Nigel Farage

Explore about the Famous Politician Nigel Farage, who was born in United Kingdom on April 3, 1964. Analyze Nigel Farage’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Nigel Farage dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Nigel Farage?

Nigel Farage Biography

Former UKIP leader, and a top rated right-winger in a poll by The Daily Telegraph who began leading the UK Independence Party in 2010. He was known for his impassioned speeches in European Parliament which often became very contentious. In 2016, he was very instrumental in getting the UK to announce it would be withdrawing from the European Union.

He helped found the United Kingdom Independence Party.

He was accused of racism while attending Dulwich College in 1981 and he has refused to stand during an ovation for Prince Charles.

He has been married twice; first to Gráinne Hayes in 1988, and then to Kirsten Mehr in 1999, and has four children.

When John Major‘s Government signed the Treaty on European Union, Farage left the Conservative Party.

Nigel Paul Farage (/ˈ f ær ɑː ʒ / ; born 3 April 1964) is a British politician and broadcaster. He has been leader of the Brexit Party since 2019, and served as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 until the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU in 2020. He is also a vice-chairman of the pro-Brexit organisation Leave Means Leave, and is the host of a radio phone-in on the Global-owned talk radio station LBC.

From 1975 to 1982 Farage was educated at Dulwich College, a fee-paying independent school in south London. In his autobiography he pays tribute to the careers advice he received there from England Test cricketer John Dewes, “who must have spotted that I was quite ballsy, probably good on a platform, unafraid of the limelight, a bit noisy and good at selling things”. Farage was active in the Conservative Party from his school days, having seen a visit to his school by Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph. In 1981, an English teacher who had not met the 17 year-old Farage, Chloe Deakin, wrote to the headmaster of Dulwich College, David Emms, asking him to reconsider his decision to appoint Farage as a prefect, citing concerns expressed by others over Farage’s alleged ‘fascist’ views. Emms rejected those concerns, as did the College’s deputy headmaster, Terry Walsh, who said later that Farage “was well-known for provoking people, especially left-wing English teachers who had no sense of humour.” Farage later stated that some teachers were hostile to him because he was an admirer of Enoch Powell, and said: “Any accusation I was ever involved in far right politics is utterly untrue.”

Farage joined the Conservative Party in 1978, but voted for the Green Party in 1989 because of what he saw as their then “sensible” and Eurosceptic policies. He left the Conservatives in 1992 in protest at Prime Minister John Major’s government’s signing of the Treaty on European Union at Maastricht.

After leaving school in 1982, Farage decided to seek employment in the City of London, trading commodities at the London Metal Exchange. Initially, he joined the American commodity operation of brokerage firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, transferring to Crédit Lyonnais Rouse in 1986. He joined Refco in 1994, and Natixis Metals in 2003.

On 25 November 1985 Farage was hit by a car after a night out, and suffered injury to his head and left leg, the latter nearly requiring amputation. He was in casts for 11 months but recovered, and the nurse who treated him became his first wife. On 26 December 1986, Farage first felt symptoms of what was later discovered to be testicular cancer. He had the left testicle removed, and the cancer had not spread to any other organs.

Farage lives in Single Street, a hamlet in the London Borough of Bromley, “around the corner from Jail Lane”. He has been married twice. In 1988 he married Irish nurse Gráinne Hayes, with whom he has two children: Samuel (born 1989) and Thomas (born 1991). The couple divorced in 1997. In 1999 he married Kirsten Mehr, a German national; the couple have two children. Farage has spoken of how his children have been teased because of their relation to him. He has made reference to his German wife in response to criticisms that he is “anti-Europe”, while he himself says he is merely anti-EU. Farage has employed his wife Kirsten as his parliamentary secretary and in April 2014 he said that “nobody else could do that job”. In February 2017 his wife told the Press Association that they were living “separate lives” and that Farage had “moved out of the family home a while ago”.

From taking office as a UKIP MEP in 1999, Farage has often voiced opposition to the “euro project”. His argument is that “a one-size-fits-all interest rate” cannot work for countries with structurally different economies, often using the example of Greece and Germany to emphasise contrast.

Farage was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 and re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014. The BBC spent four months filming a documentary about his European election campaign in 1999, but did not air it. Farage, then head of the UKIP’s South East office, asked for a video and had friends make copies which were sold for £5 through the UKIP’s magazine. Surrey Trading Standards investigated and Farage admitted the offence. Farage was the leader of the 24-member UKIP contingent in the European Parliament, and co-leader of the multinational Eurosceptic group, Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy. Farage was ranked the fifth-most influential MEP by Politico in 2016, who described him as “one of the two most effective speakers in the chamber”. Reportedly, he would always be assigned office number 007 in the European Parliament.

