Friday 29 May 2009
Geoff Burch - Virtual Seminar
Last week, speaker and business guru, Geoff Burch held a virtual seminar for Scottish businesses. Check it out here.
Jonathan Gabay on BBC Scotland
..........talking about how Santander are ridding the High Street of our building society brands:
Tuesday 26 May 2009
Gabay on CNN
Jonathan Gabay continues his television appearances with this on brands with CNN:
Nostalgia in the high street from Jonathan Gabay on Vimeo.
Jonathan Gabay of brandforensics (co.uk) talks to CNN about the current trend for retail brands to draw on nostalgia to win back credit crunched consumers. Also check out Jonathan's latest book - Soul Traders at soultraderstruth com
Monday 25 May 2009
The Queen and Extremists
Jonathan Gabay has written this piece in the Soultraders Ning group:
The current spate of scandals surrounding MP expenses may leave the electorate voting at the upcoming European elections with more than just clouds in their coffee.
The recession has already given an edge to BNP spin-doctors who, in the words of Harriet Harman, has cranked up the credit crunch climate to ‘spread division and despair’ among hard hit middle as well as more traditional lower class margin voters. Her voice wasn’t a lone one: the Archbishop of Canterbury warned that Britain needed to heed the lessons of Nazi Germany and accept “a very high risk of financial stringency leading to political extremes - anger finding its expression in xenophobia.
Just a matter of months before the current fiasco surrounding member claims, the anti-fascist body, Searchlight estimated that BNP only needed 8% of the vote to secure seats in European Parliament. This week a Guardian/ICM poll carried out in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal found that some 27% of voters plan to support a minority party. The poll also uncovered evidence that more could soon join them. This week, in a joint statement for the Church of England House of Bishops, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu said it would be “tragic” if people chose not to vote, or to register a protest vote, (for the Far Right) at the European parliamentary and local elections on 4 June.
However, many political pundits have cast aside worries about the BNP capitalising on the current national distrust in our leaders. They point to the fact that new poll suggests that The Greens are set to take 9% of the total vote, Ukip is on 10%, leaving the BNP on just 1%.
Maybe the British public is more resilient than the classic textbooks would suggest. Take for example the voters of Salford’s Irwell Riverside ward - perfectly placed to give the BNP a landslide win. Most of the ward’s white, working-class voters live in run-down terraces. Salford’s MP - Hazel Blears lives a very different lifestyle, claiming for three different properties in one year, along with Generation Game’s conveyor belt of goodies including, TVs, beds, mattresses, curtains, pots, pans and even the mandatory overnight stay in posh London hotel.
Yet, despite it all Blears held her Labour seat. The BNP stayed stuck in third place, its share of the vote up a mere 3.8% on last year.
So should moderate voters be allowed to let go of their anguishes over a Neo-Fascist rise? Perhaps not, in my new book Soul Traders, I discovered that it only requires a pinch of carefully placed propaganda added to an already generally unsettled public, at precisely the right moment, for the status quo to become unnerved. That is usually down to timing of announcements which conveniently coincide with a series of fortuitous events leading up to a decisive date (election).
Voters with growing multi-cultural communities at constituencies such as in The Midlands, still need to be on their guard from xenophobes as well as slick double-talk by BNP’s marketing machine producing campaigns including slick videos (on their website) . Such shrewdly written pieces of propaganda can for some voters teetering on the edge, appear to make sense.
Then there is the BNP’s ability to seize on headlines,such as the recently announced £1.7bn stock piled budget. This was driven home to me today whilst listening to the chit-chat on talk radio shows. Callers were calling in, citing the NHS surplus headlines and then combining the news with facts such as one quarter of all babies born in NHS hospitals are delivered to mothers who are not British nationals. Chat show hosts chipped in with quips such as: “what a cheek, the NHS is keeping money for themselves, cutting back on essential health-care but letting foreigners abuse our system…” Or … “ It took 80 million years for the planet to have 1billion people. Thanks to over population, we now have one billion more people every ten years….” This all spurred callers to complain about “her next door” from Eastern Europe or India or just about anyway north or south of Lands End or John O Groats, “bleeding the social dry by having too many kids which we will have to educate, clothe etc..”
The other piece of news was the (very short-lived) possibility of Nick Griffin having tea (Earl Grey no doubt) with the Queen. That turned out to be a storm in a tea-cup. However, as the UK continues to grow and prosper thanks in a great part to its multi-cultural society, the chances of a division within the country may become more noticeable. (This is not just down to good old racism or anti-Semitism - but the even older fear of anyone or anything that can be perceived as a threat on personal property and prosperity).
