The Story of Nigel Farage - Part II

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This is the second in an exclusive two-part series from the book, Making the Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain by Professor Vernon Bogdanor. You can read part one here. Making the Weather is the story of six postwar politicians, all of whom exerted an outsized influence on our political life —an influence greater than that of most prime ministers.

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In the European Parliament, Nigel Farage specialised in colourful, if provocative, speeches. Indeed, in 2016 the journal Politico was to declare that he was ‘one of the two most effective speakers in the chamber’.

In addition, UKIP benefited from the financial and in-kind resources available to them as a result of being the largest contingent in the political group of hard Eurosceptics, which Farage led.

His most notorious intervention occurred in March 2010, on the maiden appearance in the Parliament of Herman Van Rompuy, the newly chosen president of the European Council and outgoing prime minister of Belgium.

Van Rompuy, Farage declared, had ‘the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk’. He asked who had voted for Van Rompuy and how he could be removed. He then concluded that Van Rompuy would be ‘the quiet assassin of European democracy’ and that he lacked legitimacy, adding for good measure that Van Rompuy’s hostility to the nation state was due to the fact that he came from Belgium, which was a ‘non-country’.

Farage was summoned by the president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, to apologise, but said that his only apology should be to bank clerks: ‘If I have offended them, I am very sorry’.

He was then fined €3,000, to be deducted from his parliamentary allowance, since he had ‘insulted the dignity’ of the president of the Council.

From its earliest days, UKIP was dogged by …