At the point Nigel Farage announced his intention to stand for parliament “my heart sank”, admitted Trixy Sanderson, 42, formerly known as Annabelle Fuller. “It’s very triggering,” said Farage’s former lover and press aide.
The overriding emotion of Doug Denny, 76, a former member of Ukip’s ruling body, was frustration. “I don’t like frauds,” he said, with a shake of the head. As for Nikki Sinclaire, 55, one of Farage’s former MEPs, she said she felt cold anger.
It was inexplicable to her that this particular political bandwagon was still rolling on. “I get very frustrated because the media have had the tools for many years to down Farage.”
That collective sense of foreboding deepened on Thursday night as Farage’s Reform UK party summoned up Rishi Sunak’s worst nightmare, nudging ahead of the Conservatives in a YouGov poll for the first time, with its support reaching 19% to the Tories 18%, while Labour powered on at 37%.
“This is the inflection point,” said Farage, 60, in a hastily shot video for social media. “The only wasted vote now is a Conservative vote. We are the challengers to Labour. We are on our way.”
For all of Farage’s apparent national popularity, it has not been an entirely comfortable opening to his eighth attempt to gain a seat in parliament, this time in the Essex town of Clacton-on-Sea.
He has been drenched in banana milkshake and been forced to duck projectiles thrown at him while on a bus tour through Barnsley town centre. Yet as unpleasant as those scenes have been, the truth is that such scuffles have long been part of the campaign appearances of people as divisive as Farage.
There is, however, something quite peculiar about the level of antipathy that is also felt towards the Reform party leader by so many of those who have worked closely with him over the years.
Grudges and gripes are nothing new in politics. It is arguably inevitable that Farage would have picked up enemies over his long political career, even among former confidants; and he does have friends, of course.
This April, 300 people, including the former prime minister Liz Truss, joined him at a boisterous 60th birthday dinner at Boisdale, in London’s Canary Wharf, to which the former US president Donald Trump sent a video message of congratulations. Some speak of his private kindness and entertaining company.
It is, however, striking, and possibly instructive, how very many enemies, often of his own political hue, Farage has accumulated since he swapped being a trader on the London metal exchange for politics more than 30 years ago.
The reasons given for the often deeply felt dislike – mainly varieties of the claim that he is a power-hungry narcissist – also potentially offer an insight into his intentions for Reform, described as an “entrepreneurial political start-up” in which Farage is the company’s director and majority shareholder.
He has promised, in time, to democratise the party, which has 45,000 paying supporters, but does not seem in any hurry to give up control.
Observers see parallels in his conversion of Ukip into a one-man show, although a spokesperson for Reform said the party leader and party chair had never taken a salary or dividend.
Sinclaire said: “The thing is, with Farage, he plays the same game over and over and over again.” Arguably, the game started at school.
Chloe Deakin, an English teacher at Dulwich college, wrote in 1981: “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.”
In Michael Crick’s biography of Farage, One Party After Another, those who shared a classroom with Farage at the private school in south-east London expressed the full range of views on him.
One Jewish pupil claimed Farage would sidle up to him and say: “Hitler was right,” or “Gas ’em.” Another claimed Farage had a preoccupation with his initials, NF, as they were the same as those of the National Front.
“He was a deeply unembarrassed racist,” said David Edmonds, who was in the same class as Farage when they were about 15. Others told Crick they did not hear such comments and that they regarded him as neither malicious nor exceptional in the views he held.
In his autobiography, Fighting Bull, Farage admitted some people were alarmed by his admiration for Enoch Powell, and when confronted in 2013 by Crick he admitted saying “ridiculous things” but “not necessarily racist things”.
What was undeniable, he conceded, was that he was a “difficult bolshie teenager who pushed the boundaries of debate further than perhaps I ought to have done”.
It could be argued that Farage never really grew up.
Ukip emerged as a political party in 1993 and Farage was determined to be there at the start of it, aged 29, having been propelled to live life to the full, he has said, after being knocked down by a Volkswagen Beetle and then having his left testicle removed due to cancer.
He quickly fell out with Ukip’s then leader, Alan Sked, a rather unworldly academic who would come to complain that Farage was turning up drunk to meetings of the party’s national executive committee.
But Farage had a penchant for snappy rhetoric and attracting media attention and in 2003, three years before he became leader, he also displayed a flair for making money, albeit with an outcome that would make others feel uncomfortable.
Alan Bown, a retired bookmaker and Ukip donor, had offered a former betting shop in Ashford, Kent, for the party to use as a call centre, recalled Denny, the treasurer for the south-east, where Farage was an MEP.
The operation was run by Farage and it was a huge success but concerns were raised over time by Denny and others as to where the money was going, including £211,267 that turned up as “other costs” in the call centre’s books.
There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Farage, who has denied that any money went missing and described the operation as a “spectacular success”.
“But it was never investigated properly,” said Denny. “Thing is, I quite like him in some respects because, he’s like Boris, he’s just a bit of a buffoon, and is great fun in a pub with a pint and a fag in his mouth and so on, but the man’s a spiv.”
Denny added that those who challenged Farage were dealt with swiftly. “Any other people who were potentially leaders would be, well, he made their life so untenable they either left the party entirely, or they were sidetracked, or whatever,” he said. “That was the reason I resigned. I was actually deselected [as a candidate MEP], not by him, but by a minor party official who became the electoral candidate selection officer or something. It was a bogus bloody situation, but that’s how it was done.”