Who knows, maybe years or just decades down the road, the tabloids could indeed feature a picture of the far right enjoying a digestive with whoever is residence at the house with the biggest back garden in central London. Once the initial shock of it all fizzles out, in time such a picture opportunity will no doubt be considered as simply an example of British fair play and equality to all.
(Ah the irony of British fair play).
Jonathan Gabay
Author Soul Traders
www.soultraderstruth.com
The current spate of scandals surrounding MP expenses may leave the electorate voting at the upcoming European elections with more than just clouds in their coffee.
The recession has already given an edge to BNP spin-doctors who, in the words of Harriet Harman, has cranked up the credit crunch climate to ‘spread division and despair’ among hard hit middle as well as more traditional lower class margin voters. Her voice wasn’t a lone one: the Archbishop of Canterbury warned that Britain needed to heed the lessons of Nazi Germany and accept “a very high risk of financial stringency leading to political extremes - anger finding its expression in xenophobia.
Just a matter of months before the current fiasco surrounding member claims, the anti-fascist body, Searchlight estimated that BNP only needed 8% of the vote to secure seats in European Parliament. This week a Guardian/ICM poll carried out in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal found that some 27% of voters plan to support a minority party. The poll also uncovered evidence that more could soon join them. This week, in a joint statement for the Church of England House of Bishops, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu said it would be “tragic” if people chose not to vote, or to register a protest vote, (for the Far Right) at the European parliamentary and local elections on 4 June.
However, many political pundits have cast aside worries about the BNP capitalising on the current national distrust in our leaders. They point to the fact that new poll suggests that The Greens are set to take 9% of the total vote, Ukip is on 10%, leaving the BNP on just 1%.
Maybe the British public is more resilient than the classic textbooks would suggest. Take for example the voters of Salford’s Irwell Riverside ward - perfectly placed to give the BNP a landslide win. Most of the ward’s white, working-class voters live in run-down terraces. Salford’s MP - Hazel Blears lives a very different lifestyle, claiming for three different properties in one year, along with Generation Game’s conveyor belt of goodies including, TVs, beds, mattresses, curtains, pots, pans and even the mandatory overnight stay in posh London hotel.
Yet, despite it all Blears held her Labour seat. The BNP stayed stuck in third place, its share of the vote up a mere 3.8% on last year.
So should moderate voters be allowed to let go of their anguishes over a Neo-Fascist rise? Perhaps not, in my new book Soul Traders, I discovered that it only requires a pinch of carefully placed propaganda added to an already generally unsettled public, at precisely the right moment, for the status quo to become unnerved. That is usually down to timing of announcements which conveniently coincide with a series of fortuitous events leading up to a decisive date (election).
Voters with growing multi-cultural communities at constituencies such as in The Midlands, still need to be on their guard from xenophobes as well as slick double-talk by BNP’s marketing machine producing campaigns including slick videos (on their website) . Such shrewdly written pieces of propaganda can for some voters teetering on the edge, appear to make sense.
Then there is the BNP’s ability to seize on headlines,such as the recently announced £1.7bn stock piled budget. This was driven home to me today whilst listening to the chit-chat on talk radio shows. Callers were calling in, citing the NHS surplus headlines and then combining the news with facts such as one quarter of all babies born in NHS hospitals are delivered to mothers who are not British nationals. Chat show hosts chipped in with quips such as: “what a cheek, the NHS is keeping money for themselves, cutting back on essential health-care but letting foreigners abuse our system…” Or … “ It took 80 million years for the planet to have 1billion people. Thanks to over population, we now have one billion more people every ten years….” This all spurred callers to complain about “her next door” from Eastern Europe or India or just about anyway north or south of Lands End or John O Groats, “bleeding the social dry by having too many kids which we will have to educate, clothe etc..”
The other piece of news was the (very short-lived) possibility of Nick Griffin having tea (Earl Grey no doubt) with the Queen. That turned out to be a storm in a tea-cup. However, as the UK continues to grow and prosper thanks in a great part to its multi-cultural society, the chances of a division within the country may become more noticeable. (This is not just down to good old racism or anti-Semitism - but the even older fear of anyone or anything that can be perceived as a threat on personal property and prosperity).
Who knows, maybe years or just decades down the road, the tabloids could indeed feature a picture of the far right enjoying a digestive with whoever is residence at the house with the biggest back garden in central London. Once the initial shock of it all fizzles out, in time such a picture opportunity will no doubt be considered as simply an example of British fair play and equality to all.
