‘He was a bully at school, he's a bully now’: the long history of racism allegations against Nigel Farage

In the ordinary way, reporters do not interview other reporters. But then, in the ordinary way, the leader of the British political party that has topped every single opinion poll since May did not say “Paki”, “Wog”, “Gas ’em all”, “Hitler was right” and “That’s the way back to Africa” when he was at school. 

Recent reporting has put this behaviour back under the spotlight, but it’s not the first time it’s been aired. Challenged over the years about these comments, allegedly made while he was at Dulwich College from 1975 to 1982, Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, has issued a series of qualified denials. This man is currently on course to be our next prime minister, so the history and the integrity of this investigation and the precise nature of his denials are important.  

That’s why I find myself standing outside the playing fields of fee-paying Dulwich College in south London talking to Michael Crick, while my dog Bertie gives him a good sniff to check that he is not a Russian spy. 

Perhaps the greatest political reporter of his age, Crick started at Channel 4 News, switching to BBC Newsnight, then returning to his old stable, before in the last few years stepping away from the camera to concentrate on writing books. One observer said of him: “Crick adheres instead to the honourable belief that the job of the reporter is to create as much trouble as possible.”  He has helped destroy the careers of many politicians, with his biggest scalp being Jeffrey Archer, the former Tory party chairman, serial fantasist and convicted felon. 

We kick off with me asking Crick what he had found out about Dulwich’s perhaps most famous old boy.  

“Twelve years ago, 2013, I did a film for Channel 4 News, a profile of Farage. I always liked going back to people's pasts. So I took a look at Dulwich College. Pretty quickly I was led to a former English master called Bob Jope, who lived all the way down in Torquay, and he agreed to talk on camera, so I immediately got on the train. He’d said on the phone he thought he had a letter somewhere in his files from a fellow teacher at the time, complaining about Farage being made a prefect, and how he was utterly unsuitable to be a prefect because he was a racist and a neofascist and so on.”  

Crick acknowledges that the story is complicated, that there were fellow schoolboys and teachers who sided with Farage and did not remember him being racist, and that he had a friend who was black. But there were many others who recall a racist bully. 

The letter to the school’s then headmaster was written in 1981 by Chloe Deakin, a young English teacher at the school. The letter remains shocking: 

“Dear Master 

…You will recall that at the recent, and lengthy, meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a ‘fascist, but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the Common Room. Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views; and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set, that he had to be removed from the lesson… Yet another colleague described how, at a CCF [Combined Cadet Force] camp organised by the College, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler youth songs.”

In 2013 Crick, working for Channel 4 News, caught up with Farage and asked him about the letter and the wider allegations that he had been racist and neofascist at school. 

Crick: Would you like to see the letter? 

Farage: I’ve seen it before. 

Crick: Have you? 

Farage: Well, not for 30 years. Yes, of course, I said some ridiculous things … 

Crick: Racist things? 

Farage: Not necessarily racist things. 

Crick: Not necessarily racist? 

Farage: Well, it depends how you define it. You see, I mean, you’ve got to remember that ever since 1968, up until the last couple of years, we’ve not been able in this country intelligently to discuss immigration, discuss integration. It’s all been a buried subject, and that's happened through academia, it’s happened through politics and the media. 

Crick: But I mean, that letter, for instance, it cites an example of you, taunting someone in class and having to be excluded... 

Farage: … I was excluded … 

Crick: By implication on racial grounds. 

Farage: [laughing jovially] I was excluded from class dozens of times over the years for all sorts of reasons … 

Crick: … For racist … 

Farage: No, no, no, I don’t accept that … 

Crick: It’s not just that. Fellow pupils remember you making racist comments. 

Farage: Well, I might have wound some of them up too. 

Crick: So you made racist comments to wind people up?

Farage: All through the 1970s, I would counter any received wisdom on any subject quite deliberately, I wasn’t alone in doing that ... 

Crick: What about the accusation that you marched through this Sussex village singing Hitler Youth songs?

Farage: [laughing jovially] I don’t even know the words … Was I a typical bolshie teenager who pushed the boundaries of debate further than perhaps I ought to have done? Yes. Have I, to some extent in politics, continued to challenge things that are continued to be unchallengeable? Yes. Have I ever been a member of any extremist organisations, left or right? No. 

Farage is the most fluent politician of our time and the exchange is a minor classic illustrating his gift, his easy way with words. When I interviewed him about his fondness for the killer in the Kremlin for the BBC’s Panorama in 2017, he deflected, expressing admiration for Vladimir Putin then quickly pivoting, touching on how many opposition figures in Russia have been killed. He speaks so well you often miss what is actually being said or not being said. I intend no criticism of Crick to state this: that his denial in 2013 is a category mistake. He answered a question Crick did not ask: was he a member of a far-right organisation? At no point did he directly answer the primary question: had he used racist and antisemitic language? 

To be fair, Crick, back then, did not have the full charge sheet or key witnesses who would back him up on camera. 

He was not alone. Someone else troubled by Farage’s conduct at school popped up in 2019 in the Independent. It ran an anonymous article from an another old boy who had been a friend of Farage at school, setting out the interest Farage took that his initials, NF, were the same as the National Front, that Farage often said: “Send ’em home” and sang “Gas them all, gas ’em all, gas them all.” 

