to the shoot. Feeling slightly chuffed, in the bit before the interview proper while the camera op was faffing about, I explained to Farage what we had done, that we had been green.

“No, you were being entrepreneurial.” His remark was whip-smart and somehow unsettling. The words don’t properly convey the tone, which suggested I was a bit thick and I had better get it that he was the boss. I wasn’t having that. Farage was on record singing the praises of a killer. Some years before, Alastair Campbell had asked him for GQ magazine who was the world leader he admired the most. Farage replied: “As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing” – Putin backed the tyrant Bashar al-Assad, who used poison gas against civilians – “Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically. How many journalists in jail now?”

The answer was – is – far too fucking many. But the people who stood out were my friends: two Russian journalists, Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova, and one politician, Boris Nemtsov. They were not in chokey. In order, they had been poisoned then shot; shot; shot. So I asked Farage about his funny-peculiar taste in world leaders.

Sweeney: Why do people on the right admire Vladimir Putin?

Farage: I think it’s a question of people who believe in nation-state democracy have some admiration for Vladimir Putin. He is clearly, with all his faults, a national leader who is enormously proud of his nation and of course what we’ve had is decades of our political leaders effectively trying to get rid of nation-state democracy, so what you saw in 2016 was nation-state democracy making a comeback. I would argue actually it’s a return to normality.

Sweeney: Is Russia a democracy?

Farage: No, not properly, no.

Afterwards, I got my wrist slapped by the Jellyfish – also known as BBC management – but I decided to poke him in the eye with a stick. I asked him the same question again.

Sweeney: Is Russia a democracy?

Farage: Not a proper democracy as we understand it, no.

He pulled a face full of hate. Farage was, it seemed to me, not just slippery but secreting some kind of amphibian poison, suggesting that if I pursued this line of inquiry, things might not go well for me. You take him on, he turns nasty, far nastier than his popular image might suggest. The disconnect between how he comes across on the stump or on telly and how I feel after I challenge him is a chasm. It is a strange mixture of dismay and fear and I am not a timid man.

If seeking power is a trial of character, my book – The Real Nigel Farage – is, if you like, making the case for the prosecution. I set out seven charges why Farage is not a fit and proper man to become our prime minister, an MP, or anything like it. The debt I owe to everyone who has spoken to me is plain. I have necessarily come across a whole series of people who know the man well but whose politics, to put it mildly, I don’t agree with.

Step forward the Hamiltons, Neil and Christine, ancient frenemies. Christine is the Great British Battleaxe, a star of I’m a Celebrity; her hubby, Neil, the disgraced former Tory MP who lost his seat in Tatton to my hero Martin Bell. Neil got into bed, as it were, with Farage for a time, and then was cast into the darkness: “Nigel Farage wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral,” he says. Neil is morbidly funny about Farage’s fear of due process, of proper organisation. But it’s worse than that: “He is a kind of messiah.” Christine nods her golden mane: the lioness of the British right agrees.

Step forward Rupert Lowe. He was elected in 2024 as a Reform MP and was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Farage. But then things started to go wrong. Lowe says that when he began to express criticisms of the way Farage was running the party, the knives came out for him. When Lowe called Farage “the messiah” in the Mail, he was accused the very next day of bullying his own staff in parliament, a charge the team called “nonsense”. Reform threw the book at him: “It was a hit job.” He told me: “Farage is a selfish narcissist.” It was that judgment more than anything that made Lowe set up Restore Britain, a party even further to the right than Reform. On Farage, he concludes: “I don’t think he is fit to become prime minister.”

Step forward Annabelle Fuller, now Sanderson. Once upon a time, she said of Farage: “He was fun, with a wicked sense of humour. He had the best jokes and easily the most interesting political stories. I loved listening to him. I was captivated by his worldliness.” That was then. For a long time, she was secretly in what she says was an abusive relationship with him and one that took a terrible toll on her self-esteem. 