(Ah the irony of British fair play).
Jonathan Gabay
Author Soul Traders
www.soultraderstruth.com
Thursday 21 May 2009
Sunday 17 May 2009
Saturday 16 May 2009
Love Your MP.....
.........says Jonathan Gabay on his blog
The current political shenanigans are leading many like the Hansard Society to suggest that the electorate will now be turned off politics for good. I disagree, a parallel can be made with reality TV programming. Many complain about the overwhelming volume of reality TV shows, but does that mean they stop watching TV altogether? Instead they seek out different shows and favour channels reflecting their tastes and ideals.
When we emerge from this period in history, one of the changing effects on politics may be that people will tend to vote differently rather than traditionally as perhaps thinking beyond the conditioning of their parents beliefs – so establishing power with people not just political masters. To make that happen, emerging politicians will need to demonstrate that unlike their peers, they can be trusted through deed rather than promise and spin. Although however they are paid, the pension will still be top notch. The message is simple, now is the time to engage not disengage with politics.
See http://www.soultraderstruth.com
The current political shenanigans are leading many like the Hansard Society to suggest that the electorate will now be turned off politics for good. I disagree, a parallel can be made with reality TV programming. Many complain about the overwhelming volume of reality TV shows, but does that mean they stop watching TV altogether? Instead they seek out different shows and favour channels reflecting their tastes and ideals.
When we emerge from this period in history, one of the changing effects on politics may be that people will tend to vote differently rather than traditionally as perhaps thinking beyond the conditioning of their parents beliefs – so establishing power with people not just political masters. To make that happen, emerging politicians will need to demonstrate that unlike their peers, they can be trusted through deed rather than promise and spin. Although however they are paid, the pension will still be top notch. The message is simple, now is the time to engage not disengage with politics.
See http://www.soultraderstruth.com
Thursday 14 May 2009
Motivating In A Recession
Speaker and business guru Geoff Burch features in a virtual seminar next Tuesday, May 19th. If you're a business leader in the West of Scotland why not register?
Tuesday 12 May 2009
Monday 11 May 2009
Sunday 10 May 2009
MP's Expenses
This piece by Jonathan Gabay on the expenses scandal explains how politicians manipulate the press and fool us!
Jonathan is the author of Soul Traders which will be available in the UK very shortly.
Jonathan is the author of Soul Traders which will be available in the UK very shortly.
Saturday 9 May 2009
Friday 8 May 2009
Thursday 7 May 2009
Iain Dale on MP's expenses
Iain Dale has just posted this on Twitter:
ALERT: Telegraph has bought disc of MPs expenses. They are splashing on it tomorrow. Will try to monitor developments over the next hours.
Sounds exciting.
ALERT: Telegraph has bought disc of MPs expenses. They are splashing on it tomorrow. Will try to monitor developments over the next hours.
Sounds exciting.
Wednesday 6 May 2009
Tuesday 5 May 2009
Jonathan Gabay On ITV News
This evening, communications consultant and speaker, Jonathan Gabay featured on the ITV News. He was holding some discussions earlier today in Dulwich, the district in south-east London where schools have been closed due to swine 'flu.
Monday 4 May 2009
Iain Dale writes about UKIP
Iain Dale recently interviewed Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP
My GQ Interview With Nigel Farage
Iain Dale 8:25 PM
In the May issue of GQ Magazine I wrote a lengthy profile of UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Now that the issue is no longer on sale, I am posting it on the blog...
Being leader of a political party which stands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever achieving real power is not a very rewarding occupation. You need the patience of a saint, the hide of a wildebeest and the tenacity of a Duracell bunny. Luckily for his party, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party possesses all three, and if Oscars were awarded for optimism in the face of adversity, Nigel Farage would sweep the board.
In his two and a half years in the post, Farage has given UKIP a profile they had previously only attained during European election campaigns. He has aggressively courted the media and to some effect. He is the only recognizable face of a political party previously dominated by old fogies but now being dragged kicking and screaming into the new media age. Farage’s personal profile has engendered bitter jealousies from those who believe he is using UKIP for his own ends. His enemies accuse him of personal vanity and far worse. But he is unrepentant. He knows that any modern day politician’s success or failure is largely defined through the prism of the media.
So who is this man who his critics decry as a ‘Little Englander’ and his supporters believe could be the saviour of British sovereignty?
