"Farage’s responses to this have gone all over the place like a wonky supermarket trolley"
Political journalist Michael Crick has said the Reform leader is “really rattled” and has “totally lost it” over the allegations he racially abused classmates when he was at Dulwich College.
Crick, who authored a biography on Farage, said the way the Reform leader has responded shows “He’s really, really rattled in a way we’ve not seen before”.
Peter Ettedgui, a fellow former Dulwich College student who is Jewish, accused Farage of making antisemitic remarks, including saying “Hitler was right” and “gas them”.
Another former pupil, Yinka Bankole, said Farage told him, at age 9, “that’s the way back to Africa”. Farage was 17 at the time.
The Reform leader has also been accused of calling other students from ethnic minority backgrounds the P-word and the W-word.
Times Radio journalist Calum MacDonald asked Crick if Reform had delivered “a satisfactory answer” to the allegations.
Crick said: “No, and it’s partly because Farage’s responses to this have gone all over the place like a wonky supermarket trolley with only three wheels.”
The journalist said that Farage has said it was “only banter”, but on other occasions, such as when Crick spoke to him in 2013, he has admitted “of course I said some ridiculous things, not necessarily racist things”.
“At times he sort of accepts he said things he shouldn’t have done, and at other times he and his spokesman and his deputies say ‘no, no he didn’t say anything like that whatsoever, everybody is a liar’,” Crick said.
He added: “I think the whole way he has responded to this shows he is really really rattled in a way we’ve not seen before.”
“You know, he has lost the Farage touch on this.”
Crick said he thinks Farage is “really really worried” that the allegations are going to “grow and grow and grow”.
He added that the “volume of it now” and the number of allegations, coming from nearly 30 people, means they “cannot all be fiction, they cannot all be made-up”.
Crick said Farage is handling it “really badly”. He said Farage should have said ‘look, I don’t recall this myself’, which is, I know not likely, […] ‘but the picture people are painting here of me as a teenager is horrendous, I’m deeply ashamed of that, I’m ashamed of what I did as a boy, but I assure you the Farage of Dulwich College is not the Farage of today.”
He also said Farage should have phoned the victims and apologised to them one by one, which Crick said he would have helped him with, “but now he’s left that too late”.
Crick said he’s even started dismissing the victims, including Ettedgui as “that guy”. He also criticised Farage for calling BBC journalist Emma Barnett, who is Jewish herself, a “lower grade presenter”.
“Farage is normally brilliant at handling these kinds of things, on this issue he’s totally lost it and I don’t see where he goes from here, he’s pushed himself into a corner,” Crick said.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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