Questions around money would be a source of difficulty for years to come.
Sinclaire had been elected as a Ukip MEP in 2009 but was expelled over her rejection of the party’s membership of the wider Europe of Freedom and Democracy group, which Farage had championed despite the bigoted views expressed by some of its members.
On 12 March 2014, her longstanding frustration over the Ukip leader’s use of parliamentary allowances bubbled over. She raised a question with him in the European parliament in Strasbourg.
“With unemployment still a problem across Europe and and indeed across the UK, does Mr Farage thinks it is a fair use of taxpayers’ money, namely his secretarial allowance, not only to employ his wife, Kirsten, but his former mistress Annabelle Fuller? Is this a responsible use of taxpayers’ money, Mr Farage?”
Farage responded: “I don’t want to answer that at all, thank you.”
He later claimed the allegations were “nonsense” and “malicious”.
The genesis of Sinclaire’s question, made under parliamentary privilege which gives her protection from the defamation laws, lay in Farage’s insistence in 2004, shortly after his election as leader, that Ukip MEPs would not employ their partners, a policy that he had personally and quietly ignored. He had also promised to hand over the extra unspent allowances he received as an MEP to the party’s central coffers.
“Of course, when he got elected he didn’t want to give the party any money unless he has control of what it was saying,” Sinclaire said. “An MEP can legitimately claim about €200,000 (£169,000) a year. So it’s a huge amount of money.”
A Farage spokesperson described this allegation among others as “historic comments from people with an axe to grind”.
The woman at the centre of that scandal, who had been his closest adviser, press aide and speechwriter, now involuntarily shakes at the mention of Farage’s name.
At the time, Fuller and Farage vehemently denied they were in a romantic relationship.
She only admitted in an interview in 2017 that they had been having an on-off affair for more than a decade. She changed her name to Trixy Sanderson eight years ago in an attempt to draw a line under an unhappy period.
“He is a narcissist,” Sanderson said. “I’m not a doctor but people are disposable to Nigel. When you are in his good books it feels like a great place to be, but then he chips away at your confidence. For me, it was: ‘Well, no one else will employ you.’ You know: ‘You can’t have a relationship with anyone else because they will only want to know about me.’ And then it’s his way or no way, which I am sure Richard Tice [the former leader of Reform] is finding.”
She added: “I mean, the thing is, he is incredibly charismatic. He is a brilliant communicator, but, but he’s also very dominating. If he’s angered about something, that’s it, you are shut out. And he’s never wrong either.”
Announcing his candidature and leadership of Reform, Farage explained that he had decided to stand after being approached by people disappointed with his previous decision not to do so.
Ann Widdecombe, 76, a former MEP for the Brexit party, Reform’s previous name, said Farage had been under “massive pressure” to rethink his position. Gawain Towler, 56, one of a handful of confidants who have loyally worked with Farage for decades, and is Reform’s director of communications, said he had been with Farage in Skegness when the pivot was made.
“It was people basically saying [to Farage]: ‘Really pleased to see really good campaigning but why aren’t you leading it? You are letting us down, mate,’” Towler claimed.
Hermann Kelly, the president of the anti-immigration Irish Freedom party, who was also a press aide to Farage for years in the European parliament, claimed his former boss was genuine in being driven by his belief in social conservatism and a small state, citing JS Mill’s On Liberty as an inspiration. “I remember him making a comment to me: ‘Nice suit, clean shoes, on parade,’” Kelly, 55, said. “This whole idea: we’re in a war of ideas and the suit is the same as a uniform.”
It had not been without cost, he said. Farage was lucky to survive when his two-seater plane towing a “Vote Ukip” banner crashed in Northamptonshire in 2010, and he is said to still struggle with the injuries. Kelly said he had seen Farage cry twice. Once when talking about the difficulties of being away from his four children, to whom he remains close, and on a second occasion when he was shown an article in Conservative Woman in appreciation of his work. “We were in the smoking room in Brussels, and he says: ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever written about me,’” Kelly recalled.
It was undeniable Farage could be politically ruthless, Kelly conceded. “If a job had to be done, Nigel would make sure that the job was done,” he said. But he was effective. Kelly added that when he was working with him, Farage had saved just six numbers in his mobile phone and for a long time struggled to send a text, but that he was quick to see the value of YouTube, TikTok and X, for which he dictates messages to his press aides.
Farage’s YouTube channel, which has 379,000 subscribers, is just outside the top 1,000 most popular in the UK, according to analysis by Who Targets Me, and he is said by friends to be “obsessed” with his metrics. A spokesperson for Farage said: “Nigel is back because there is a gap in the political market.”
Sanderson, who now works in medical technology, said she was not looking forward to seeing more of Farage in the media. He had become more of a “white nationalist over time”, she said. “He used to talk about trade and fishing and now it is all immigrants.” She said she thinks she understands why he has made his comeback.
“He had serious fear of missing out. Because he was campaigning he wasn’t able to do his GB News show because of Ofcom rules,” she said. “So, all of a sudden, the spotlight’s gone, right. And I think, in fact I know, he would have also thought, ‘No one else can run a campaign like me’ – and that’s probably true.”