Nigel Farage was born 45 years ago in the village of Downe, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where he still lives. Down is famous as the birthplace of another famous man who rebelled against the conventional wisdom and believed in the survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin. But there, the similarities end. Farage is a chain smoking, hard drinking, pin-striped loving, Fedora wearing father of four with a German wife, and who bears an uncanny likeness to the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
Farage went to the local prep school and then attended his father’s alma mater Dulwich College. He was in his element there. “I loved the tradition of it all,” he explains. “I couldn’t have been more involved in the life of the school if I had tried.” He was in the Army Cadet Force, the politics society, the cricket club, the rugby club – everything. He loved to challenge what he was taught and delighted in being argumentative, especially with the kind of teachers who he refers to as the ‘Bob Dylan set’. He had far more time for the more traditional schoolmasters who had had a good war and drifted into teaching. “I adored them and responded well to them,” he reflects. “They thought nothing of doing nets with you three nights a week. It was a vocation for them.” But even at school, he was obsessed by the issue of Europe according to his then classmate Nick Owen. “He chuntered on about Europe and everyone thought he was barking mad. He’s still chuntering on about Europe…” Owen recalls that even at school, the young Nigel Farage was into making money. “He ran a shoe shining business. He paid the juniors to clean shoes and then skimmed a commission off the top.”
Farage determined very early on that he did not want to go to university, a decision which caused anguish among his family. “It was the early 1980s. Exchange controls had been abolished. The City was exciting and it was where I wanted to be. It was partly lifestyle and partly because I wanted to earn serious money.” Farage Senior was a successful stockbroker, but Farage Junior decided it was the London Metal Exchange that had more appeal, and it neatly avoided the risk of being permanently in his father’s shadow. “I loved it, I was good at it and was good with clients. I knew within six months it was the lifestyle I would enjoy,” he recalls. His first employer was the aggressive Wall Street investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, which collapsed in 1990. Farage recalls that the company motto was “no guts, no glory”, an epithet which might equally be applied to his own political career.
But at the age of 21, things started to go wrong for Farage. He was seriously injured after being run over by a car and spent four months in hospital. But worse was to come. Less than six months later he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of testicular cancer. “It was an horrendous experience,” he recounts. “There was an overwhelming feeling of it being so unfair. I hadn’t done any of the things I had wanted to do.” After the operation he was told by doctors that the cancer had spread to his stomach and lungs, with the clear implication that there was no hope of recovery. Two days later he had a Cat Scan and was given the all clear. “Those two days were like torture,” he says, his voice riven with emotion. For the next six months he had to go to London Bridge hospital twice a week for blood tests to see if, as he puts it, he was “allowed to leave the building or not.” He describes it as “psychologically worse” than having chemotherapy. But he emerged from the experience with a determination to seize the day, rather than worry about the future. It explains a lot. He’s known as one of life’s bon viveurs and is quite open about his love for – and over indulgence in - good wine and good food. “No one who’s been through what I went through could ever say that it is out of their mind totally. I’m very much a fatalist. Life’s for the living. You’ve got to follow your heart and I won’t pretend that didn’t shape my decision to leave business and enter politics.”
In his late teens Farage joined the local Tory Party but took no active part apart from delivering a few leaflets at election time. But over the course of the next few years Farage fell out of love with the Conservatives, firstly over the Anglo Irish Agreement but later over Europe. His split with the party came over Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990. “That was the big moment,” he recalls. “I fulminated with rage against the economic idiocy and proceeded to bore everyone to death predicting disaster and gloom.” By chance he then saw a small advert in the London Evening Standard for a meeting held by the Campaign for an Independent Britain. He went along, and the rest is history. Within a year he had become a founding member of the Anti Federalist League which turned into UKIP in 1993. In early 1994 left his job to go self employed and set up his own business Farage Futures. This gave him the time to pursue a political career. He stood in various by-elections, at the 1994 European elections and the 1997 general election, but it was only in 1999 that he succeeded in getting elected to the European Parliament, after the government introduced proportional representation. Three years later, time constraints led to him closing down his business and concentrating on politics full time. Those who knew him well thought it was inevitable he would end up leading UKIP. “It was written in the stars,” says one ally. “Everyone knew Nigel could take the party to the next step; it was a matter of how long it would take the party to realise it.”
And in the autumn of 2006, his chance came when its somewhat charismatically-challenged leader Roger Knapman stood down. After a fairly bitter campaign, Farage emerged triumphant and immediately set out to transform UKIP into a major political force and enhance the fortunes of the Independence & Democracy Group in the European Parliament, which he now chairs.
