Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  Nobody much wanted ‘UK’ or ‘United Kingdom’ in the party’s name. It is cumbersome and enables the unthinking to associate us with British supremacists. We were not a nationalist group, but believers in self-determination for all people, peoples and cultures. On the other hand, we happened to be British and happened to be battling in this instance on our own behalf against a specific threat in an international arena.

  ‘UK Independence Party’ was resolved upon quite simply because it succinctly declared our origin and our principal aim. Further resurgence and reform must wait until our own nation had won freedom from the EU. From the outset, the committee decided that they would refer to the Party by its acronyms. ‘United Kingdom’ would not be used on letterheads or in conversation. We would be the UK Independence Party or UKIP.

  So far, so good.

  Now the enduring headaches were set in place. Sked’s hasty Constitution, affording an absurd degree of security of tenure to the leader, was adopted. The General Committee named itself the Executive Committee and limited itself to fourteen members (of whom, it appeared, I was one), and the party would hold an annual conference during the traditional autumn conference season.

  On to battle-plans. UKIP would contest the 1994 European elections. Gerard Batten and John Harvey would recruit eighty-seven candidates. Gerard would also approach wealthy individuals and organisations for badly needed financial support.

  He had already written to one James Goldsmith, the ultimate ‘wrong but wromantic’ gambler, asset-stripper, buccaneer and cosmopolitan lone wolf who had already supplied considerable funding to the European Foundation, a Eurosceptic think-tank. Goldsmith had replied, ‘I am grateful for your suggestions. However, I will continue to fight for the cause, but on a non-party-political basis.’

  He must have kept tabs on this insolent new grouping, however, and observed its rise because, of course, in the 1997 general election, his short-lived Referendum Party was to steal much of our thunder, supply a focal point for Eurosceptic feeling in Britain and, incidentally, prove a rich source of talent for UKIP.

  My absence meant that I also missed the first skirmish in another dispute which was to torment us in years to come. It was, of course, purely academic, even fanciful at the time, but the committee now considered just what it would do should we manage to return members to the EU Parliament.

  Sked was adamant and high-principled. In taking his seat, a member could be seen as legitimising the parliament and British participation in the European project, which our members could evidently never do. The seat must remain vacant. John Harvey suggested that successful candidates should visit Brussels just once, make a speech demanding independence and retire to Britain.

  Helen Szamuely, a woman and so, for all her brilliance, never so academic or so principled as to abandon pragmatism, held, as would I, that the voters deserved something more than a high-minded and ultimately impotent gesture in exchange for their votes, and that a UKIP MEP would be uniquely privileged to increase public awareness of the corruption and waste in the parliament.

  I had set off on holiday with a passionate hobby. I returned to find myself on the Executive Committee of a national party, committed to fighting every election. It was as though I had bought a small salamander for amusement and company and had seen it grow into a fire-breathing dragon with a prodigious appetite.

  But then, this unlikely Saul was finally coming out to himself and to the world as a committed Christian. I cursed it and the demands that it made on my time and my wealth, but I dearly loved my pet dragon.

  This was the year when the new life began.

  To start off with, I had finally resolved that I could no longer even pretend to be a corporate man.

  What had been a two-man metals-trading desk at Rouse had grown into a large department. My disenchantment had grown with it, and now politics was eating deep into my few leisure hours.

  As so often, the catalyst for change came unheralded, unbidden and at first sight unwelcome. It took the burly form of my good friend Joe Corazza.

  Joe, for many years a client, is, if such a thing can be conceived, a sort of G. K. Chesterton writ large, amplified and speeded up. He has a lion’s mane of fair hair, a walrus’s moustaches and a voluminous figure. He is a fine shot and an ardent fly-fisherman who, in those days, smoked sixty or seventy cigarettes a day, had a phenomenal capacity for drink and expressed his forthright views on just about anything without much in the way of diplomacy or restraint.

  Joe came to town and we lunched, as ever, at Sweetings, a wonderful old fish restaurant on Queen Victoria Street. We began with a few pints of Black Velvet. Then there were West Mersea oysters, then Cornish brill, then soft roes on toast, all washed down with Chablis. Everything was going swimmingly until the first decanter of port thumped onto the table. I cannot remember if it had one successor or two, but it may just be that our intake that afternoon was a trifle excessive by the standards of the modern City.

  It was somewhere in there that Joe suggested that I might take him down onto the London Metals Exchange trading-floor as my guest.

  Knowing Joe as I did, I am sure that I should have – and, had we been a little less convivial, probably would have – resisted more firmly. As it was, I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell? He’s a good client. Damn them if they can’t take a joke.’

  They couldn’t.

  My confidence had drained away a bit by the time that we got there. I stood on the exchange floor in silence, almost frozen to the spot as Joe careered about, jovially abusing all and sundry there. He plainly felt that unseen clients on the ends of telephone lines were not getting value from their brokers and therefore shouted his own colourful additions to the conversations into the receivers. At last, he was bustled out by concerned officials.

