The deputy master at the time of the prefect affair, Terry Walsh, recalled on Channel 4 News in 2013 that Farage had liked to provoke left-wing teachers who had “no sense of humour” – hence, according to Walsh, Chlöe Deakin’s letter. I do not think that Deakin (who voted Liberal if not Conservative) was among them. My impression of the prefect Farage is that he was a grandiose, faintly deluded figure with a powerful sense of social grievance. His father Guy Farage, apparently an alcoholic of Huguenot immigrant ancestry, left home when Nigel was five. The showman-ideologue already evident in the schoolboy is to be lampooned tonight on BBC2 in Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back, a mockumentary which follows Nige (Kevin Bishop) as he returns to a so-called Little England world of pints, puzzles and episodes of ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’. Farage’s early habit of viewing the world through the lens of immigration, race conflict and social antagonism makes him easy to send up as a buffoon. He joined the Tory party at 14 and later became famous for his Spitfire cufflinks.
In Fighting Bull, the former UKIP leader wrote of his schoolboy self: “I was quite ballsy, probably good on a platform, unafraid of the limelight, a bit noisy and good at selling things.” He can say that again. In lampooning Farage as a cartoon figure, however, Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back rather miss the point. Farage justifiably invites ridicule but he has stood up to the narcissistic Bonapartism (let us call it that) of Jean-Claude Juncker in the European Parliament, and that was surely not such a bad thing. Goodbye, Nige; you never did look good in that school prefect blazer.
30 October 2106