In his thirty months in office, Farage has attempted to turn UKIP from a ramshackle, rather shambolic operation into an election fighting machine. He has been conscious that the Party has been easy to pigeonhole as predominantly male, old and of the ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ tendency. He’s recruited former EU whistleblower Marta Andreasson to be a candidate and attempted to ensure that some younger and female candidates appear on the ballot papers. Hehas also headhunted a professional campaign manager - ex Tory candidate and Adam Smith Institute policy wonk Kenneth Irvine - for the Euro elections and appointed an aficionado of the political blogosphere, Tim Worstall, as UKIP’s Head of Press. In January they opened a new campaign office in the heart of Westminster and have geared up for a real push with an eight strong campaign team. But the spectre of financial overstretch is constantly present. They face having to pay back a donation of more than £360,000 from Alan Bown, after it was found he wasn’t on the electoral roll. The dispute has been rumbling on for two years and is now awaiting an appeal date. If they do have to pay the money pack, the party faces financial ruin over an oversight not of its own making.
The European Elections on 4 June present Farage with the toughest challenge of his political career yet. In 2004, UKIP achieved a record 16% vote share (beating the LibDems into fourth place) and elected no fewer than 12 MEPs. This time it may be very different. Despite having a much more impressive line-up of candidates than five years ago, UKIP’s performance may well depend on how far they can attract two types of voters – those who wish a plague on all politicians from the three main parties and those Conservatives who feel so strongly about the European issue that they will continue to lend their vote to UKIP in European elections. This is a sizeable group, which continues to view David Cameron’s various Eurosceptic policy initiatives with increasing scepticism. It is this part of the electorate which may determine Nigel Farage’s fate.
Most political pundits think 2004 was a high watermark for UKIP and that they will be lucky to be left with enough MEPs to fill a telephone box in June. If that happens, Farage says he will walk the plank without having to be ordered to do so. “If we win fewer than ten seats, that’s a failure and I will resign,” he says with the refreshing candour which mainstream party politicians find so difficult to emulate. “Quite clearly, if we do badly, then I’ve tried my hardest, and that’s that. It will be time for someone else to do it.” By even talking that way in advance of the elections, a psychoanalyst might draw the conclusion that he’s had enough and may well quit anyway. There’s an air of resignation in his voice when he says, “I have tried to change the party, to modernize it, change the attitude and outlook,” but he knows also that the knives are out for him in his own party come what may. Even if they achieve a higher vote share and more MEPs than they currently have, there are plenty of people within UKIP who would gladly see the back of Farage.
Since he became leader he has been subjected to the most vicious character assassination imaginable. He has had death threats, his staff have been abused and threatened and journalists have received anonymous tipoffs about his drinking habits and alleged eye for the ladies. At times, his life has been made hell. Some of his colleagues are increasingly jealous of his high media profile and accuse him of operating a quasi autocracy and running roughshod over the party. Farage is unrepentant. “Some people have been a big disappointment – people I have given jobs to and when it doesn’t work out they behave badly. You just think, would I behave like that? God, I hope not.”
He readily admits that a good result on June 4th is a prerequisite for him carrying forward his own agenda. “I do need a mandate,” he says. “I will have the impetus to change it further.” But to do that he has a number of enemies to see off, both from within his own party and outside it, not least the British National Party. The BNP has tried, so far with little success, to infiltrate UKIP and take it over from the inside. They have a number of, what Farage calls, “useful idiots” who have adopted the tactics of the old Militant Tendency who tried to take over parts of the Labour Party in the 1980s. However unsuccessful they have been, Farage knows how bad it looks for the letters BNP and UKIP to appear in the same sentence. “The most damaging thing ever written about us was that we were the BNP in blazers,” he concedes, although he believes those days are behind them. When the BNP’s membership list was leaked recently, UKIP analysed it and found only two of their own members on it. The sighs of relief emanating from UKIP HQ were almost audible, but Farage is far from complacent.
“I wouldn’t compare myself to Cameron, but he tried to change the image of his party, to make it more acceptable to a broader range of people, and that’s the journey I’m on.” He cites the recruitment of an increasing number of ethnic minority members as evidence that the party is heading in the right direction. So, no longer the party of “fruitcakes and closet racists”, as David Cameron once memorably described them. “If we are successful in June, we’ll have a new slate of MEPs, they’ll be much younger, with a prominent woman, and we can go out into the media with a new image, without giving the impression that it’s just me doing it,” claims Farage. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his current colleagues, but he’s a realist.
Since Farage became leader of UKIP in the autumn of 2006, he has tried to turn the party away from being a single issue, anti European Union pressure group and convert it into a normal political party, with a policy on virtually everything. He tasked his deputy, David Campbell-Bannerman, with coming up with populist policies on public service reform. A belief in selective education is possibly the most eye-catching of the policies announced so far, but again, it plays into the perception that UKIP really does represent ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ rather than Mr & Mrs Average whose two kids go to the local comp.
