Nigel “has only got one ball”. John Sweeney is already singing by page three of this crude and disorganised biography, and he hopes we’re singing along with him, or at least whistling. He knows we know the song, and who it’s about. But to the feeling reader, it seems a rather nasty reference to the testicular cancer Nigel Farage first noticed on Boxing Day, 1986, aged 22. It resulted in an orchidectomy; Sweeney repeats Farage’s trading-floor nickname, “Uniball”. And it’s a lazy joke, symptomatic of a lazy book and of lazy thinking – thinking that neither comprehends Farage nor confronts him.
Sweeney is an old hack, so let’s toss his news line up nice and high. If you didn’t get it by now: Nigel Farage is, his book alleges – or at least was – a Nazi. At first, this is suggested: “Hitler’s words of hate for Jews were not lost in a vacuum but led to innocent people being killed. Do Nigel Farage and his politics of blood echo that?” Then it is stated, firmly, but with a lawyer at the shoulder: “… at school he was a Nazi”. By page 213, the accusation has reached the Ukraine war, and become a kind of sledging: “Farage was on Team Nazi.”
The main evidence for this glibbery is Farage’s behaviour as a schoolboy at Dulwich College (first reported by Michael Crick for Channel 4 in 2013, more fully documented in his 2022 Farage biography One Party After Another, and expanded upon by Mark Blacklock, Henry Dyer and Dan Boffey at the Guardian in late 2025). Like an over-energetic schoolboy, Sweeney throws his bulk on to the bundle, dedicating roughly a third of his book (which he admits “is not a conventional biography”) to the schoolboy allegations.
As Sweeney writes, there are 34 Dulwich old boys who have accused Farage of having fascist, neo-fascist, racist or Nazi sympathies; Sweeney met with 12. Their allegations are serious and consistent. The young Farage appears to have had a stinking mouth and an angry soul. After the briefest sketch of Farage’s childhood, we’re deep in the vale of his teenage years, and find him doodling the National Front logo, clicking his heels, hissing “Ssss! Gas ’em” in the ear of Jewish boys, saying “Hitler was right”, bullying boys of colour, and singing racist and antisemitic songs (“Into the chambers they crawl”). Almost all of Sweeney’s claims are in Crick or the Guardian, and Crick quotes a broader range of memoirs, including some who minimise Farage’s singularity on this score. But the weight of corroboration, and Sweeney’s delivery, make the claims plausible. (Sweeney says that Farage didn’t respond to his requests for comment, but the Reform leader has defended himself against these allegations in the past. When challenged about whether he had racially abused anyone, Farage responded: “No, not with intent.”)
The rest of the book proceeds in the same vein. At times serving more as a private investigator than a reporter, Sweeney speaks to Farage’s colleagues from the City’s metal exchange, the allegations being more about booze and birds. Soon we’re into Farage’s political career. The book takes on its repetitious form, an arc shaped less like a narrative than a well-loaded bandolier filled with the grievances of Farage’s enemies. We hear from the historian Alan Sked, briefly leader of Ukip in the late Nineties; we revisit Ukip’s 2006 leadership contest; we remember the scandalous 2009 sidelining of the candidate Robin Page. However unreliable the sources, Sweeney will hear them out. Christine and Neil Hamilton are given a chapter, with Christine weirdly described as the “Great British Battleaxe… her golden mane… the lioness of the British right”.
The allegations pile into a midden: racism, expenses-fiddling, psychopathy, narcissism, cultishness, OCD, bad impressions of working-class people. And when Sweeney can’t find Farage guilty, he finds him guilty by association. He unwisely recalls the 2016 murder of Arek Jóźwik in Harlow – at the time misreported as “the Brexit murder”. The commentator James O’Brien directly linked Farage’s rhetoric to the death; Sweeney interviewed a Polish friend of Jóźwik for the BBC who said Farage had “blood on [his] hands”. But the attack was found by a court not to be racially motivated or xenophobic; the death was judged manslaughter. That doesn’t stop Sweeney’s innuendo. A tone of doggedness slipping into desperation recurs throughout, even though he is on firmer ground when investigating Arron Banks, Nathan Gill (who took pro-Russian bribes) and the gifts Farage has received from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. With the evidence of Farage’s taste for fast talk and easy money growing, you wonder if his downfall will not come through Sweeney-like hysteria but sober and, in a way, banal investigation.
But Sweeney’s writing is so clogged with extraneous information that whatever qualities his book may have cannot truly show. He interviews like an old hack; before you get to his quotations you must, like a harried waitress, note his drinks order. Every interview forms its own scene, and begins over “a bottle of Gavi”, “a Claret”, “a bottle of red”, “a gin and tonic for me and a beer for my source” and “a slug of Monkey Shoulder whisky and Coca-Cola (I pull a face and slurp Italian red)”. A rare exception comes when, “My knee still hurts after I clattered off my Lime bike in Trafalgar Square a few nights before while under the influence, so it’s water for me and him.” These stories don’t make Sweeney sound intrepid; they make him sound like a lush, especially since he makes various allusions to Farage’s drinking.
