By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: November 30th, 2010 Politicians always claim not to be politicians, but Nigel Farage has a point. His memoirs – if that’s the right word for a book published mid-stream – are quite unlike any you’ve read: artless, breathless, occasionally crude, completely plausible and utterly readable. They describe the transformation of a typical Home Counties boy into the leader of the party that came second at the last European election. When I say “typical Home Counties boy”, I suppose I mean the type often encountered in Betjeman’s verse and in P G Wodehouse’s golfing short stories (Wodehouse was, like Farage, a cricket-obsessed old boy of Dulwich). Nigel’s main interests in life were – and perhaps still are, underneath everything – pubs, golf, women, cricket and fishing. The type is easily satirised; but it has produced its great men, Denis Thatcher foremost among them. Nigel Farage is Denis Thatcher on speed. On the night he was elected to the European Parliament, the first question from our local TV man, Phil Hornby, was: “So, from now on it’s going to be endless lunches, lavish dinners, champagne receptions: will you be corrupted by the lifestyle?” “No,” replied Nigel amiably, “I’ve always lived like that”. This manner isn’t to everyone’s taste; but its authenticity is indubitable. Nigel is equally authentic when, in his book, he sets out to answer the central question of his life. How did an eighteen-year-old with a handicap of six and a job in the City become a full-time anti-EU campaigner? I’ll let him answer in his own words: “I did not enter politics out of philanthropy but rather as an extension of my own annoyance at having inherited freedoms infringed by power-crazed idiots”. Nigel has demotic appeal. In a comment that found its way back to me, he once told someone: “Dan can talk to broadsheets, I can talk to tabloids”. It’s true, and his is the greater gift: it’s no coincidence that tabloid writers are often paid twice as much as their broadsheet equivalents. Like most people with the popular touch, Nigel is savvier than you realise at first. His life story pulses with the ideas that actuate him: libertarianism, British particularism and (in the sense of championing the people against the elites) populism. The book is surprisingly full of unobtrusive literary and historical allusions. Its title, “Fighting Bull”, refers (as well as the obvious) to the rape of Europa by Zeus: Nigel has a fancy metaphor about Europe’s elites shafting their peoples which, of course, neatly brings the reference back to vulgar territory. Earthy, Hogarthian and utterly honest, the book reflects its author. It should appeal to non-UKIP voters as much as to Nigel’s partisans. Indeed, the author is as aware as anyone of the cranky, captious, cussed nature of his party: three of his four predecessors ended up falling out with their activists (not counting Kilroy who failed to become leader). Yet these activists are admirable, too, in their way; heroic, almost. Nigel recalls the furious arguments, back in the mid-1990s, about whether or not UKIP MEPs ought to take up their seats if elected. In those days, when UKIP was holding its AGMs in the upstairs rooms of pubs, the question would have struck any sane observer as academic. But, against all the odds, it turned out not to be academic at all. That this should be so is overwhelmingly due to UKIP’s present leader. I wonder whether his party realises how much it owes him. Anyway, buy the book: you’ll enjoy it. RECENT POSTSDaniel Hannan
Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.
What drives a normal man into politics?
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
RECENT POSTSWhat drives a normal man into politics?
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