  My bosses at Rouse were unamused. For a moment, I thought of protesting my innocence. After all, I had done nothing wrong beyond inviting the wild man in…

  It’s … sort of true. I was … sort of innocent. After all, I had not known for a certainty that Joe would kick up on the trading-floor and I had not encouraged him…

  Hmm. I don’t believe my own protestations. In retrospect, I would class it as brinkmanship. I had known that things must change.

  Fun and flair had fled the City. We were answerable to joyless and talentless people. All right, it was a little like those dreary teachers with their Xeroxed notes, under whose tutelage the average and subnormal did really quite well whilst the gifted and the maverick lost all their verve and enthusiasm, but I had come to the City in search of originality and inventiveness from no matter what source.

  If the newspaper seller outside the offices heard a rumour, I wanted to hear it, because, if it tallied with my intelligence and inspired guesswork, I would act on it. I was good at reading the water, sensing the barometric pressure and picking the right fly to catch the very biggest fish. In the brave new world where everything was under the control of the water bailiffs, I was now expected to snooze on the bank whilst the stake-nets in the estuary scooped up an approved poundage of minnows and fry.

  I had known that Joe was a bull beyond my control and that the trading-floor, once a bullring, had been converted into a china-shop. I had known that Rouse was in the midst of a serious financial dispute with the Exchange. If he had not run amok that day, something else would soon have happened to precipitate my departure.

  As it was, my well-behaved masters at Rouse thought it provident to show me the door. ‘Work hard – play harder’ was no longer a motto which worked here. You worked as you were instructed and your play, if you knew how to play, should be discreet and unrelated.

  I had friends and admirers who sympathised. I received job-offers. I turned them down. I knew that I was unemployable. I was henceforth going to be my own boss. Under the banner of Refco, who were happy to let talent flourish on its own terms, I founded Farage Futures.

  My political career started, fortuitously, at the very moment when Britain first rumb
led the nature and the scale of the EU’s plot to acquire control. I could never have become involved as I did without the relative freedom (I was now twice as busy, but on my own terms) and the high income afforded by running my own company, so the EU Commission can add Joe Corazza to its blacklist of ‘Those Who Made Farage Possible’.

  And then my marriage, which had been on ice and torpid with its claws bound for so long that we had both forgotten that it was alive at all, at last expired. We were both in love with other people, which only means, in truth, that we were both thinking and feeling like single people and so did what comes naturally.

  If there be such a thing as an amicable divorce, this was it, not least because it made so little difference to our lives. There were no arguments about access or money. I recognised that I had made not the slightest effort to sustain the marriage. Clare had quite properly made a life for herself without me. At her request, I bought her a new house and she moved out with the children.

  Henceforth, I had access to Sam and Tom every weekend. I had no idea how to cook and no interest in theme parks. Fishing and cricket, my old passions, came to the rescue. The boys became expert sea-anglers and dedicated cricket fans, and I know as well as Gordon Ramsay how not to ruin a fresh cod, bass or bream.

  Public awareness was not, I think, on Conservative MP Stephen Milligan’s mind as, bound, gagged and clad only in stockings and suspenders, he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation in his Chiswick home. It was the sad destiny, however, of this former president of the Oxford Union to contribute more to public awareness – albeit of a very arcane nature – by the manner of his death than by his work in life. His death also put an abrupt end to John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign and left the parliamentary seat of Eastleigh up for grabs. I jumped at the chance to contest it and so became the first candidate ever to stand for UKIP.

  The Tories were running scared, so delayed the by-election until 9 June in order that it coincided with the European election, in which I stood for the angler’s celestial constituency (or, as one wit had it, the tinea cruris seat): Itchen, Test and Avon.

  I simply loved the hustings. All that interaction brought out the best in me. The reactions of the people of Eastleigh to the brash new interloper on the electoral scene were much the same as those which I had encountered when canvassing for Sked: a lot of goodwill, broad agreement and persistent fear of a ‘wasted vote’. In the end, I won just 952 votes – 1.4 per cent of the ballot. I narrowly beat Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party. The seat went to the Liberal Democrats on a 16.3 per cent swing from the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost a crushing 26.5 per cent of their vote.

  As we waited for the count that night, David Sutch (who campaigned for such important causes as all-day opening for pubs, more than one Monopolies Commission and the like) swayed up to me and said, ‘Oi, Nige. Let’s go for a drink, shall we? The rest of this lot are a bunch of wankers.’

  Who could resist such an invitation? We returned to the stage just in time for the announcement of the result.

  The film of that announcement was to be shown many hundreds of times as an illustration of the Conservatives’ woes. There, alongside the grave-looking candidates of the main parties were Sutch and Farage, looking slightly pink and not at all reverential.

  I had to develop a little more high seriousness – but not much – in my later political career.

  In all my years of canvassing, though I have encountered the usual grumpy old buggers who quite reasonably and indiscriminately threaten all politicians with Rottweilers, hunting-whips, the contents of chamber-pots and so on, I have rarely met a normal voter who grew angry at our policies. That is the exclusive preserve of professional politicians (such as Tony Blair) who for some reason grow apoplectic at the mention of us.

