Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  I saw a lot of Clare that year, but then I could not spend much time in pubs and bars, not dressed up as a chalk with my younger brother, constantly checking his watch, in attendance.

  That divinity which shapes our ends and in which I do not believe now got seriously cross with me. He or She had gone to all that trouble, admittedly on a pitifully low-budget, with the late-night car accident, and I appeared to have paid no attention.

  ‘OK, then,’ they said on Olympus or wherever they meet these days, ‘let’s see if the little bugger gets this message!’

  I went to work on Boxing Day 1986, just one month after the plaster was at last removed. On my return to Downe, I hobbled on that atrophied leg into the Queen’s Head. I had got as far as ‘Good evening, and a Happy—’ when an invisible larding-needle was stabbed directly down through my kidney and into my left testicle. I said something memorable like ‘Fuck!’ and doubled up in excruciating pain.

  Back in hospital, I was painfully examined by four doctors. They resolved that I was suffering from testicular torsion, also known as ‘Winter syndrome’ because scrota which have sagged in warm beds tighten abruptly when their owners arise in the cold air, causing snarled up spermatic cords to tighten into blood-knots.

  I was about to be wheeled into theatre when an Indian consultant (upon whom may eternal blessings shower) stepped forward and dissented with the diagnosis. Surgery was cancelled. I was released. The pain, which had abated by then, returned. My left testicle swelled up, first to the size of a golf-ball, then to that of a tangerine.

  I went to my GP, who was baffled. A City colleague reminded me that my terms of employment included comprehensive BUPA cover. I took a taxi to Harley Street. I was given an ultrasound scan. The consultant shook his head slowly, clicked his tongue and told me, ‘Oh, Mr Farage, I do hope you’re not planning to go anywhere too quickly…’

  I had testicular cancer.

  In early February 1987, I was admitted to the Princess Grace Hospital in Marylebone, I signed a form consenting to any mutilation deemed apt and went under.

  Last time I did this, I awoke monocular. This time I awoke monorchid.

  I knew, of course, that Nature (again I was grateful to evolution) doubled up on truly vital organs such as kidneys, lungs, ovaries and testicles, providing us with a spare of each against just such emergencies. I didn’t need two, but I had quite liked the sense of security which the extra one had provided, besides which, as Eeyore had said of his tail, I had been attached to it. Nonetheless, when they offered me an artificial one to supply me with greater social confidence, I refused.

  I had had a teratoma (‘monstrous tumour’ in Greek). These not only have a nasty habit of moving about the body at alarming speed but tend to like company in the lymph-glands and other areas. I was advised that I was likely to have secondaries in my lungs and stomach. I underwent a comprehensive CT scan.

  I believed that I was going to die.

  In common with all others so persuaded, I thought this unfair. I reflected on all the things that I was never after all going to be able to do but which I had hitherto assumed to be my birthright. These included being married and having children. Clare had the misfortune to be the only one of my friends not only to be female, attractive, affectionate and on the spot but to be able to treat my afflictions with brusque professional amusement rather than with terror or hilarity – which I suspect to be the same things.

  On Friday 13 February 1987, I was sitting with Hugh LeFanu, a friend and fellow broker, watching the racing in my private room. We had cigarettes and large straight malts in either hand. Peter Harper, the oncologist, strolled in. He leaned back against the wall and waited politely as Peter O’Sullevan gabbled the last rites over several hundred of our pounds. Then he stepped forward. ‘You will be delighted to know, Mr Farage,’ he said with a small smile, ‘that the scan has uncovered no further anomalies. You have, for now, the all-clear.’

  Hugh whooped, slurped more Laphroaig into our glasses and pressed a toothmug of whisky on the consultant.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Harper. ‘Some of my patients after such an experience spend the rest of their lives drinking carrot juice and avoiding all excess. A few go the other way. I suspect that you belong in the latter category.’

  He then laid down the conditions of my release. Instead of chemotherapy, I was to turn up at London Bridge Hospital twice a week at 8.00 am to have my alpha-fetoprotein count taken. Should it rise by an iota, I would be whisked back into hospital and subjected to every indignity which technology had yet devised.

  In early March, I played thirty-six holes with such proficiency and bloody-mindedness that I was selected to play for Dulwich in the Halford Hewitt.

  I was back on track.

  *

  No Pauline conversion, then, but my time in the sidings had given me pause in more senses than one. The next five years were to be a bid at compromise, an attempt to persuade myself that I had been right and was just fine as I was, thanks.

  I bought a house. Clare moved in with me. We were happy.

  But then, we were both working full-time and I was on a roll, so happy was easy. Our news, on the rare occasions when she was not in the hospital and I neither on the exchanges nor in the bar, was consistently exciting. In that same year, my colleague Charlie Vincent and I were charged with setting up a metals department. My annual income rocketed. Clare believed my constant absence to be the normal price for such rewards.

