Nigel Farage: was he a teenage racist?

It is the hectoring, jeering tone in Nigel Farage’s voice that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui, said The Guardian. Farage used the same tone, at Dulwich College, the south London private school that both men attended in the late 1970s, when he would sidle up to him and growl: “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. He would sometimes add “a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”, says Ettedgui, now in his 60s, who was one of the few Jewish children at the school. It wasn’t just Jews the young Farage singled out. “I’d hear him calling other students ‘P*ki’ or ‘W*g’ and urging them to ‘go home’,” says Ettedgui.

Farage has denied the specifics of these allegations. But The Guardian has spoken to 22 contemporaries and former teachers who say otherwise. They remember him, as a prefect, singling an Asian boy out for detention, for no reason; doing Nazi salutes and chanting “Oswald Ernald Mosley”; and singing racist songs as an army cadet. No one is claiming that Farage still holds such views. “Nevertheless, extreme views in any person’s history matter, particularly if that person may be a future PM.”