  This is, I think, strange and significant.

  Things were very different in the European poll, whose result was announced on 12 June. Here the ‘wasted vote’ crowd felt freer to express their sympathies, and 12,423 of them or 5.2 per cent, voted for me.

  This established a pattern which has remained constant over the decades. Small parties fare ill in national elections under our misguided three-party, first-past-the-post system. Tribal loyalties prevail one way or another, so electors tend to vote for or ‘against’ a particular candidate, and voting against the candidate in the black hat invariably means voting for the guy in the white.

  In the European elections, however, they feel free to express their personal views and preferences. It has been amongst UKIP’s intentions from the outset to re-engage voters in the process of their own government and to overthrow the two-and-a-spare hegemony of British party politics. After some years of wrestling with prejudice and fear of Italian-style, writ-in-water, permanent coalition government, I have no hesitation in acknowledging that proportional representation is, though flawed, a more representative system than our own.

  In that 1994 election, which was still first-past-the-post, we had twentyfour candidates and won 157,000 votes – 3.3 per cent of the vote in the seats where we stood. Not bad for a special interest group which had only been a political party for a scant few months.

  We had also attracted attention. When we were first told of our party political broadcast, we anticipated telephone enquiries and asked who would be taking them. ‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ said Gerard Batten. ‘Give them my home number.’

  I winced. I stared. I contrived to conceal whatever disdain might have crept into my voice as I insisted that it might be a better idea to have extra lines installed in my Eastleigh election office.

  The broadcast itself was also amateurish – a five-minute Talking Sked. Sked had ignored Andrew Alexander’s advice that he should get a haircut. The Muppet-like stormcloud atop his head was therefore a major distraction from the good sense that he spoke. Several people who tuned in believed that they were watching a sketch from Not the Nine O’Clock News. It nonetheless attracted 30,000 enquiries. The phones rang continuously until 3.00 a.m., when we had to give up.

  This was another indication to me that we had struck a nerve. The EU had done its covert business, as prescribed by its founders, well, but the general public had sensed that something was wrong. We had identified what that something was.

  *

  The early days are the hardest. Those first life-forms which later became more complex and specialised and evolved into us must have had a hard time. They had to battle against extremes of weather and, pretty soon, against one another. Small wonder that the mythological version in Genesis has one half of the second generation murdering the other.

  Political parties are similar. It is little short of a miracle that UKIP survived those first years. You start with a shared conviction that something must be done. Little else necessarily links you, and for every Abel there is likely to be a Cain. In our case, we started with a few airy-fairy academics and retired service personnel, a couple of farmers, a solicitor, an accountant and an angry young metals trader convinced of a destiny beyond the City.

  Enthusiasm is a prerequisite, and enthusiasm is nowhere greater than in the fanatical or the personally ambitious. Nutters and the self-seeking therefore hitch rides. Peaceful, orderly, obsequious health and safety officers and those functionaries of borough councils with enthusiasm for nothing who would quite willingly sanction genocide provided that it were tidy tend to stay away. Of course, the big political parties are crammed with criminals, racists, sexists and paranoid conspiracy theorists, but they pass unnoticed amongst the orderly mediocrats. In an embryonic party, just one of these loonies can bring the entire set-up tumbling down.

  The founding of a party takes enormous amounts of time and energy. The average concerned young or middle-aged person has little time and his or her energies are already committed to family or to work. Most of our early activists were therefore retired and ‘of an age’, so giving rise to the popular perception of us as a ‘Dad’s Army’ offshoot of the Tory Party (an inaccur
ate caricature, as it happens, since we had former Labour diehards and political agnostics amongst our number from the outset, and Sked himself had stood as a Liberal).

  Nonetheless, with agitprop démodé, local councils emasculated and all politics increasingly regarded as irrelevant by the young, the huge majority of our members in the early years were at least only distantly acquainted with rollerblading.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and, in any new volunteer organisation, there are spaces crying out to be filled and volunteers eager to step into them. Not all offers of help, alas, are altruistic. There are differences as to means, style and structure. Where leadership is not strong and decisive, fierce rows develop amongst over-enthusiastic members who should be united but whose several backgrounds persuade them of the rightness of their different approaches.

  And God and established politicians are overwhelmingly on the side of the big battalions.

  Over the years, we have had to fight not just for every second of every official party political broadcast, but for every column inch. Because we were not a mainstream party, we must, it seems, perforce be extremists. There is a sort of logic to this. What just and reasonable cause, after all, would not find advocates in three established parties?

  Ours, actually.

  I suspect that we could never have survived even the first two years had we not acquired at this point a quiet, dedicated member whose organisational skills were equalled by his honesty and lack of self-interest.

  David Lott was the desperately needed officer amongst us enthusiastic amateurs. It may sound like one of those ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ tributes, but I seriously doubt that UKIP could have survived those first years and grown up – I seriously doubt that I would have remained on board amidst all the factional in-fighting and plotting – had it not been for David’s calming, encouraging, motivating influence and his clarity of vision.