London: Rarely photographed without a beverage in hand, Nigel Farage has turned the UK Independence Party into a national force but is battling for his future at Britain’s May 7 election.
Anti-Brussels and anti-political correctness, Farage reminds Ukip’s base of older, white, blue collar voters of a bygone era when the economy felt stronger, immigration was lower and Britain was great.
The charismatic 51-year-old, who once compared ex-European Council president Herman Van Rompuy to a “damp rag”, led Ukip to victory in last year’s European elections and third place in opinion polls before May’s vote.
Once dismissed by Prime Minister David Cameron as a party of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, Ukip is now defending two House of Commons seats and looks set to take thousands of votes nationwide from the main parties.
But while his “people’s army” looks likely to win a handful of seats nationally, this is unlikely to be enough for them to call the shots over a referendum on Britain leaving the European Union.
And Farage, a former commodities trader, says he will step down as party leader if he does not win his own seat in the seaside constituency of South Thanet.
Farage was born in 1964 to an affluent family in Kent, southeast England. His father was a stockbroker and an alcoholic and his parents divorced when he was five.
He was educated at one of England’s top private schools, Dulwich College, where he says his headmaster saw him as “bloody-minded and difficult”.
Rather than attending university, he followed his father into the City of London, where he says that 12-hour boozy lunches were the norm.
Having supported the Conservatives since his school days, he joined Ukip in 1993 as a founder member and was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, aged 35.
Farage became Ukip’s leader in 2006 before standing down in 2009 and then being re-elected the following year, when Ukip’s ascent really began.
He has survived a string of personal misfortunes — a serious car accident, testicular cancer and a plane crash as he was campaigning during the 2010 general election.
Farage is married to a German woman and has four children. His interests include cricket and fishing.
Despite his wealthy background, he prides himself on keeping up with the concerns of ordinary people in the “pubs, coffee mornings and yes, even the golf clubs of Britain”.
This backfired last month when he and his family were chased out of his local pub by anti-Ukip protesters he labelled “scum”.
In his pinstriped suit and fedora, Farage is the public, presentable figurehead of a party lacking any other figures with the same profile.
He avoids the kind of race-related gaffes for which Ukip has expelled a string of members but has voiced admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and suggested foreigners with HIV should not receive treatment on the state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
Ukip’s popularity under Farage played a major part in prompting Cameron to promise a referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU which will take place by 2017 if the Conservatives win on May 7.
But the party looks unlikely to win enough seats to be able to prop up a minority Conservative government and force it to hold an EU referendum this year, as Farage wants.
More critically, his future as Ukip leader depends on whether he can persuade voters in South Thanet to vote him in, while also leading the party’s national campaign.
He has a fight on his hands — a poll commissioned by the party and leaked to this week’s Mail on Sunday newspaper put Farage one point behind his Conservative rival.
While dismissing the figure as “rogue”, a Ukip spokesman added: “No one is pretending we do not have work to do.”