On 18 November 2004 Farage announced in the European Parliament that Jacques Barrot, then French Commissioner-designate, had been barred from elected office in France for two years, after being convicted in 2000 of embezzling £2 million from government funds and diverting it into the coffers of his party. He said that French President Jacques Chirac had granted Barrot amnesty; initial BBC reports said that, under French law, it was perhaps illegal to mention that conviction. The prohibition in question applies only to French officials in the course of their duties. The President of the Parliament, Josep Borrell, enjoined him to retract his comments under threat of “legal consequences”. The following day, it was confirmed that Barrot had received an eight-month suspended jail sentence in the case, and that this had been quickly expunged by the amnesty decided by Chirac and his parliamentary majority.

Farage persuaded around 75 MEPs from across the political divide to back a motion of no confidence in Barroso, which would be sufficient to compel Barroso to appear before the European Parliament to be questioned on the issue. The motion was successfully tabled on 12 May 2005, and Barroso appeared before Parliament.

In early 2005 Farage requested that the European Commission disclose where the individual Commissioners had spent their holidays. The Commission did not provide the information requested, on the basis that the Commissioners had a right of privacy. The German newspaper Die Welt reported that the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, had spent a week on the yacht of the Greek shipping billionaire Spiros Latsis. It emerged soon afterwards that this had occurred a month before the Commission under Barroso’s predecessor Romano Prodi approved 10.3 million euros of Greek state aid for Latsis’s shipping company. It also became known that Peter Mandelson, then the British EU Commissioner, had accepted a trip to Jamaica from an unrevealed source at a debate on 26 May 2005. The motion was heavily defeated. A Conservative MEP, Roger Helmer, was expelled from his group, the European People’s Party – European Democrats (EPP-ED), in the middle of the debate by that group’s leader Hans-Gert Pöttering as a result of his support for Farage’s motion.

At 10pm on 19 October 2006, Farage took part in a three-hour live interview and phone-in with James Whale on the national radio station talkSPORT. Four days later, Whale announced on his show his intention to stand as UKIP’s candidate in the 2008 London Mayoral Election. Farage said that Whale “not only has guts, but an understanding of what real people think”. Whale later decided not to stand and UKIP was represented by Gerard Batten.

In his maiden speech to the UKIP conference, on 8 October 2006, Farage told delegates that the party was “at the centre-ground of British public opinion” and the “real voice of opposition”. He said: “We’ve got three social democratic parties in Britain – Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative are virtually indistinguishable from each other on nearly all the main issues” and “you can’t put a cigarette paper between them and that is why there are nine million people who don’t vote now in general elections that did back in 1992.”

Farage was a founder member of UKIP in 1993. On 12 September 2006 he was elected leader of UKIP with 45 percent of the vote, 20 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival. He pledged to bring discipline to the party and to maximise UKIP’s representation in local, parliamentary and other elections. In a PM programme interview on BBC Radio 4 that day he pledged to end the public perception of UKIP as a single-issue party and to work with allied politicians in the Better Off Out campaign, committing himself not to stand against the MPs who have signed up to that campaign.

He first became the leader of UKIP in September 2006, and led the party through the 2009 European Parliament election, when it won the second-highest share of the UK popular vote, defeating Labour and the Liberal Democrats with over two million votes. He stepped down in November 2009 to concentrate on contesting Buckingham, the constituency of the Speaker, John Bercow, at the 2010 general election, and came third. In November 2010 Farage successfully stood in the 2010 UKIP leadership contest, becoming leader of the party once again after the resignation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who voluntarily stepped down as leader in August that year.

He was leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009 and again from 2010 to 2016. Known as a prominent Eurosceptic in the UK since the early 1990s, he has been noted for his European Parliament speeches, and as a vocal critic of the euro currency. Farage was a founder member of UKIP, having left the Conservative Party in 1992 after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which furthered European integration and founded the European Union. After campaigning unsuccessfully in European and Westminster parliamentary elections for UKIP since 1994, he was elected MEP for South East England in the 1999 European Parliament election. He was re-elected in the 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections. In the European Parliament, he served as the President of Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD).

Charles, Prince of Wales was invited to speak to the European Parliament on 14 February 2008; in his speech he called for EU leadership in the battle against climate change. During the standing ovation that followed, Farage was the only MEP to remain seated, and he went on to describe the Prince’s advisers as “naïve and foolish at best.”

On 4 September 2009 Farage resigned as the UKIP’s leader to focus on his campaign to become Member of Parliament for Buckingham at Westminster in the 2010 general election. He later told The Times journalist Camilla Long that UKIP internal fights took up far too much time.

In May 2009 The Observer reported a Foreign Press Association speech given by Farage in which he had said that over his ten years as a Member of the European Parliament he had received a total of £2 million of taxpayers’ money in staff, travel, and other expenses. In response, Farage said that in future all UKIP MEPs would provide monthly expense details.

In 2010 Farage published a memoir, entitled Fighting Bull (Flying Free in paperback), outlining the founding of UKIP and his personal and political life so far. A second book, The Purple Revolution: The Year That Changed Everything, was released by Biteback Publishing in 2015.