UKIP’s success in June may well be determined by to what extent the electorate wants to punish the two main parties. Traditionally the LibDems have been the main recipient of the so-called ‘dustbin’ vote, but in the 1989 Euro elections it was the Greens who surged forward, with 15% of the vote. Indeed, Nigel Farage himself was a rather unlikely Green voter in that year. “I was still a Tory Party member,” he recalls, “and it was my first rebellion against the Conservative Party.” Election campaigns are all about momentum, the so-called ‘Big Mo’. Last time UKIP had the temporary boost of Robert Kilroy-Silk joining them and giving them a huge amount of extra publicity. “It was a risk worth taking at the time,” says Farage. “I still believe that.” It proved to be a mixed blessing in the end, but it’s difficult to see where that kind of boost will emerge from this time. Farage is relying on Eurosceptic Conservatives to lend him their vote again, but he’s also keen to point out that internet campaigning will recruit new supporters from all over the political spectrum.
“If we do badly in June, and that means curtains for me. It won’t just be UKIP that has a problem. It will be the whole anti EU movement that has a problem.” He believes there is a clear and present danger that UKIP might then indeed be taken over by the authoritarian right, rendering less of a political party and more of a narrow political sect. “It could set us back by over a decade,” he warns. It’s hardly a war cry, but it demonstrates what’s at stake both for him personally and the Eurosceptic movement in general on June 4th.
Iain Dale's Diary Political DVD & CD Store
My GQ Interview With Nigel Farage
Iain Dale 8:25 PM
In the May issue of GQ Magazine I wrote a lengthy profile of UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Now that the issue is no longer on sale, I am posting it on the blog...
Being leader of a political party which stands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever achieving real power is not a very rewarding occupation. You need the patience of a saint, the hide of a wildebeest and the tenacity of a Duracell bunny. Luckily for his party, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party possesses all three, and if Oscars were awarded for optimism in the face of adversity, Nigel Farage would sweep the board.
In his two and a half years in the post, Farage has given UKIP a profile they had previously only attained during European election campaigns. He has aggressively courted the media and to some effect. He is the only recognizable face of a political party previously dominated by old fogies but now being dragged kicking and screaming into the new media age. Farage’s personal profile has engendered bitter jealousies from those who believe he is using UKIP for his own ends. His enemies accuse him of personal vanity and far worse. But he is unrepentant. He knows that any modern day politician’s success or failure is largely defined through the prism of the media.
So who is this man who his critics decry as a ‘Little Englander’ and his supporters believe could be the saviour of British sovereignty?
Nigel Farage was born 45 years ago in the village of Downe, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where he still lives. Down is famous as the birthplace of another famous man who rebelled against the conventional wisdom and believed in the survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin. But there, the similarities end. Farage is a chain smoking, hard drinking, pin-striped loving, Fedora wearing father of four with a German wife, and who bears an uncanny likeness to the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
Farage went to the local prep school and then attended his father’s alma mater Dulwich College. He was in his element there. “I loved the tradition of it all,” he explains. “I couldn’t have been more involved in the life of the school if I had tried.” He was in the Army Cadet Force, the politics society, the cricket club, the rugby club – everything. He loved to challenge what he was taught and delighted in being argumentative, especially with the kind of teachers who he refers to as the ‘Bob Dylan set’. He had far more time for the more traditional schoolmasters who had had a good war and drifted into teaching. “I adored them and responded well to them,” he reflects. “They thought nothing of doing nets with you three nights a week. It was a vocation for them.” But even at school, he was obsessed by the issue of Europe according to his then classmate Nick Owen. “He chuntered on about Europe and everyone thought he was barking mad. He’s still chuntering on about Europe…” Owen recalls that even at school, the young Nigel Farage was into making money. “He ran a shoe shining business. He paid the juniors to clean shoes and then skimmed a commission off the top.”
Farage determined very early on that he did not want to go to university, a decision which caused anguish among his family. “It was the early 1980s. Exchange controls had been abolished. The City was exciting and it was where I wanted to be. It was partly lifestyle and partly because I wanted to earn serious money.” Farage Senior was a successful stockbroker, but Farage Junior decided it was the London Metal Exchange that had more appeal, and it neatly avoided the risk of being permanently in his father’s shadow. “I loved it, I was good at it and was good with clients. I knew within six months it was the lifestyle I would enjoy,” he recalls. His first employer was the aggressive Wall Street investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, which collapsed in 1990. Farage recalls that the company motto was “no guts, no glory”, an epithet which might equally be applied to his own political career.
