When Nigel Farage flew into New York’s JFK Airport for the first time in 1988, he was travelling into the future. Ronald Reagan was the global figurehead of a conservative counter-revolution sweeping the West, one that merged tradition with new money and black-tie balls with the mantra “greed is good”. It was the close of a glossy go-go decade. The Reagans had waltzed on the cover of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair magazine. John Travolta had swept Princess Diana off her feet in the White House. The US seemed powered by what Tom Wolfe called “money fever”. America was what’s next. For Farage, it still is.
His love affair with America began decades before he met Donald Trump. Farage has been commuting to the US since the late 1980s, crossing the Atlantic more times than he can count. When I asked Farage recently what he admired about America back then, he said: “The can-do. The applauding of success.” He judges us against our US cousins: “If someone’s made a fortune, everyone goes, ‘Oh, fantastic, well done, mate.’ In the UK they all look at you sideways.”
Farage wore pinstriped suits when he arrived in Manhattan. He was playing a character that Americans understood, and some British voters would come to adore: the ebullient English chap. His work was straightforward: get clients, make money. Farage, then employed by the French bank Crédit Rouse, following his first job at the US investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, would make trades for his high-powered clients on the London Metals Exchange, or the “premier non-ferrous base metal market in the world!” as Farage still boomingly calls it.
By 1990, Drexel was being forced into bankruptcy, the first Wall Street firm to go bust since the Great Depression. Wolfe’s “money fever” burned out, for a time. But Farage took more than money from his period with the American bank. In the 2010s he could still be heard incanting Drexel’s credo – “no guts, no glory” – during Ukip and Brexit Party meetings. He still remembers the “marvellous time” he had in the 1980s with his Yankee clients.
“I was the very English type,” he said. “They loved it, they loved it, they loved it!”
Farage is no longer an eccentric English finance bloke in a pinstripe suit wooing “masters of the universe”. Nor is he a cartoon candidate for a fringe party scooping up protest votes in European elections. According to the polls, he is on the cusp of routing the liberal establishment. A sense of inevitability has gathered around him, among his own team and in the nightmares of his Westminster opponents: the Reform UK leader may be the next prime minister.
If Farage pulls it off, he will enter No 10 with a relationship to Washington DC as close as any in British history. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson all had close associations with the US and the Republican Party. But Farage is something else. He is already a celebrated figure on the transnational radical right, an inspiration to the Maga movement that has reshaped Washington over the past decade.
“I’ve been with him in New York, DC, Florida. He gets stopped all the time,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House. “It was like Michael Jordan walking through. [Farage] was the OG disruptor candidate.”
Raheem Kassam, a former Ukip aide who has reinvented himself into a flamboyant power player and restaurateur in Washington, told me Farage is “kind of the éminence grise of the movement”. Kassam helped arrange many of Farage’s visits to America in the 2010s. “He’s seen as the elder statesman. He almost has senator status. If England were the 51st state, Nigel Farage would be one of the senators.”
Farage’s ally Steve Bannon says he “draws crowds the size of Ted Cruz… Another senator will be half the crowd.” In Trump’s America, “that means a lot”.
“He’s plugged in to every senior person in Maga from the president on down,” Bannon said. “He couldn’t be more highly regarded, because the guy’s delivered. He’s a major player. He’s going to be the next prime minister.”
Over the past two decades, Senator Farage has built a gentlemen’s club of connections in Washington. The New Statesman has spoken to figures on the Hill, key players in the Trump administration and sources within Reform. The picture that emerges is of a would-be leader of the country who sees Trump’s US as a blueprint for what Britain must become.
Farage’s time as a trader and his entry into politics overlapped. Ukip was then still a small organisation, and Farage cut a lonely figure, looking for allies who also reviled the power that organisations such as the EU held over the nation state. “We stand for nothing more than the right of the people to govern themselves,” he told the author Mark Daniel in 2004. What Farage called the “cavalier” spirit found natural allies among the libertarian right wing of US politics.
One early collaborator was Alex Jones, a former talk-radio host turned live-streamer. Conspiratorial sermons are the Maga equivalent of an acid trip; Jones once claimed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were demons because they smelled of sulphur. According to Michael Crick’s biography of the Reform leader, One Party after Another (2022), Farage first went on Jones’s show in 2009. (Crick was the first to report the allegations of schoolboy anti-Semitism Farage has struggled to shake off.) In one episode, Farage spoke as if they were comrades fighting the same war. “Alex, of course they’re scared of you, and I must say, in Britain and the EU, they’ve been scared of me for many, many years.” Farage saw Obama as “very dangerous”. Jones compared Obama’s acolytes to the Germans who went along with Hitler. Farage agreed, noting he was struck by the similarities between the anger in the UK and US. “People have got to start waking up.”