Annabelle spoke to me at length for this book: “You remember you shouting at the Church of Scientology, that clip that went everywhere?” You bet. “That’s what life with Nigel is like. The cult of Farage.” Religions have dead messiahs. Cults have living ones. Cults brainwash. Cults do harm. “For some reason, the working-class people of this country think he’s their saviour. He is not. They are just voting fodder for him. He is their messiah and that’s incredibly dangerous. In politics, we must be able to criticise and hold people to account without fear of what’s going to happen to you if you do. With Nigel, whenever I write something on social media, his supporters are so hostile, and I’m constantly in fear: ‘Should I have said that?’”

She sent me some of the tweets she has received from Reform supporters. They were horrible. “But then I think, no, I know what I’ve got to say. This is about our country, right? I am one of the few people that knows what he’s really like. I have had years of therapy over that man, over what he did to me. I wasn’t in love with him. I was in a coercive control relationship with him.” Do you want him to be prime minister? “He would be incredibly damaging to the country. He doesn’t have the temperament, the morals or the intellectual capacity to be prime minister. Nigel doesn’t do detail. It’s all just slogans and playing to the lowest common denominator. He hardly turns up to parliament but now he wants to run the place; he wants his ego stroked. If he becomes prime minister, I’d leave the country.”

Step forward Godfrey Bloom. He once called for Britain to stop sending aid to “Bongo-Bongo Land”. A one-time Ukip MEP, he shared a flat in Brussels with Farage, introduced him to the French woman who was to become Farage’s “love of his life”, and Farage signed a copy of his ghosted autobiography, calling Bloom “my best friend in Ukip”. Then Farage withdrew his love. How best could Bloom capture his old flatmate? “I am not in the giving vein today.” That’s a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III, when the car-park king goes back on his word to the Duke of Buckingham to honour him. That Bloom compares the man who could be our prime minister to the monster that had the young princes murdered in the Tower is chilling, utterly so.

Take these witnesses, three former political allies, an ex-lover and his old flatmate, and they form an insight into Farage’s character which can be condensed into three words.

Charisma. Cruelty. Chaos.

And then there is the fourth pillar of his character: greed. When it comes to money, Farage is like a pig at his trough. He used to charge £75 to read out messages on Cameo. That’s how he got to wish Happy Birthday to Hugh Janus. In 2017, Farage said he was “53, separated and skint … There’s no money in politics”. Seven years on, he receives five million smackers from a crypto king but no one else knows. It’s money that was handed over in the gloaming and that’s not good.

Just like his hero Trump, Farage thrives on stark contradictions that would destroy a less charismatic politician. Ancient and modern, he is the Great British champion of techno-feudalism, asserting ancient sovereignties – Brexit – but boosting crypto, which is poison to the sovereignty of the pound sterling. 

He says the five million was a gift from the man with two names. Christopher Harborne is a multibillionaire who is also known by his Thai second identity Chakrit Sakunkrit. Farage says because it was a gift he did not have to log it with the Parliamentary Register of Interests. He needed the money for security, he says, and he took it when he had decided not to stand in the 2024 general election, but later changed his mind. Then it came out that Farage’s henchman, “Posh George” Cottrell, had been paying for security and those payments had not been logged with the register. 

Cottrell is not someone a smart politician should take a penny from. In 2016, after going to the Republican convention with Farage, Cottrell was arrested by US revenue special agents and indicted on 21 counts for conspiracy to commit money laundering, wire fraud, blackmail and extortion. Cottrell’s indictment states how, two years before, he met with undercover IRS federal agents in Las Vegas, where he conspired to launder millions of dollars’ worth of drug money using offshore bank accounts. He gave the feds some useful information and copped a plea bargain. Prosecutors dismissed 20 counts in return for a guilty plea to a single count of wire fraud. He served eight months in prison. The gossip is that Posh George calls Farage “Daddy”.

On the £5m, Farage changed his story, and said that the money was to thank him for getting Brexit done. The dosh had no influence on him: “I can’t be bought by anybody.” But the rules are simple: every new MP has to look back over the last 12 months and register any serious money they have been given, and the threshold for that is £300. Farage’s dosh from the crypto king overshot that number by £4,999,700. True, he started publicly boosting digital currency in 2020, four years before the gift. But it just so happens that it was only after receiving the five million that he set out a draft law putting the Bank of England’s heft behind crypto. Fancy that.

