Nigel Farage, the original British bad boy of Brexit, is buzzing. His new political party came in atop Britain’s European elections last month, and a week before we met, he was afforded an audience with President Trump.
The meeting was shoehorned into the president’s packed schedule during his three-day state visit to the United Kingdom. The pair bonded during the 2016 election when Farage stumped for the Republican candidate, two unlikely riders of a populist wave.
He told the Washington Examiner he found the American president enthralled by his time with the queen.
“Here we’ve got the two most famous people in the world together,” said Farage, punctuating his comments with a cigarette-infused cackle. “I think he was really pleased with the way it went. He was very impressed by the pomp and circumstance.”
Farage, 55, is the best known of the British politicians campaigning for a complete break with Europe. He rose to prominence as leader of the U.K. Independence Party but quit as leader in 2016, weeks after winning the referendum to leave Europe. “During the referendum, I said I wanted my country back. … Now I want my life back,” he said famously at the time.
Much to the annoyance of the governing Conservative Party, Farage reemerged in recent weeks as a key player. His new Brexit Party took almost a third of the vote in elections for the European Parliament, trouncing more established political groups and keeping pressure on the government to make a clean break with the EU rather than seeking some sort of compromise deal.
It was the victory of his forces in the June 2016 referendum that heralded the global surge in populist politics and rejection of the status quo that also propelled Trump to the presidency.
Farage said he sensed a change in the U.K. since Trump’s first visit to the country last year.
“When he last came, the media take was that the streets were full of a couple of hundred thousand optimistic young people against this very regressive, nationalistic, narrow-minded figure,” he said, leaning back in his chair and throwing his arms wide for emphasis. “That all turned around. Actually, it was the woman screaming ‘Nazi scum’ who has suddenly lost her job, and there’s a big debate about why are people in Britain so intolerant of other points of view.”
Siobhan Prigent was caught on camera screaming abuse in the face of a Trump supporter before he was covered in a milkshake. She left her job in the National Health Service after her employer was inundated with demands she be fired.
Farage was an early supporter of Trump on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. He addressed his supporters at a rally in Mississippi in August and operated in the spin room in St. Louis following the second presidential debate in October, which was held two days after the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape emerged.
“It was only Rudy Giuliani, Jeff Sessions, and me in the room,” said Farage with another cackle. “Everybody else had run for the hills. He was virtually an independent.”
For his part, Farage is intent on building a new political movement. He claims his politics have always been more centrist than his critics allow, and his talk of a grassroots party, with devolved decision-making, does suggest a new way of doing things.
His main task is knocking his 3-month-old party into shape for a general election that could come at any time as the Conservative government lurches from crisis to crisis — some of them, it must be said, of Farage’s making, as he heaps pressure on the party to hurry through Brexit.
His populist instincts and connection with anti-elitist voters also make him well-placed to keep his finger on the pulse of Trump’s reelection chances. Today, he sees a leader who can campaign on a slate of promises kept and a buoyant economy, even if his public utterances and Twitter feed raise hackles.
“It’s a bit like ’80s Britain,” he said. “People thought Thatcher lacked humor, compassion, but ‘you know what, we’re doing OK.’”
And Thatcher did all right, he added with another chuckle.