Around 2011, Farage began to befriend congressmen, such as the future attorney general Jeff Sessions and Senator Steve Daines. He went to congressional breakfasts and attacked the EU as “globalisation writ large”. Farage was wooing top Republicans – winning over allies for his campaign to wrest Britain from the EU – with the same English charm with which he had once hit New York bankers.
It wasn’t only traditional Republicans who noticed. Trump came across the boisterous MEP after watching his witty tirades in the European Parliament on YouTube. In 2014 Trump told his team to get Farage to New York, but their diaries didn’t align. Instead, their meeting came about two years later.
Farage was at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July 2016. With the Brexit referendum won, his fame reached a crescendo. The vote showed Trump’s presidential campaign that revolution was possible. “Even the bartenders knew who I was – it was remarkable,” Farage told me. He watched dewy-eyed at the RNC as balloons fell from the ceiling, envious of the pageantry. Pyrotechnics later turned Farage’s rallies into spectacles akin to those at GOP conventions (although a Reform source said that it was the Trump campaign who copied Farage).
In a bar on the final night of the RNC, Farage got talking to some aides of Phil Bryant, the pro-Trump Mississippi governor. A month later Bryant arranged for him to fly to Jackson to speak at a rally. As they embraced on the stage, Trump told Farage they would be “friend[s] for life”.
On 12 November 2016, Farage and Kassam, then his aide, smoked on the balcony outside Bannon’s office in Trump Tower. Trump had won the presidential election four days before. When they were eventually taken up to Trump’s apartment, Trump said: “There’s my Nigel!”
That night Farage and his team went to a restaurant. They noticed that a photo of him and Trump in front of the president-elect’s golden door was being broadcast on the television fixed to the wall above them.
Farage estimates that, in the period after the Brexit vote, he was flying to the US around six times a year. Republicans wanted to speak to the man in that photo, whose success with Brexit in June prefigured their own in November. Farage had reinvented himself as a multimedia populist pundit and Washington became the carnival stage on which he would perform.
What did an average day in DC look like for Farage in the late 2010s? He would be out of the Trump Hotel’s door by 7am, impervious to hangovers. A working breakfast would follow at the Capitol Hill Club a few hundred metres from Congress. Then it would be time for what is known in Farage circles as a “PFL”, or a “proper fucking lunch”, at Morton’s steakhouse, starting with a gin and tonic, topped up with two bottles of wine, usually red. A moment to freshen up at the hotel (Farage now prefers the privacy of an apartment), before ploughing on to slots on Fox News in the evening – “Rupert [Murdoch] was very keen for me not to do any other channels,” Farage told me– topped off with a discreet night cap.
Alcohol and tobacco powered Farage’s courtship of America. Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operator, said he was “amazed by Farage’s ability to eat, smoke and talk all at the same time”. One day he took it too far. During a night-time Fox News appearance in New York – which his aides, no strangers to drunkenness, still reminisce about – it was clear, as he swayed out of the green room, that he should have forgone that last gin and tonic.
The 2019 constitutional crisis brought Farage back to Britain to form the Brexit Party. But with the Brexit saga ending by December, he once again became a transatlantic talking head, splitting his time between US speaking engagements and his new nightly show on GB News. “Lucrative” was how a Reform source described Farage’s US speaking tours between 2022 and 2024. Ben Habib, who was once Reform’s co-deputy leader but has since fallen out with Farage, told me that “Farage loves money… He loves spending money. He loves the trappings of wealth… Bodyguards, car, private jets, all that kind of thing.”
Farage’s attendance at Trump’s second inauguration in January was paid for by the cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne, who gave £10m to the Brexit Party in 2019-20. (On 4 December, it was reported that Harborne has donated a further £9m to Reform.) A few months later, Farage flew to Las Vegas to speak at a crypto conference, promising a “crypto revolution” in Britain. He added that Reform would accept donations in cryptocurrency, just as Trump had done.
His banter charms Maga Americans even more than his crypto advocacy. “He will constantly quote from, you know, Thatcher, Churchill,” Miller said, before adding, without irony: “His knowledge of world political history is unparalleled.” Farage would go to parties, alongside Kellyanne Conway and other Maga figures, at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a townhouse opposite the Supreme Court in Washington where Bannon now films his talk show WarRoom. “We used to have flappers going around with jars of sweets,” Kassam told me. “Guys rolling cigars out in the backyard. There was a champagne keg. At one of them, there was a 16-piece brass band in the living room – it would just rage around us,” Kassam said. “[Farage] became a trusted person in the circle. He had all the right friends. He moved in all the right circles, all the right places.”