If Farage gets to No 10 and goes ahead with his plans to favour crypto investors with tax cuts over those of us who believe in sound money, there would be a flight from investments held in sterling. The country’s tax base would evaporate; the pound would be devalued; the government’s control of the economy would be gone; and British economic sovereignty would be shared with some bad actors from cryptoland: the Russian dark state, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Office 39 in Pyongyang. The economic hit would make Brexit look like a nosebleed.

The Guardian broke the story of the five million gift and who or what their source was is one of the mysteries of journalism. Farage suspected that he had been illegally hacked, possibly by the Russians. Annabelle Sanderson was unforgiving, tweeting: “‘Hacked’ (be careful of the huge pile of salt I’ve just left there) or not, Farage was still given £5m by a crypto billionaire which he did not declare, followed up by Reform announcing their crypto bill.” Millions of people warm to the Farage charisma but don’t see the cruelty or the chaos and don’t have the foggiest about crypto.

As ill luck will have it, we do have a road map of how a Nigel Farage government might work because of his first brush with power, when he was made a prefect at Dulwich College. One of the saddest, most depressing things I learned writing this book – and there are too many – is the shame felt by Peter Ettedgui, a Jewish boy whose beloved grandfather was a refugee from Nazi Germany. His grandad admired Churchill and would quote his speeches, and his grandson could not bring himself to tell his family that the boy he sat next to at school would say that Hitler was right, that Churchill was wrong, who barked: “Shut up, Jew!” Who hissed: “SSSSSSSS! Gas ’em!”

That classmate was Nigel Farage. He denies it, but Peter Ettedgui has 34 witnesses from Dulwich College on his side; for my book I have met 12 of them in person, an English jury.  

Peter says of Farage: “I do not want to see a school bully become my prime minister.” Peter is a real and proper man, but with respect I believe he understates it. The evidence is compelling that the man who might be our prime minister after the next general election was not just a school bully, but a Nazi. In Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, before he came to power, under the democratic Weimar Republic, Hitler’s words of hate for Jews were not lost in a vacuum but led to innocent people being killed.

Do Nigel Farage and his politics of blood echo that? You might think that Nigel Farage’s words could not lead to bloodshed. I doubt that. Divisiveness is his trademark. Farage once told Russia Today that the leaders of the European Union “are the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945”, claimed that the Labour party “hate the concept of Englishness” and that Nick Clegg, then leader of the Liberal Democrats, was part of an elite who “had never had a proper job”. He’s on record as saying that people don’t want to live next to Romanians, that “an employer is not allowed to choose between a British-born person and somebody from Poland”, that “we discriminate in favour of people from Poland”.

Did his rhetoric, demonising liberals, immigrants, especially eastern Europeans, during the Brexit campaign have any effect? Yes, it did. Did Leave.EU’s “Breaking Point” poster, showing hundreds of asylum seekers crowding a border in the Balkans, move opinion? Yes, it did. Britain voted Leave. Did some white Britons get it into their heads that Farage’s language gave them licence to be rude to Polish people, to beat them up? Yes, I think they did. After the Brexit vote, hate crimes, especially against eastern Europeans, in particular Poles, spiked 41%.

Given his history, what he was at school, and his denial of it; given his charisma, his cruelty, his chaos, the thought of Nigel Farage getting even a taste of power fills me with dread. 

This is an edited extract from The Real Nigel Farage by John Sweeney, which will be published by Headline on 10 September (RRP £22; to order at a special 10% discount go to the Nerve Bookshop and enter the code LOVEBOOKSHOPS)

John Sweeney is a journalist who has won awards for his work both in print and broadcasting including the Paul Foot Award in 2005. His most recent work includes the book Murder in the Gulag (2024) and the podcast Hunting Ghislaine

The Nerve has reported extensively on the links between Christopher Harborne and Nigel Farage. Read our investigation here