But at the age of 21, things started to go wrong for Farage. He was seriously injured after being run over by a car and spent four months in hospital. But worse was to come. Less than six months later he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of testicular cancer. “It was an horrendous experience,” he recounts. “There was an overwhelming feeling of it being so unfair. I hadn’t done any of the things I had wanted to do.” After the operation he was told by doctors that the cancer had spread to his stomach and lungs, with the clear implication that there was no hope of recovery. Two days later he had a Cat Scan and was given the all clear. “Those two days were like torture,” he says, his voice riven with emotion. For the next six months he had to go to London Bridge hospital twice a week for blood tests to see if, as he puts it, he was “allowed to leave the building or not.” He describes it as “psychologically worse” than having chemotherapy. But he emerged from the experience with a determination to seize the day, rather than worry about the future. It explains a lot. He’s known as one of life’s bon viveurs and is quite open about his love for – and over indulgence in - good wine and good food. “No one who’s been through what I went through could ever say that it is out of their mind totally. I’m very much a fatalist. Life’s for the living. You’ve got to follow your heart and I won’t pretend that didn’t shape my decision to leave business and enter politics.”
In his late teens Farage joined the local Tory Party but took no active part apart from delivering a few leaflets at election time. But over the course of the next few years Farage fell out of love with the Conservatives, firstly over the Anglo Irish Agreement but later over Europe. His split with the party came over Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990. “That was the big moment,” he recalls. “I fulminated with rage against the economic idiocy and proceeded to bore everyone to death predicting disaster and gloom.” By chance he then saw a small advert in the London Evening Standard for a meeting held by the Campaign for an Independent Britain. He went along, and the rest is history. Within a year he had become a founding member of the Anti Federalist League which turned into UKIP in 1993. In early 1994 left his job to go self employed and set up his own business Farage Futures. This gave him the time to pursue a political career. He stood in various by-elections, at the 1994 European elections and the 1997 general election, but it was only in 1999 that he succeeded in getting elected to the European Parliament, after the government introduced proportional representation. Three years later, time constraints led to him closing down his business and concentrating on politics full time. Those who knew him well thought it was inevitable he would end up leading UKIP. “It was written in the stars,” says one ally. “Everyone knew Nigel could take the party to the next step; it was a matter of how long it would take the party to realise it.”
And in the autumn of 2006, his chance came when its somewhat charismatically-challenged leader Roger Knapman stood down. After a fairly bitter campaign, Farage emerged triumphant and immediately set out to transform UKIP into a major political force and enhance the fortunes of the Independence & Democracy Group in the European Parliament, which he now chairs.
In his thirty months in office, Farage has attempted to turn UKIP from a ramshackle, rather shambolic operation into an election fighting machine. He has been conscious that the Party has been easy to pigeonhole as predominantly male, old and of the ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ tendency. He’s recruited former EU whistleblower Marta Andreasson to be a candidate and attempted to ensure that some younger and female candidates appear on the ballot papers. Hehas also headhunted a professional campaign manager - ex Tory candidate and Adam Smith Institute policy wonk Kenneth Irvine - for the Euro elections and appointed an aficionado of the political blogosphere, Tim Worstall, as UKIP’s Head of Press. In January they opened a new campaign office in the heart of Westminster and have geared up for a real push with an eight strong campaign team. But the spectre of financial overstretch is constantly present. They face having to pay back a donation of more than £360,000 from Alan Bown, after it was found he wasn’t on the electoral roll. The dispute has been rumbling on for two years and is now awaiting an appeal date. If they do have to pay the money pack, the party faces financial ruin over an oversight not of its own making.
The European Elections on 4 June present Farage with the toughest challenge of his political career yet. In 2004, UKIP achieved a record 16% vote share (beating the LibDems into fourth place) and elected no fewer than 12 MEPs. This time it may be very different. Despite having a much more impressive line-up of candidates than five years ago, UKIP’s performance may well depend on how far they can attract two types of voters – those who wish a plague on all politicians from the three main parties and those Conservatives who feel so strongly about the European issue that they will continue to lend their vote to UKIP in European elections. This is a sizeable group, which continues to view David Cameron’s various Eurosceptic policy initiatives with increasing scepticism. It is this part of the electorate which may determine Nigel Farage’s fate.