Stephen Miller, now effectively running Trump’s domestic agenda but then working for Jeff Sessions, was an early acolyte. He would be keen to get photos with Farage at the Capitol Hill Club. On one occasion in early 2015, he had to make do with the then Ukip deputy leader, Paul Nuttall. Nuttall left the party in 2018, and rejoined Farage’s retinue this July as Reform’s deputy chairman.
“You go to the White House, they view me as a historic figure. You go to Westminster and they think I shouldn’t be let in,” Farage told me. He said he had spoken to Miller only a few weeks ago. “I see Steve whenever I’m over. He’s someone I know well. We’re friends. He’s performing a big role.”
I asked Farage about that role. The mass deportation programme spearheaded by Miller has led to US citizens being removed from the country. Masked agents roam the streets dragging suspects into vans. When I suggested the policy was brutal, Farage said he disagreed, pointing to the scheme to pay migrants to leave the country. “That’s a really grown-up way of doing it.” But the cruelty is undeniable. Either Farage does not want to criticise the administration or he has no qualms with the policy. He might try to replicate it in Britain.
Maga figures often talk about mass deportations as the only way to save Western civilisation. Stateside, Farage adopts this rhetoric like a Maga native, lobbing attacks at the “globalists” while lamenting the decline of “Judaeo-Christian” values, phrases that may sound foreign to the average UK voter.
One Brit for whom these ideas are less foreign is Paul Marshall, the hedge-fund manager who owns UnHerd and the Spectator, and is co-owner of GB News. In 2023 Farage – by now the star performer on the channel – went to Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump for GB News. It was the start of a tight relationship between the outlet and the White House. Jason Miller was the man responsible for making sure big names went to the September launch party of GB News in America, held at Ned’s Club, an exclusive new private members’ spot near the White House. Miller said he couldn’t even get through saying Farage’s first name before they would say, “Oh, I’m there.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, joined Farage and Marshall. “Almost every person who spoke at the launch referred to him as the next prime minister,” Miller said. Several toasts that night made the same prophecy. In his speech, Farage said Brexit lent momentum to Trump’s first victory. Now, he said, “it bounces back the other way”.
Maga holds Britain up as a future to avoid. Charlie Kirk, Maga’s chief activist who was assassinated in September, described Britain after a visit this year as a “third-world hellhole”. Jason Miller told me he will frequently hear people in Maga say “that the UK is lost. I hear it all the time. There’s just nothing to do. It’s too far gone… It’s important to Nigel that the US doesn’t give up on the UK.”
Does Farage, in his own words a “not especially active Christian”, see his purpose as saving Judaeo-Christian civilisation? “Oh, without doubt, without a doubt.”
Some Republican figures privately believe that Farage needs to be more radical to save Britain. Kassam, who wrote a book called Enoch Was Right (2018), said he and Farage once almost scuffled over their steaks at a restaurant in 2018. The issue was Tommy Robinson.
Bannon was hosting the dinner at the 21 Club in Midtown Manhattan. To his left was Kassam. Farage was sitting opposite. Kassam, who had organised rallies in support of Robinson, told Farage that he should stop criticising those to his right: “Just because I’m not a thug doesn’t mean other people are not entitled to be a thug.” Farage replied that he had spent his life fighting people like the BNP and the English Defence League.
“I was like, let Tommy be Tommy,” Kassam said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you… stop fucking denouncing these people.” He concluded: “Your problem is you’re a Dulwich [school] posh boy.” Then they “literally lunged at each other, and Steve had to put his arm in the middle of us”. At Bannon’s suggestion, they reconciled over a cigarette outside. More recently, Farage refused to meet Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation who has been criticised for defending Tucker Carlson after the broadcaster hosted the anti-Semitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Farage predicts the Labour government will fall by 2027, which means he could become prime minister while Trump is still in office. But a general election does not need to be called until 2029. JD Vance might have succeeded Trump by then.
Farage first met Vance in France in 2012, before he met Trump. He gushed to me over the vice-president: “incredibly bright”; “a very natural successor”. When I asked whether the tech billionaire Peter Thiel – an early mentor to Vance – arranged the meeting, Farage said that “you can make your own mind up on that”.
A key ambassador to Trump’s Washington is Nick Candy, a property magnate who used to donate to the Tories but joined Reform as its treasurer last December. Candy got to know Farage over a long evening on his super yacht in Montenegro almost a decade ago. Before Candy got rid of the yacht, it was once chartered by Lutnick, now the commerce secretary. The treasurer is close to the Trump clan and met with the president’s second son, Eric, at a crypto conference attended by Asian tycoons in Hong Kong this August.
And it was Candy who organised a well-publicised meeting between Elon Musk and Farage on 16 December last year, during the transition between the Biden administration and the Maga takeover in January. Tech oligarchs were milling around the Trumpian retreat. Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank billionaire, and the TikTok chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, were there. “It felt like the court of King Henry VIII, with people lining up to kiss the ring,” one source told me.
