Flying Free (16 page)

Atkinson vanished off the face of the earth, accusing me of ‘dirty tricks’ and the party, of course, of ‘extremism’, nature unspecified. Holmes’s supporters faded away or clambered back on board.

And things settled down.

It is not realpolitik. It was not engineered. The lesson of history, however, seems to be that every political party needs a purge, just as many a habitat needs the cleansing but doubtless painful effects of fire. This painful, spontaneous episode saw the party strengthened and those who would place their own convictions, fancies or personal ambitions above the interests of the party and the central cause burned up to make room for new, healthy shoots.

With the assistance of Richard North and Heather Conyngham, Jeffrey and I punched well above our weight in the EU Parliament but increasingly returned to our principal mission – spreading the word in the UK. The party was small and vulnerable. We nursed it at home. We were back in the pubs and the village halls. New branches opened. Established ones grew.

But there is one game in which, more than any other, the decks are marked and the dice loaded against a small party. The media may be critical of the established parties, but they are cosy with them. They too are of the establishment. The media are overwhelmingly liberal but therefore astonishingly illiberal when a new voice is heard in the land.

We made our mistakes, of course, and sometimes deserved media scorn, but, for several years, that scorn was reflex. We simply did not belong.

In October, 2009, I was ranked No. 41 in a list of the 100 most powerful right-wingers in Britain. I am unsure about the ‘right winger' bit, preferring to consider myself a Whig, but, if individualism, advocacy of capitalism (which always seems to me a little bit like advocacy of overall wetness in water) and concern for the preservation of established institutions be ‘right wing', I plead guilty. The principal reason given for my purported potency, however, was my ‘media savvy'.

My what?

My media savvy consists in enjoying a drink or several with journalists and broadcasters, recognising that they, like me, have a tough job to do, speaking my mind and, I hope, being mildly entertaining.

But then, I don't suppose that anyone in politics has tried that technique in quite a while.

When I started out, I had no experience of the media whatever. I have had no training. Despite growing evidence that we were going to win seats in 1999, the national media – and particularly the BBC – tried very hard to pretend that UKIP did not exist. There was a profile in the
Telegraph
with a rather fetching picture of me in a cream suit, and that was about it.

This had been the case for the entire Eurosceptic movement for years. We were simply ignored.

Of course every small party will develop paranoia and accuse the establishment of censorship, but independent analysis after the election demonstrated the extent of the BBC's Europhilia. Stories about Europe concentrated exclusively on the largely fictional split in the Tory party. Labour, it seemed, had no Eurosceptics at all. A party called the Pro-Euro Conservatives of whom no one has ever heard since received more coverage in that campaign than UKIP.

On the Record
conducted interviews only with dedicated servants of the European project – Margaret Beckett, Paddy Ashdown, Jack Cunningham, Sir Leon Brittan (by then a European Commissioner) and Romano Prodi (who had nothing to do with the election at all). Their sole concession to the Eurosceptics was an interview with William Hague – he of ‘in Europe but not run by Europe' infamy.

The BBC is meant, as a public service broadcaster, to retain impartiality. It signally failed in that obligation here. It began to be known as the ‘Brussels Broadcasting Corporation'.

Even this was not entirely fair, because Brussels thinks that its doings are of paramount importance, whereas the British media like to ignore European elections then bemoan the fact that voter turnout has dropped yet again. The BBC News department afforded 2.5 per cent of its time to the forthcoming poll.

All in all, in that campaign UKIP received 3½ minutes of national coverage out of a total of 624 hours, and yet we won 7 per cent of the nation's votes. Speculation is bootless, but I hazard that, had we received even 5 per cent of the coverage, we might have won a much larger share of the poll.

Radio 4's
Today
programme is possibly the most influential and
best-researched
current affairs programme of the lot, and, when I am asked with which broadcaster I best like to work, I unhesitatingly name John Humphrys, who puts me on my mettle like no other and draws out the best and worst in his interviewees.

Being grilled by him is like donning white tie and tails for a party. Suddenly the back straightens, the vowels become purer, the consonants crisper and the mind sharper. And, of course, any defects in deportment
or thickening about the intellectual waist become more apparent. It is uncomfortable. It is daunting. It is infinitely more fun than ‘smart casual'.

I did not approve of him, however, on my first appearance on the programme – my first ever interview on national radio.