Most political pundits think 2004 was a high watermark for UKIP and that they will be lucky to be left with enough MEPs to fill a telephone box in June. If that happens, Farage says he will walk the plank without having to be ordered to do so. “If we win fewer than ten seats, that’s a failure and I will resign,” he says with the refreshing candour which mainstream party politicians find so difficult to emulate. “Quite clearly, if we do badly, then I’ve tried my hardest, and that’s that. It will be time for someone else to do it.” By even talking that way in advance of the elections, a psychoanalyst might draw the conclusion that he’s had enough and may well quit anyway. There’s an air of resignation in his voice when he says, “I have tried to change the party, to modernize it, change the attitude and outlook,” but he knows also that the knives are out for him in his own party come what may. Even if they achieve a higher vote share and more MEPs than they currently have, there are plenty of people within UKIP who would gladly see the back of Farage.
Since he became leader he has been subjected to the most vicious character assassination imaginable. He has had death threats, his staff have been abused and threatened and journalists have received anonymous tipoffs about his drinking habits and alleged eye for the ladies. At times, his life has been made hell. Some of his colleagues are increasingly jealous of his high media profile and accuse him of operating a quasi autocracy and running roughshod over the party. Farage is unrepentant. “Some people have been a big disappointment – people I have given jobs to and when it doesn’t work out they behave badly. You just think, would I behave like that? God, I hope not.”
He readily admits that a good result on June 4th is a prerequisite for him carrying forward his own agenda. “I do need a mandate,” he says. “I will have the impetus to change it further.” But to do that he has a number of enemies to see off, both from within his own party and outside it, not least the British National Party. The BNP has tried, so far with little success, to infiltrate UKIP and take it over from the inside. They have a number of, what Farage calls, “useful idiots” who have adopted the tactics of the old Militant Tendency who tried to take over parts of the Labour Party in the 1980s. However unsuccessful they have been, Farage knows how bad it looks for the letters BNP and UKIP to appear in the same sentence. “The most damaging thing ever written about us was that we were the BNP in blazers,” he concedes, although he believes those days are behind them. When the BNP’s membership list was leaked recently, UKIP analysed it and found only two of their own members on it. The sighs of relief emanating from UKIP HQ were almost audible, but Farage is far from complacent.
“I wouldn’t compare myself to Cameron, but he tried to change the image of his party, to make it more acceptable to a broader range of people, and that’s the journey I’m on.” He cites the recruitment of an increasing number of ethnic minority members as evidence that the party is heading in the right direction. So, no longer the party of “fruitcakes and closet racists”, as David Cameron once memorably described them. “If we are successful in June, we’ll have a new slate of MEPs, they’ll be much younger, with a prominent woman, and we can go out into the media with a new image, without giving the impression that it’s just me doing it,” claims Farage. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his current colleagues, but he’s a realist.
Since Farage became leader of UKIP in the autumn of 2006, he has tried to turn the party away from being a single issue, anti European Union pressure group and convert it into a normal political party, with a policy on virtually everything. He tasked his deputy, David Campbell-Bannerman, with coming up with populist policies on public service reform. A belief in selective education is possibly the most eye-catching of the policies announced so far, but again, it plays into the perception that UKIP really does represent ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ rather than Mr & Mrs Average whose two kids go to the local comp.
UKIP’s success in June may well be determined by to what extent the electorate wants to punish the two main parties. Traditionally the LibDems have been the main recipient of the so-called ‘dustbin’ vote, but in the 1989 Euro elections it was the Greens who surged forward, with 15% of the vote. Indeed, Nigel Farage himself was a rather unlikely Green voter in that year. “I was still a Tory Party member,” he recalls, “and it was my first rebellion against the Conservative Party.” Election campaigns are all about momentum, the so-called ‘Big Mo’. Last time UKIP had the temporary boost of Robert Kilroy-Silk joining them and giving them a huge amount of extra publicity. “It was a risk worth taking at the time,” says Farage. “I still believe that.” It proved to be a mixed blessing in the end, but it’s difficult to see where that kind of boost will emerge from this time. Farage is relying on Eurosceptic Conservatives to lend him their vote again, but he’s also keen to point out that internet campaigning will recruit new supporters from all over the political spectrum.
“If we do badly in June, and that means curtains for me. It won’t just be UKIP that has a problem. It will be the whole anti EU movement that has a problem.” He believes there is a clear and present danger that UKIP might then indeed be taken over by the authoritarian right, rendering less of a political party and more of a narrow political sect. “It could set us back by over a decade,” he warns. It’s hardly a war cry, but it demonstrates what’s at stake both for him personally and the Eurosceptic movement in general on June 4th.
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