Musk and Candy had been texting since Trump’s victory, and Candy got permission from Trump’s team to host the meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Candy, Farage and Musk sat in the resort’s wood-panelled library for more than an hour. Musk shared insights into how he led the ground operation during the 2024 election and what data strategy they used. Candy and Farage wanted Musk’s advice. And his money. They spoke about him potentially donating to Reform.
By January, whatever warm feelings that had existed between Musk and Reform had soured. Musk attacked Farage on his social media platform, demanding he allow Tommy Robinson into the party. Today, these fractures are being slowly healed. The tone of communications between the two camps has changed. There is talk of another meeting at Mar-a-Lago in the new year.
“What are you on about?” Farage replied, agitated. It was 23 June. He was holding a press conference in Westminster, and I had asked whether his support for US strikes on Iran the day before was driven by his friendship with Trump, rather than Britain’s national interest. “I believe that our foreign policy on Iran has been wrong. We blindly followed Obama. Blindly following America could be a big mistake.” But he added that Britain must “recognise that without America, we are defenceless”.
Trump’s second administration is a model for Reform. Farage wants to enter office as exhaustively prepared on policy as Trump’s team were. He wants a cabinet made up of all-star personnel from outside politics. Reform’s leader wants a British version of what the president called in his inauguration speech the “golden age”. While Farage told me that he and Trump diverge on tariffs, they agree on fossil fuels, ending wars and developing industry. One White House source told me that “Farage has to win first. I love him, and like Trump he can’t give in to the online right. He has to build a coalition.”
And yet this all means that Farage is out of sync with the British public. He knows many voters, left and right, “find the New Yorker style brash”. According to the Economist, Trump policies poll well in the UK, but not the president himself. “I can’t detach myself and pretend I don’t know him,” Farage said, adding that he doesn’t “dump friends”.
It’s more than personal loyalty that prevents Farage from criticising Trump. He thinks the type of country Trump is creating is better than the technocratic, woke America he is destroying. Farage still has that wide-eyed wonder for the US experiment that dates back to the 1980s. “I just see so much positivity in America, a positivity that I’ve not seen in this country for a very long time.”
It tells you a lot that Farage thinks the US is still a hopeful place. In reality, Trumpland is embittered and divided. Liberals despair at what they see as the irreparable corruption of America, while Trump has turned the executive into a fiefdom to enrich his clan. It is a patrimonial, aggressive form of politics that has attracted Farage again and again.
Like Reagan in America, Farage wants to make Britain feel good about itself again. He puts Reform’s success partly down to the fact that it “exudes a positive vibe, a can-do belief that we can turn things around, change things and make things better”.
Farage does not think Britain has been at ease with itself since the 1990s, or perhaps – surprisingly – the 2012 Olympics. “We’ve become an unhappy country. We’ve become a pessimistic country,” he said. “And I think Reform come along and say, ‘Guys, we’re going to change everything.’”
America’s nationalist right has become an international enterprise. If Farage does enter No 10, and Maga holds on to the White House in 2028, the nationalist right’s power will arc from Washington to London. Few in the British capital understand what Farage actually is: an American politician as much as a British one. An emissary from Magaworld to his home country, importing Trumpian politics to Britain.
Farage would want his relationship with the president to be like that between Thatcher and Reagan. The 1980s loom large in his imagination; it is still the decade by which he judges the present. His ambassador to Washington would be someone from the “world of business. Somebody who’s made money and lost money, somebody who understands what America actually is.”
Of course, we no longer live in the 1980s, however much Trump and Farage might like to go back. They are at risk of becoming figures from the past, looking slightly conventional as their supporters spin out towards the extremes. The Maga movement has spent the end of this year squabbling over anti-Semitism. Something ugly is stirring in Washington; I have encountered it over and over again as a reporter in the city this year. A crypto bro at a Maga party in February mused that “someone should go into the British parliament and spray it”. With what? I asked. “Bullets,” he replied, eyes gleaming. He thought Farage was weak, already a dated figure. “You need a King Arthur. Farage is a pimp.” But this pimp is now the bookies’ favourite to enter No 10.
Now imagine Prime Minister Farage landing at the Joint Base Andrews airfield in Maryland. His ambassador, Nick Candy perhaps, is there to welcome him back to the city he knows so well. Inside the White House, Farage and the president pose for a photo that is seen around the globe: the two men grin at each other as they shake hands by the Oval Office fireplace. Will the world understand the moment? It will be an ironic one. Not a first meeting between a prime minister and president, but a homecoming, decades in the making.
[Further reading: Reform’s “DOGE” yet to tame outsourcers]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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