It had been arranged that a car would pick me up at 5.30 in the morning to drive me to the London studio. At the last minute, however, I received a call from the BBC. The car could not make it, but no matter. A telephone interview would suit them just fine. David Lott and I sat waiting nervously in my kitchen. The phone rang at 6.55. I was almost immediately on air.

‘So, Mr Farage,' said Humphrys, ‘I have here a copy of
Spearhead,
the BNP's magazine. You are singled out for particular praise. What's it like to have friends like that?'

How do you answer a question like that without being on the defensive and so appearing to have something to hide? I had thought journalists wise to ‘When did you stop beating you wife?' stories, but no. It still makes good copy.

Nothing which I had ever said or written indicated sympathy with the BNP or its so-called policies. If a badger-baiting or Europhiliac magazine had made me its playmate of the month or dish of the day, would the BBC therefore have concluded that I must share their perversions? A lazy researcher had simply heard malicious gossip, noted that we had ‘UK' in our name as the BNP had ‘British' in theirs and, had, in effect, done the BNP's work for them.

But it was I, not the lazy researcher, who had to suffer.

I spent those 3½ minutes on the ropes.

The BBC may barely have noticed our existence or the threat which we posed, but the dirty tricks departments of other parties were plainly rather more alert. On the Friday before the election, I received a call from my friend Nick Jones, the BBC's political correspondent who was in the end to lose his position for being ‘off message'. He was invariably on the side of those who challenged authority, no matter what their political affiliations.

Nick felt it only fair to give me notice that tomorrow's
Times
was to run a piece by Andrew Pierce about UKIP's ‘links' with the BNP and that Francis Maude of the Tory Party had already indicated his willingness to comment on air.

It was a terrifying moment. We had waited and worked for so long for this moment, and now, I supposed, some idiotic branch chairman was about to reveal that he and his mates also happened to run the Budleigh Salterton chapter of the Ku Klux Klan or something.

Andrew Pierce rang. It was nothing so dramatic, but it might at the time have been still more destructive. Sked had been singing a favourite tune, now well known to be inspired by injured amour-propre but then still novel. He spoke of Deavin – his protégé, but he preferred to recall my later lunch with the man. He alleged that I had in conversation referred to ‘nig-nogs'. The paper had the picture of me with Deavin and Lecomber.

I did something which I have never done before, something which was against my nature. I called the famous libel solicitors Carter-Ruck and appealed for the protection of the law against allegations without substance.

Even as we celebrated our election victory, Carter-Ruck were locked in a battle with Rupert Murdoch and News International which could easily have escalated into a bloody – and bloody ruinous – war.

It was Michael Gove, a
Times
columnist who has since become a Tory MP, who stepped between these two pawing and snorting herd-bulls and insisted that his newspaper end the deadlock. I owe Michael one for that. An apology was duly printed (at the bottom of page 2) and the whole business closed. I still reckon that that
Times
article, though fanciful, cost us seats in Yorkshire and in the north-west.

On the night of the election count, it was eighty-seven minutes into the programme before David Dimbleby deigned to notice our existence, and, as we excitedly awaited results of immediate importance to all present in Winchester Guildhall, Bruce Parker of BBC South approached me with a microphone. He demanded, ‘So, Mr Farage, we see that M. Le Pen's party is doing well in France. You must be pleased?'

I usually try to nurse a drink on such nights, but this fatuous, malicious lie posturing as a question sent me seething to the bar where I ordered several large gins before painting a smile back on my face.

I suppose the ease with which I took to the broadcast media was the consequence at once of nature and of nurture. My mind teems with opinions and jokes, I like people and I have always made it my business to
understand my opponent's point of view and to observe his or her ‘tells', as poker-players call them – the telltale signs of confidence or nervousness.

The diversity of my interests too – ridiculously rare in an age of ‘professional politicians' – enabled me to answer questions about business, sport, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and other subjects of more interest to the discerning public than the intricacies of some impertinent bureaucratic Brussels directive.

So although
Question Time
is easily the scariest programme of the lot, I love it. We genuinely do not know what questions are to be asked or how the audience will react. Again, at first I had to battle against ignorant preconceptions. The producer and his team treated me as an unwelcome token guest, there on sufferance and to be regarded with circumspection, much as if I bore some vile ideological contagion.