  By the following summer, she was pregnant and we married. Our son Sam was born in January 1989. This was an unparalleled joy for me. I don’t want to bore those who have had the experience, but it is strange and sobering to feel your heart wrested from you by main force as that negligible little thing slithers into the light, flexes its fingers and commands your allegiance for life.

  I now officially had everything. I was still fretting.

  4

  ‘SOVEREIGNTY WILL CEASE’

  Those in search of seamless progression will note that, in this account of the first twenty-five years of my life, there is no mention of the European Union, though in its various guises it had been a fact of life since my ninth year.

  In common with just about everyone with more soul than a Swiss roll, I had railed against unnecessary regulations and interference. After 1986, the City became more and more regulated and it was clear that the days of the cavalier free trader were numbered.

  Emptor did not have to cavere quite so much (or so it seemed. The crash of the noughties shows that, on the contrary, regulation affords a dangerously specious sense of security) but talent, intuition, flair and fun were all but outlawed.

  This was the nature of ‘big bang’. It brought huge sums of money into the economy and established Britain as a dominant player on the global market. At the same time, it marked the end of the gentlemen’s club which had been the City and the cold, grey dawn of corporatism.

  My new employers, R. J. Rouse and Co., had started out as a coffee and cocoa broker and, when I joined it, was owned by Mercantile House and run by a very English retired colonel called John Barkshire, who was still occasionally to be seen wandering through our offices, murmuring encouragement to the gold-braceleted Essex boys and the chalk-striped public-school dropouts barking into the phones.

  Shortly afterwards, however, Rouse was snapped up by the French corporate giant Credit Lyonnais. A senior French executive swaggered into the dealing-room and demanded of one of our broadest, brashest bond-traders, ‘What grade are these staff on?’

  ‘Yer what?’ came the response. ‘Nah, mate, we don’t do that stuff round ’ere. Way it works is, either they make money or they fuck off.’

  Worse still, every aspect of human life in Britain was becoming the subject of homogenising intervention.

  Not just my market – the financial – was being prowled by unimaginative jobsworths intent upon standardisation, but the very street markets where I bought my morning apple, the pubs where I ordered a pint and a homemad
e pie and mash, the builders and plasterers whom I engaged to improve my home, the police officer who had greeted me every morning outside the tube station but was now usually absent, proving compliance by filling in forms, even Clare and I as we tended Sam when he had croup – all of us must kowtow to regulations and procedures intended, so they said, to protect us.

  The defining moment for me came in October 1990. We were drinking in Corney and Barrow’s on Old Broad Street one evening after work when news came through that we had joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. All my colleagues were incredulous.

  I was incandescent. I am told that I spent the rest of the evening fuming and spitting like a very hot fire of green timber. ‘What sort of stupid, asinine moron is this Major…? This cannot work…! This will not work…! This will be a disaster…! Yes. Another pint please… This Major man is certifiable…! What does he think he is doing…? Oh, hello, Kit. Good day? I cannot believe it… Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’

  I became a well-known ERM bore, a soothsayer and prophet of doom. It was obvious to me that this was going to end in disaster, so how was it possible that not merely the Tories but Labour and the Lib-Dems, the CBI and most of the trades unions were in favour of what Norman Tebbit called ‘the Eternal Recession Mechanism’?

  I knew at least that ERM would prove short lived, but the constraints of corporatism were increasing daily and looked to be set in stone. There was much reason to resent such impudent and pointless regulations, and I resented them all the more when told that they emanated from Brussels – that they had sprung, that is to say, not from the will of my own people, aware of and concerned for our very specific needs, but from an alien group of appointed bureaucrats no more concerned for, or knowledgeable about, our cultural traditions and immediate practical requirements than I for Greek shepherd songs or the preservation of a seventeenth-century rebel leader’s birthplace in Bari.

  This was long-range, one-size-fits-all colonialism – entirely contrary to the British tradition – and driven, if by anything more than the bureaucrat’s desire for homogeneity and tidiness, by a nebulous concern for our own welfare and a misplaced notion as to how that might best be served.

  And every time we allowed someone the right to ‘protect’ us, we conceded another power of self-determination and hammered another tack into the coffin of individuality and freedom.

  I vaguely concluded, however, that this was the way of the world and that the people had chosen to enter this bondage. That was what everyone told me. Live with it, Farage. It’s a fact of life.

  But I had not adolesced and spurned the loving but oppressive protectiveness of a mother only to sink back unquestioning into childish dependence. I had not developed skills, intuition and a gambler’s sixth sense only to find them deemed dangerous criminal traits.

  And if my favourite costermonger or my pub landlord found a source of russets or steak which tasted better and cost less than the approved varieties, if my builders wanted to offer me a special deal or the police officer to use his initiative or local knowledge to break ranks and warn off a potential mugger or to turn a blind eye to an otherwise law-abiding lock-in at a local pub, or if Clare knew of an old treatment for croup as yet unapproved but effective, I wanted the freedom to avail myself of them and considered myself adult, autonomous and so able to assess the risks.