Crick returned to the story of Farage’s schooldays in 2022 in his book One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage. It’s a disturbing read. Crick notes that the picture is confused, that many students at the school he got in touch with defended Farage and had no recollection of him saying racist and antisemitic stuff.  

But Crick writes: “One Jewish pupil recalls a climate in which it wasn’t unusual to hear anti-Semitic or racist comments in school. ‘I got it,’ he says. ‘Kids from India or Pakistan got it.’ He specifically remembers how Farage would sidle up to him and say, ‘Hitler was right’, or ‘Gas ’em.’” 

Crick quotes Tim France, another student, saying that Farage openly “supported the British Movement” – further to the far right than the National Front. “He recalls Farage as ‘very vocal’, how he chanted ‘BM, BM. We are British Nazi men’, and how he even did Nazi salutes. France also remembers a repetitive chant similar to the song mentioned by the anonymous letter writer: ‘gas them all, gas ’em all, gas them all.’” 

In One Party After Another, Crick quotes at length Farage’s response to the allegations of racism and antisemitism: “Let’s get one thing straight. I joined the Conservative party in 1978, and thought all of the far right parties/movements to be ludicrous, barmy/dangerous. There were some hard left class-of-1968 masters [who] joined the College and several of us thoroughly enjoyed winding them up. Terms of abuse thrown around between fifteen-year-olds were limitless; there were no boundaries. I think red-haired boys fared especially badly.”

Farage’s denial in 2022 is, like that of 2013, a category mistake. He again addresses an issue that Crick does not raise, his (non-)membership of far-right parties and movements, while sidestepping the primary question: did he use racist and antisemitic language? 

Three years on, the Guardian has entered the fray. Reform UK’s No 1 slot in the opinion polls, and more and more talk of Farage being our next prime minister, seems to have pushed people who naturally preferred to stay out of the limelight to stand up and be counted. Reporter Henry Dyer was Crick’s researcher for his book. Along with Daniel Boffey and Mark Blacklock, Dyer got 20 former students at Dulwich to spill the beans. For the first time, Jewish former Dulwich pupil Peter Ettedgui went on the record: “[Farage] would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘gas them’, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers … I’d never experienced antisemitism growing up, so the first time that this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage’s mouth was deeply shocking. But I wasn’t his only target. I’d hear him calling other students ‘Paki’ or ‘Wog’, and urging them to ‘go home’. I tried to ignore him, but it was humiliating. It was shaming. This kind of abuse cuts through to the core of your identity.”

Jean-Pierre Lihou said: “[Farage] used to say ‘Jude’, to Peter, the German for Jew, in the way it was said in the 1930s, a long ‘u’ in a menacing way.” Lihou remembered the words of the song Farage sang: 

“Gas em all, gas em all, into the chambers they crawl. We’ll gas all the pakis, and we’ll gas all the yids, and we’ll gas all the coons and all their fucking kids.’”

To the Guardian, a Reform UK spokesperson said: “There is no primary evidence. It’s one person’s word against another.” 

On 4 December, the story finally cut through into the national conversation when, on BBC Radio 4 Four’s Today programme, presenter Emma Barnett pressed Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, on his boss’s “relationship with Hitler”. Tice condemned the Guardian story as “made-up twaddle” and, asked whether Ettedgui was lying, said: “Yes.” 

Farage then picked up the cudgels, attacking the BBC for its coverage of the story, calling it “despicable” and “beyond belief”, characterising Barnett as one of the BBC’s “lower-grade presenters” and condemned the BBC for the fact it was showing programmes in the 1970s and 1980s that would be viewed as racist today. “I cannot put up with the double standards of the BBC about what I’m alleged to have said 49 years ago, and what you were putting out on mainstream content,” he said. “So I want an apology from the BBC for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 80s,” he said, referencing comedian Bernard Manning and the fictional character Alf Garnett, as well as The Black and White Minstrel Show.

As in 2013, 2022 and last month, Farage did not address the primary question directly. Farage did tell an ITV presenter: “Recollections may vary.”

Farage blaming the BBC was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Yinka Bankole, whose family were from Nigeria. He went to Dulwich’s prep school when he was nine years old for a year, when Farage was 17: “One day Farage, and at least one other, spotted me in the lower-school playground. He was about 17. He towered over me. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked. Within seconds of offering my rather confused and sputtering answers, he had a clear response: ‘That’s the way back to Africa.’” 

On Bankole’s allegations, Crick told me: “The worst kind of bullying you can imagine: not just racism, but bullying racism.”

 Farage could become the next prime minister. Does that worry Crick?

“I am worried. Everything you see in Farage today is the Farage of Dulwich College. He was a bully at school, he’s a bully now.” 

Subsequently, Farage issued a new statement saying: “I can tell you categorically that I did not say the things that have been published in the Guardian aged 13, nearly 50 years ago.”

The use of the phrase “aged 13” in his denial is very time-specific. I have been a reporter since I was 18 in 1977 and my instinct and the heft of the evidence tells me that when Nigel Farage implies that he did not use racist or antisemitic language at school, he is lying through his tobacco-stained teeth. 

John Sweeney is The Nerve’s Reform UK correspondent. He 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