Nigel Paul Farage (born 3 April 1964) is a British politician who has been the Leader of Reform UK and a Member of Parliament for Clacton since 2024. He had previously served as the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009 and from 2010 to 2016, and as a member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 until the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) in 2020.
Farage was a member of the Conservative Party for 14 years, from 1978 to 1992. He has been a prominent Eurosceptic since the early 1990s and was first elected to the European Parliament in 1999. In 2004, he became the president of Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy. Farage was elected UKIP's leader in 2006 and led the party at the 2009 European Parliament election, when it won the second-most votes in the UK. He stood unsuccessfully in Buckingham at the 2010 general election before returning as UKIP's leader later that year. At the 2014 European Parliament election, UKIP won the most seats in the UK, pressuring David Cameron to call the 2016 EU membership referendum. At the 2015 general election Farage was an unsuccessful candidate in South Thanet.
After the referendum, Farage resigned as UKIP's leader. In 2018, he co-founded the Brexit Party (renamed Reform UK in 2021), which drew support from those frustrated by the delayed implementation of Brexit by the Conservative government, and won the most votes at the 2019 European Parliament election, becoming the largest single party in the parliament. At the 2024 general election Farage again became Reform UK's leader, and won in Clacton. In July 2026, whilst under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over undeclared gifts including one of £5 million, Farage announced his resignation as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election which he won, reclaiming the seat with 63.3% of the vote.
Early life and education Nigel Paul Farage was born on 3 April 1964 in Farnborough, Kent, England, the son of Barbara née Stevens and Guy Justus Oscar Farage. His father was a stockbroker who worked in the City of London. A 2012 BBC Radio 4 profile described Guy as an alcoholic who left the family home when Nigel was five years old. Guy gave up alcohol two years later, in 1971, and entered the antiques trade, having lost his Stock Exchange position; the next year, endorsed by friends, he returned to the trading floor at the new Stock Exchange Tower on Threadneedle Street. Farage said in 2026 that his mother remarried a local man a few years later and that he is on good terms with both parents.
Farage's paternal grandfather, Harry Farage, served as a private in the First World War and was wounded during the Battle of Arras. It has been suggested that the Farage name comes from a distant French Huguenot ancestor. Both parents of one of Farage's great-grandfathers were Germans who immigrated to London from the Frankfurt area shortly after 1861.
Farage's first school was Greenhayes School for Boys in West Wickham, and he subsequently spent a short period at a similar school in nearby Eden Park. From 1975 to 1982 Farage was educated at Dulwich College, a fee-paying private school in south London. Politicians visited the school, including Keith Joseph, Edward Heath and Enoch Powell. Farage joined the Conservative Party in 1978 after Joseph's visit.
In December 2025 twenty-five former pupils and one ex-teacher at Dulwich College signed an open letter published in The Guardian asking Farage to apologise for alleged racist and antisemitic behaviour during his time there. Other former pupils who knew Farage said that they do not recall the behaviour described. Reform UK responded to the open letter by describing it as "a naked attempt to discredit Reform and Nigel Farage", adding that "the left-wing media and deeply unpopular Labour Party are now using 50-year-old smears in a last act of desperation". Farage denied making any of the comments that were attributed to him.
One Jewish classmate of Farage, Peter Ettedgui, alleged in 2025 that Farage repeatedly made antisemitic remarks targeting him, including "Hitler was right" and "gas 'em". The Guardian reported that eight other pupils have corroborated Ettedgui's account. Farage responded to the allegation by stating: "I categorically deny saying those things" which Ettedgui said was "fundamentally dishonest". Jason Meredith, who was three years below Farage at Dulwich College, alleged to The Guardian that he had been subjected to racist insults, including being called a "paki" and being told to "go back home". Cyrus Oshidar, who was in the same year as Farage, also alleged to The Guardian that Farage called him a "paki". When questioned by ITV News about the allegations of racist behaviour, Farage said: "I don't apologise for things that are complete made-up fantasies. Some of what I heard was just absolute nonsense by people with very obvious, if you looked, political motivation".
One Black former Dulwich College pupil told The Guardian that Farage allegedly made repeated racist remarks targeting him, including "That's the way back to Africa", "simply because of how I looked". Farage denied saying anything racist or antisemitic directly at an individual and suggested that the claims were politically motivated. The author and journalist Michael Crick found equal proportions of Farage's past acquaintances who did, and who did not recall Farage engaging in racist behaviour. According to Crick, as a youth, Farage could be friendly to people of minority ethnicities, and Crick concluded that as an adult, Farage was not a racist. Reverend Neil Fairlamb, a former teacher at Dulwich College, said he did not see racism from Farage—instead referring to him as "objectionable" in a complimentary way.
In 1981, Dulwich staff debated whether his views ought to exclude him from becoming a prefect; ultimately he was appointed. At the time, English teacher Chloë Deakin wrote to David Emms, the head teacher, asking him to reconsider his decision to appoint Farage as a prefect, citing his alleged "publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views". Deakin did not know Farage personally but included, in her letter, an account of what was said by staff at their annual meeting, held a few days earlier, to discuss new prefects. In 2025, Deakin told The Guardian that in 1981 there was discussion amongst pupils referring to Farage as a bully. She also recalled that some colleagues at the time told of his fascination with the far-right, including allegedly "goose‑stepping" during cadet force marches. Deakin added that she believed school leaders had overlooked repeated accounts of troubling behaviour raised by pupils and teachers at the time. David Emms said of Farage's behaviour: "It was naughtiness, not racism" and said that though he "didn't probe too closely into that naughtiness" he was "proved right" to have made Farage a prefect because of his potential.
In his 2010 autobiography, Farage wrote that the outrage was because staff "deplored my spirited defence of Enoch Powell". A deputy headmaster later summarised Farage's argumentation as intentionally antagonistic but facetious. Responding in 2013, Farage stated: "Of course I said some ridiculous things. Not necessarily racist things. It depends how you define it". He acknowledged that his statements as a pupil "would offend deeply".
Early career After leaving school in 1982, Farage obtained employment in the City of London, as a commodities trader. 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.
Political career Farage had joined the Conservative Party in 1978, but voted for the Green Party in the 1989 European election due to their 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. In 1992, Farage joined the Anti-Federalist League. In 1993, he was a founding member of UKIP. In 1994, Farage asked Enoch Powell to endorse UKIP and to stand for them, both of which Powell declined.
Former UKIP leader Alan Sked has alleged that, shortly before the 1997 general election, Farage urged him to drop the party's ban on former National Front members standing as UKIP candidates. According to Sked, when he objected, Farage allegedly replied that they should not "worry about the nigger vote. Nig-nogs will never vote for us". Farage dismissed this allegation as "complete rubbish". When questioned in 2014 about Sked's claim, Farage stated that only Sked had made that allegation and "in politics all sorts of disappointments happen to people and they throw mud".
On 12 September 2006 Farage was elected leader of UKIP with 45 per cent 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.
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".
European Parliament
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 no offence was found. 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". He would 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 prohibition contained in the French penal code against mentioning crimes covered by an amnesty only concerns French officials who may hear of such crimes in the course of their duties (CP L133-11), and does not apply generally (L133-10). The President of the Parliament, Josep Borrell, asked him to retract his comments and warned of potential "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."Barrot survives call to quit". The Guardian, 26 November 2004