  In November 1988, Margaret Thatcher had made her famous speech in Bruges in which she precisely encapsulated my personal feelings, declaring, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.’

  As I tried to be a dutiful husband, sitting in the car whilst Clare shopped for baby bric-a-brac, then, with ever greater disbelief and anger, on trains and in my every spare waking moment, I read up on the history of the EU.

  I found myself growling a lot.

  The EU had been designed to be an accepted fact of life, I discovered, creeping in as imperceptibly as, and no more to be questioned than, the seasons.

  In common with everyone born after 1957, I had never been asked whether or not I approved of the steady but sure surrender of the British people’s self-determination to an alien bureaucracy. Even my parents’ generation was asked only if they approved, after the event, of membership of a ‘Common Market’. No mention was made then of a mighty, wealthy, corrupt, overweening, distant EU which would presume to regulate every aspect of our lives.

  The submission of the British people to undemocratic rule has never once been democratically sanctioned.

  This was always the plan. The will of the people and peoples of Europe was irrelevant to Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri Spaak and their brethren who first concocted the plan of a European superstate. In common with most idealists and socialists, they believed the people to be servants of the state (and so, implicitly, of the state’s senior ‘servants’) rather than vice versa.

  In the wake of two devastating World Wars which had had their origins in Europe, they were resolved – no doubt sincerely – to attain their vision (one curiously akin to that of the drooling John Lennon) at any cost. The end justified any means.

  The western European supranationalist project was conceived at the same time and for much the same reasons as that initiated by the Eastern Bloc.1 The nation was an outdated notion, nationhood and national identities the principal obstacles to peace and enlightenment. Russia was hugely more powerful than her neighbours, so she tried to impose unity by main force, repression and doctrinaire ideology. We have seen the results.

  The EU’s founders obviously had to be far more cautious. Those two wars, after all, had been consequences of one European nation’s attempts to impose her will upon the others, and the two biggest nations, France and Germany, had been humiliated and hobbled. Theirs, then, must therefore be a slow, softly-softly approach. They would be patient. Like their more easterly brethren, they would recruit agents in high places. They would lie and cheat as necessary. They would conceal their true intentions.

  Although it is a fundamental principle of anthropology that a people or race is what it deems itself to be, although the peoples of Europe severally deemed themselves autonomous, and although democracy is founded upon the principle of self-determination, this self-anointed group of singularly pragmatist dreamers resolved that nationhood must die.

  Democracy and diversity were the price that must be paid for peace.

  They thought that a small price.

  By now I was howling in fury and disbelief.

  You think this paranoid raving? So did I. It had to be. There must be some mistake. I read on.

  OK. Consider the words of Arnold Toynbee, another of the EU’s architects:

  If we are frank with ourselves, we shall admit that we [perhaps the first-ever mention of this shadowy, undefined ‘we’] are engaged in a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations on the sovereignty and the independence of the fifty or sixty local sovereign independent states.

  The surest sign that this fetish of local national sovereignty is our intended victim is the emphasis with which all our statesmen and publicists protest with one accord, at every step forward that we take, that the sacred principle of local sovereignty is not really being encroached upon. It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly.

  To all Britons who, over the decades, have heard their statesmen, Tory and Labour, falsely professing this loyalty again and again as we slip further into the maws of the Leviathan, these words are both prophetic and deeply shocking. Here we see explicitly outlined the vilest and most dishonest strategy – to betray the very people to whom politicians owe their power and privileges in a cause which those people do not share and is not demonstrably in their interests.

  Toynbee continues with a frankness which subsequent federalists have seldom shown:

  We are at present working discreetly but with all our might to wrest t
his mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of local national states, and all the time, we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands – because to impugn the sovereignty of local national states is still a heresy… Sovereignty will cease in fact if not in name to be a local affair.

  Monnet too assumed a power which no one had ever given him. He declared any public understanding or debate of the ‘fusion’ project to be simply ‘counter-productive’.

  These people – this international ‘we’ – had somehow appointed themselves adoptive parents to the peoples of Europe. They knew what was best for the children. How we were led and by whom was no longer our business. We were to be seen and not heard.

  As Raymond Barre, Heath’s contemporary and Prime Minister of France from 1976 –1981, put it, with an arrogance worthy of a late Bourbon king, ‘I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account.’ And let them eat cake to you too, Prime Minister.

  Democracy was explicitly repudiated. And these people appointed their successors and they theirs to this day. The European Commission, fount of all patronage and of 75 per cent of our laws,2 has never been elected by the people of Europe. They are self-appointed, self-perpetuating autocrats.

  The more I learned, the angrier I became. These people had only had power in their own nations thanks to the democratic process. Having attained it, they proceeded to use that power to strip their employers of their wealth and their power in the service of their own very dubious ideals.

  The mid-1930s were a memorable time for Mephistopheles. They were holding a bonanza, bargain-basement, never-to-be-repeated, everything-must-go soul-sale at the Oxford and Cambridge branches (some less impressive bargains were also to be had in the minor university towns).