It’s an effort to cast the Reform UK leader as far right when he and his party are mainstream. He should be judged on his actions today, not on schoolboy insults from half a century ago
November 26, 2025 17:46
I suppose we should be grateful that the Guardian and the BBC have now decided that antisemitism is bad. Since last week they have both been running stories based on allegations in the Guardian which originally surfaced in Michael Crick’s 2023 biography of Nigel Farage – that he used antisemitic insults and taunts when he was at school.
So should it be joy and all that over one, or in this case two, sinners who repent? It’s certainly new seeing such concern about Jew hate from the two mainstream news organisations which have been more responsible than any others for the rise in antisemitism in recent years. Their slanted and misleading reports over the Gaza are just one example of how both have been in the vanguard of fostering Jew hate.
Unfortunately, however, it looks as if this is nothing more elevated than a political hit job on Farage. Far from being built on some new-found concern over antisemitism – which would involve serious soul searching and mass editorial resignations in both organisations – this is simply the Guardian the BBC weaponising antisemitism as a tool with which to beat their bete noire, Farage and Reform.
The Guardian’s story contained quotes from 20 of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich College, the independent school in south London, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They say they were either the targets or witnesses of racist abuse by the Reform leader as a boy, comments such as “Hitler was right”, and “Gas them”. He is also said to have sung racist songs. In response, Farage first used carefully constructed sentences which, while saying he had not "directly racially abused" anyone "by taking it out on an individual on the basis of who they are or what they are", nonetheless conceded that he had probably "misspoken in my life, in my younger days, when I was a child". That position then hardened, with Farage telling GB News that "I categorically deny saying those things, to that one individual, and frankly, frankly for the Guardian and the BBC to be going back just shy of half a century to come out with this stuff it shows how desperate they are."
I should declare an interest. One of the 20 people cited in the Guardian making the allegations is a good friend of mine. I would stake my reputation on him telling the truth, so of course I believe him – and thus I believe that Farage did say some deeply unpleasant, indeed appalling things.
But before we rush to judgement, some context is needed. Like Farage, I was at a London private school in the late 1970s and early 80s. Antisemitic abuse was common. One classmate – now a City bigwig who is doubtless proud of his institution’s commitment to diversity – smeared a pork pie in my gym bag. Did the insults and abuse upset me? Initially, of course. But they were an example of the law of diminishing returns. It was so common that it soon became something I barely even noticed.
It’s important to remember that things were very different then. Casual racism was normal. We have moved on a lot since then and rightly look back in horror at behaviour that was normal. One aspect of political correctness that is entirely to the good is our sensitivity to racism – but we can’t pretend that the way we look at these things today was the same fifty years ago. Are we really going to judge – and damn – people based on awful things they said when they were children? Especially when those things were said at a time when sensitivities were very different.
It’s as if we consider Keir Starmer to want Britain to be a Soviet totalitarian state because he holidayed in Iron Curtain Czechoslovakia as a teenager.
It’s clear what is going on here: an attempt to portray Farage as far right, and thus Reform as some kind of British version of the German AfD or the French National Rally. But whether you agree with Reform or oppose everything about it doesn’t alter the fact it is a mainstream party led by a mainstream politician, with mainstream supporters. There is a danger of all this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Farage has been a bulwark against extremism, and if he is out of the picture we have no idea what dark forces will emerge.
Farage should be judged, for good or ill, on who he is and what he does now. Not on insults he threw when he was a boy.
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