There are seven types of error in The Real Nigel Farage. Errors of syntax: “To a fancy London club, the Travellers, not that but something like it…” which leaves us wondering whether Sweeney is at the Travellers, or thinks the Travellers isn’t very fancy, or isn’t in London, or isn’t a club. Errors of learning: Las Vegas is not “Kafkaesque” (not unless you are falsely accused of card-counting) and Orwell didn’t talk about the “Midnight of the Century” (that was Victor Serge). Errors of taste: “charming, funny, not up his bum” is how Godfrey Bloom is described. Errors of memory: Michael Portillo did not “earn… the nation’s respect” on losing his seat in 1997 – and his chance to be Conservative leader. He became a byword for unexpected political humiliation. Errors of continuity: “I never loved him,” Farage’s former mistress Annabelle Sanderson tells Sweeney; on the same page, he writes of their relationship, “They fall in love.” Errors of hypocrisy: of Farage’s French partner Laure Ferrari, Sweeney writes, “Her accent is not classically French but more of an Essex girl from somewhere foreign – I write that and realise that I am beginning to sound like a Reform candidate.” Errors of judgement. If you’re going to write this poorly on Auschwitz – that it “is bleak beyond the saying of it. The snow lies on the cruel ground. The burning cold makes me shiver, but not just that…” – then you shouldn’t enlist it for your polemic.
Those are all errors of brushwork though, and they aren’t the biggest flaw in Sweeney’s portrait – boss-eyed, snaggle-toothed and devil-horned as it is. In Sweeney’s telling, Farage is a half-crazed deviant, hiding his viciousness beneath skin-deep good cheer. This might be an appropriate way to discuss a mole, or a melanoma. It is neither constructive nor politically mobilising when interpreting a politician, especially one who, “far-right” talk aside, has spent a career marshalling democracy in pursuit of his goals. But even if it is a crude analysis, it is a provoking one. Because it takes as its premise the key question about Farage, which I’m coming to think of as a question of aberrance: is he an alien to our political culture, or a product of it?
Sweeney’s allegations about Farage’s school days are a key test of this. We learn from his interviewees that Dulwich was a place where “we all sang: ‘My eyes are dim,/I cannot see,/There are too many Jews/In front of me’.” (“But there are songs and songs,” the interviewee says, weakly.) It was also a place where it was common to call a Jewish boy “a Yid” or “make Shylock-style jokes about Jews being mean”. Anyone with a passing acquaintance of its products will know that the minor-major public school is a particular kind of foundry, beating its boys into a peculiar alloy. Not for them the airs of Eton – an entitlement capable of straining beyond arrogance and towards something like oblige – but a snippier, brittler, more paranoid atmosphere in which snobbery and bad manners diffuse as pungently as changing-room BO. The charge against Farage in this telling – an unpopular boy who competed socially using offence and extremism – is, in a sense, more profound, an indictment of the schooling and temperament of an entire class. We should recognise it well – it filled the Tory Monday Club for decades.
“I get it that Nigel Farage is not Hitler,” we are grateful to see Sweeney write at the end of the book (in which he also measures Farage against Putin and Stalin). And what if, instead, Farage resembles not a foreign villain, but an extremist, nativist and reactionary of a domestic stripe, one who necessitates introspection rather than pathology? Sweeney has the pieces of that explanation, but passes them hotly by. He quotes Farage, briefly, on the worldview of his father: “The universal aspirations of his childhood – military, class-ridden, Edwardian – were being displaced by rude, laid-back, liberal, hippy values… he saw his heroes age by half a century overnight.” Farage, a Western Front enthusiast with a collection of First World War medals, is speaking here to the most reactionary vein of English intellectual life. To this territory – of lost causes and last summers – intelligent Faragology must turn. Only then can we move our analyses above the belt, and towards the brain.
The Real Nigel Farage: A Would-Be Prime Minister on Trial
John Sweeney
Headline, 336pp, £22
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[Further reading: Is Reform waving or drowning?]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The World According To Ed
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Subscribe here to commentIt makes you wonder what such an investigation and then review would have produced if it had been conducted on Hitler, say about mid to late 1920s? Obviously there would have been no previous Hitler to compare with, and there is no direct class comparison, but on a personal level I wouldn’t be surprised if it would have downplayed a growing and potent far right figure similarly….
Alan Bullock’s “Hitler and Stalin: parallel lives” explores that question of the world that generated Hitler and Stalin very well