Nigel Farage, Who Spurred ‘Brexit,’ Resigns as Head of U.K. Independence Party

By STEPHEN CASTLE and STEVEN ERLANGERJULY 4, 2016


The New York Times

LONDON — He spent nearly 20 years pushing for Britain to leave the European Union, and having succeeded in his aim, he is now taking his leave.

Nigel Farage, the politician who probably did more than any other to force the referendum on British membership in the European Union, resigned on Monday as leader of the right-wing populist U.K. Independence Party, saying “I’ve done my bit.”

Mr. Farage, 52, has quit the post before — twice. But on Monday he sounded as if he meant it this time, telling reporters that “my political ambition has been achieved” and that “I want my life back.”



But since the “Brexit” vote he has also been encouraged to quit by Arron Banks, the self-made insurance millionaire who has been a main funder of the party, known as UKIP, and of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, and who sees the possibility of a more broadly based political party that can appeal to disaffected Labour voters.

Mr. Farage — brash, outspoken, loquacious and divisive, a commodities broker turned politician who loves widely striped suits and large glasses of beer — was probably not the man to lead the new party beyond its current limits. In a recent interview with the Financial Times over lunch, he consumed three pints of beer, half a bottle of wine and a glass of port.

But his push for a referendum, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as the leader of UKIP, arguing that Britain could manage immigration and regain full sovereignty only from outside the European Union, struck a deep chord with many Britons. It fed into the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and made many Conservative legislators fear that UKIP would deny them an election victory in 2015.

In the end, UKIP got 13 percent of the vote but only one seat in Britain’s electoral system, and Mr. Cameron won a surprising majority. But he did so having promised this referendum, which he lost.

Even within UKIP, Mr. Farage was not universally loved. Internal critics complained of an inability to delegate, and his rivalry with the more cerebral Douglas Carswell, UKIP’s only member of Britain’s Parliament, developed into guerrilla warfare. On Monday, Mr. Carswell greeted Mr. Farage’s resignation announcement by posting on Twitter a smiling emoji wearing sunglasses.

Mr. Farage specialized in a blunt political discourse that appealed both to right-wing conservatives and to those who felt left behind in an increasingly polarized country.

Opponents frequently accused him of racism and xenophobia, most recently just before the referendum when he unveiled a poster depicting refugees at the Croatian border under the slogan “Breaking Point.” Mr. Farage denied the charge and responded that he was the real “victim” of abuse.

The vote to quit the bloc was an enormous and unexpected victory for Mr. Farage, a politician who delights in his own lack of political correctness, discipline and bland sound bites. He infuriated others in the European Parliament last week, telling them they were “in denial” and gloating over the victory, which he saw as a blow by “little people” against the elite.

As they mocked him, he responded: “Isn’t it funny? When I came here 17 years ago and I said that I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me — well I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you? The reason you’re so upset, you’re so angry, has been perfectly clear, from all the angry exchanges this morning.

“You as a political project are in denial. You’re in denial that your currency is failing. Just look at the Mediterranean! As a policy to impose poverty on Greece and the Mediterranean you’ve done very well,” he said, then went on in that vein, both angry and smug.

But his claim to be an anti-establishment figure was never convincing. Educated at Dulwich College, a famous and expensive private day school for boys in south London, he skipped college to become a commodities trader.

In a 2010 memoir, “Fighting Bull” (updated in paperback as “Flying Free”), he described his years of making money during the day and drinking hard at night, and his various adventures with women, marriage and divorce. He survived testicular cancer in his 20s and, later, a serious accident when a light aircraft he was in crashed.

Mr. Farage became involved in the campaign to extract Britain from the European Union in the early 1990s, but the UKIP he joined soon found itself competing with another, better-financed group, the Referendum Party.

In Britain’s 1997 general election, UKIP won just 0.3 percent of the vote. But the prospects of Mr. Farage and his party were immeasurably helped when the European Union forced Britain to adopt more proportional voting in elections for the European Parliament.

In 1999 Mr. Farage won one of three UKIP seats in the European Parliament, where he has stayed ever since, and where he has used the generous expense allowances for legislators to promote his party and himself.

Despite his innate English nationalism, Mr. Farage always seemed at home in Brussels, where he would frequent the bars of Place du Luxembourg, or in Strasbourg, France, the home of the European Parliament where UKIP held regular, alcohol-fueled dinners in what was known as the “gadfly club.”

Mr. Farage employed his German-born second wife, Kirsten Mehr, as his assistant, and has acknowledged expense and allowance claims of some 2 million pounds, in the neighborhood of $3 million, since his election to the Parliament.

None of which prevented him from pummeling the institutions or its representatives, most notably the former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, whose appointment he greeted with the sort of polemic seldom heard in the rarefied debates of the European Parliament.

In what was to become a YouTube hit, Mr. Farage told Mr. Van Rompuy to his face in 2010 that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.”

By then Mr. Farage, who was elected UKIP leader in 2006, had already resigned once — after the European Parliament elections in 2009 in which UKIP won 13 seats with 16.5 percent of the vote.

The plan was to run for the British Parliament in 2010, but Mr. Farage lost, and on the day of the election nearly lost his life in the aircraft accident.

He tried again in the 2015 British election but failed again, even as UKIP nationally won almost 4 million votes. In the immediate disappointment of that failure he quit the party leadership, only to reverse his decision, claiming, to some ridicule, that this was by popular demand.

During the recent referendum campaign he was kept out of the official Leave campaign amid fears that his focus on immigration might deter middle-of-the-road voters. But migration became a dominant issue for all the senior figures who argued for British withdrawal from the European Union, a vindication of sorts for Mr. Farage.

“Love him or loathe him — and many people do — it is simply a fact that we would not have had the referendum vote, nor have won it, without him,” said Gawain Towler, a longtime ally and spokesman for UKIP.

No one else had a similar reach among voters in poorer, postindustrial areas that had traditionally voted for the opposition Labour Party, Mr. Towler added.

Under Mr. Farage, UKIP transformed itself from a right-wing rump into an insurgent populist force, switching its focus from support among groups such as ex-military personnel in the affluent south to the left-behind towns of the east coast and the north of England.

UKIP’s support, he has said, is now to be found in areas with “ordinary people who get up at six in the morning, commute to work, pay their mortgages and do their best to bring their kids up.”

Last month millions of those people listened more to Mr. Farage than to the mainstream political leaders, precipitating a referendum result that, just a few years ago, seemed inconceivable.

And today, with Mr. Cameron announcing his resignation, the Conservatives competing to see who is the most loyal to Brexit and the Labour Party in chaos — with little to say about immigration — UKIP or a party built on its foundations has an open door for more support.

“During the referendum campaign, I said I want my country back,” Mr. Farage said on Monday. “What I’m saying today is I want my life back, and it begins right now.”

Not quite. Mr. Farage said he intends to keep his Parliament seat in Strasbourg until Britain finally leaves the European Union, just to ensure that there is no backsliding — and undoubtedly to keep annoying the other legislators by his very presence.

Follow Stephen Castle on Twitter @_StephenCastle, and Steven Erlanger @StevenErlanger

Sewell Chan contributed reporting.