On one of those early appearances, I was arguing that the tenuous peace which Europe had enjoyed since World War II owed nothing to a united Europe but a great deal to NATO. A member of the audience, plainly untroubled by the strains of excessive cerebration, gave it as his opinion that a largely British and American alliance all seemed to him ‘rather racist'. I confess that I dumbly gawped at this intervention.

At dinner afterwards, David Dimbleby expressed the concern which made the programme so nervous. He said, ‘Of course, the BNP question hasn't been answered.'

Nor is it likely to be unless it be asked, but then, save in the minds of the BNP and the BBC, there is no BNP question. There is also, so far as I know, no Girl Guide, Flat Earth or Holy Roller question. We have nothing in common with the BNP. They are racist. We are inclusive. They are authoritarian. We are anti-authoritarian. They hate Europe, to be sure, as they hate all of the rest of the world and a large percentage of Britons. We love Europe but happen to reject the EU.

The all-important fact to them is that we are successful where they are not. They therefore want to be associated with us.

They are not. They never will be.

At the private post-production drinks party that evening, the man with the strangely tranquil brain who had thought NATO racist was drinking with the producers.

To be fair to
Question Time
, they too had been the victims of lies and garish headlines and were, I suppose, nervous. They genuinely believed that, beneath the surface charm and the professed cause, there must be another, secret, nationalistic or racist agenda. Convinced and passionate amateurs were simply a novelty to them.

I resolved then that I must just be myself, express my love of life and my belief in people and so, by degrees, persuade the general public and
Question Time
that we were what we seemed – representatives of millions of ordinary, hardworking people who resented unelected government and would quite like to get back to running their own affairs.

You think that experienced politicians look confident up there on the stage? Like hell they are. They know, as do I, that it is the one programme on British television which causes people to stop you on the street and challenge or congratulate you. So they pace and fiddle and check their notes. They consult their policy advisers to discover just what it is that they think. They mutter retorts to imagined heckles.

I was in the Green Room before my third or fourth
Question Time
when I suddenly realised that I was in fact the least terrified person there.

The professional politicians had to please their masters without alienating the public and vice versa. The celebrities from television or show business – barring the stand-up comics like Marcus Brigstocke – had little experience of thinking on their feet. I had been facing random questions and vigorous heckling for years and I was concerned to please no one. I have, I confess, made a point since then of ordering a gin and tonic rather loudly and chatting to the bar-staff about just about anything as the audience gathers. I am sure that it makes my fellow panellists feel more relaxed.

Slowly the truth sank in. I had no secret agenda.

I had another advantage. It has long been a staple of the established parties in such forums to make sincere assurances which mean nothing. So the Tory, for example, pledges with tears in his eyes that his party will, if elected, cap immigration or reclaim British fishing-grounds. His Labour opponent knows full well that this is gibberish because no British political party has such power. They have all signed it away under the terms of the various European treaties. He will say nothing, however, because he
is about to outline his own exciting but entirely fictional immigration or employment policy.

I know the exact terms of the treaties which prevent such autonomous action, and I have no interest in pretending that these lies are even potentially true. I flatter myself, then, that
Question Time
tends to be more interesting when I am there. Politicians look askance at me and shuffle in their seats. They have to tell something akin to the truth.

I have made some unlikely friends (David Blunkett, for example, enjoys a few glasses of red with a Eurosceptic and is himself deeply mistrustful of European institutions) and have enjoyed some right royal barnies (with Alistair Darling on compulsory metrication, for example).

I have even, though reluctantly, made enemies. I suspect that David Davis may never forgive me for challenging him over his gallant ‘stand' on detention without charge for twenty-eight days. He was posing as a champion of freedoms because he opposed the government's proposed 42-day suspension of civil rights. I simply asked him, ‘Do you stand for habeas corpus?' to which he had no reply.

I have appeared regularly over the last decade. I knew, I think, that I was accepted when I gave it as my opinion that, after a snowy spell, people should be back at work. Will Young accused me of puritanism. I protested that I was no puritan and David Dimbleby, with a grin, said, ‘Ye‑e‑s‑s. Well, before we go too deeply into that…' The audience laughed spontaneously. David now looks to me as a source of cigarettes as soon as we leave the stage rather than of extreme views when we are on it.