On 1 December 2010 Justin Adams, the pilot of the aircraft involved in the accident, was charged with threatening to kill Farage in a separate incident. He was also charged with threatening to kill an AAIB official involved in the investigation into the accident. In April 2011, the pilot was found guilty of making death threats. The judge said that the defendant was “clearly extremely disturbed” at the time the offences happened, adding: “He is a man who does need help. If I can find a way of giving him help I will.” Adams was given a two-year supervised community order, and in December 2013 was found dead at home in circumstances that police said were “not being treated as suspicious”.

On 6 May 2010, the morning of the election, Farage was travelling in a two-seater PZL-104 Wilga aircraft with a pro-UKIP banner attached, when the plane crashed. Farage suffered injuries that were described as non-life-threatening. Although his injuries were originally described as minor, his sternum and ribs were broken and his lung punctured. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report said that the aeroplane was towing a banner, which caught in the tailplane, forcing the nose down.

Farage stood again for the UKIP leadership in 2010 (having stood down the year before, to focus on his unsuccessful campaign for the Buckingham seat) after his successor Lord Pearson had stood down, and on 5 November 2010 it was announced he had won the leadership contest.

After the speech of Herman Van Rompuy on 24 February 2010 to the European Parliament, Farage – to protests from other MEPs – addressed the former Prime Minister of Belgium and first long-term President of the European Council, saying that he had the “charisma of a damp rag” and the appearance of “a low grade bank clerk”. Farage questioned the legitimacy of Van Rompuy’s appointment, asking, “Who are you? I’d never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you.” He also asserted that Van Rompuy’s “intention [is] to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation states”. Van Rompuy commented afterwards, “There was one contribution that I can only hold in contempt, but I’m not going to comment further.” After refusing to apologise for behaviour that was, in the words of the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, “inappropriate, unparliamentary and insulting to the dignity of the House”, Farage was reprimanded and had his right to ten days’ allowance (expenses) “docked”.

During the campaigning before the UK voting system referendum of May 2011, which offered the two options of a continuation of first-past-the-post and an alternative vote system, Farage declared himself in favour of the latter, saying that a continuation of first-past-the-post would be a “nightmare” for UKIP, although he also said that AV would make little difference to UKIP’s fortunes. The party’s stance was decided by its central policy-making committee, although Farage expressed a preference for the AV+ system as it “would retain the constituency link and then also the second ballot ensured there were no wasted votes”. After the 2015 general election, in which UKIP took a much lower proportion of seats than votes, Farage called the first-past-the-post voting system (FPTP) “totally bankrupt”. He had said in 2011: “I completely lost faith in [FPTP] in 2005 when Blair was returned with a 60 seat majority on 36 per cent of the vote, or 22 per cent if you factor in low turnout.”

UKIP forgot to put its party name on its candidate’s ballot paper for the 2012 London mayoral election, Laurence Webb appearing as “a fresh choice for London”. Farage described the mistake as an internal error. Interviewed the following Sunday by Andrew Neil and asked about “the game plan”, Farage welcomed the “average 13% vote” across the country, and stated that the party was preparing for county council elections in 2013, the European Parliament election in 2014 and a general election in 2015.

UKIP forgot to put its party name on its candidate’s ballot paper for the 2012 London mayoral election, Laurence Webb appearing as “a fresh choice for London”. Farage described the mistake as an internal error. Interviewed the following Sunday by Andrew Neil and asked about “the game plan”, Farage welcomed the “average 13% vote” across the country, and stated that the party was preparing for county council elections in 2013, the European Parliament election in 2014 and a general election in 2015.

Farage’s stance on Iran has shifted over time. In 2013 he opposed sanctions on Iran, and criticised a potential Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, stating: “I do not support acts of aggression, even from countries that feel their existence is threatened”. In 2018 he condemned Jeremy Corbyn’s “record for standing up and defending this hardline Islamist regime” and declared that regime change was “absolutely the right thing” in Iran.

Farage has been highly critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying “Nobody should forget that the most devastating direct consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been suffered by the likes of Mr Blair, but by the civilian populations of these countries and of course by our own brave service personnel”. Farage stated that migrant exodus from Libya had been caused by NATO military intervention, approved by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, in the civil war in Libya. When the UK Parliament was debating direct military involvement in Syria in 2013, Farage cited the financial and human costs and poor outcomes of the UK involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan as reasons for Britain not to become involved militarily in Syria. He has expressed fears that rebel forces in Syria may be Islamic extremists.

Farage called on the British government in 2013 to accept more refugees from the Syrian Civil War. He later said that those refugees should be of the country’s Christian minority, due to the existence of nearer Muslim-majority safe countries. During the ensuing migration crisis, Farage alleged that the majority of people claiming to be refugees were economic migrants, and that some were Islamic State militants.

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