Flying Free (17 page)

After that first successful European election, I got myself into more trouble. Paul Henley from the independent film company Mosaic wanted to make a documentary film, funded by the BBC and Arte, about the workings of the EU. Since this exactly reflected our aims in being there, we agreed. For four months, Paul followed us wherever we went in the course of our duties.

The resulting film,
The Enemy Within: Desperately Seeking EUtopia
,
was entertaining and hugely instructive. It demonstrated (at huge expense to the licence-payer) the total futility of the intricate system of pseudo-government which (at huge expense to the tax-payer) kept all those thousands of Brussels
functionaries in business and put so many thousands of British sole traders and small enterprises out of it.

The BBC did not want to show the film.

Oh, it was shown to acclaim in every other EU country and in the United States, but in its country of origin it was shelved without explanation.

Lord Peter Shore raised the subject in the House of Lords. By what right did a public service broadcaster charged with instructing and entertaining the public presume to censor – to ban – a film made at the public's expense which did just that?

The BBC declined to answer. They conceded. Sort of. They showed the film to the two women, one man and one West Highland terrier with cataracts who watched BBC Knowledge.

And, just in case the terrier was of a sensitive disposition, they issued a solemn warning before it was shown. ‘Viewers should be warned that Mr Farage expresses extreme views as part of this programme.'

I did, too. Like ‘Have you ever seen so much money thrown away on so little?' and ‘No matter what these people do or say, the elector cannot remove them from office'.

Please ensure that no young or impressionable people are in the room as you read this page. Here is an example of my extremism: ‘Whatever your vision of the future, you are not going to be able to attain it or even aspire to it unless and until you are free to go your own way. For as long as we are part of this intrusive and ever more powerful Soviet, we can't make decisions for ourselves or determine our own future. What we do with our freedom once we have won it remains to be seen, but we are demanding that we be allowed to take that first step and reclaim responsibility for our own lives.'

Is the suppression of such dissident ranting in the national interest? Or is it pernicious, Soviet-style censorship?

I grew angry. It was not just the production team who had put a lot of effort into the making of the film. We too had done many interviews and had had our first steps in Brussels and Strasbourg dogged by Paul.

I taped the film and, from my office in Redhill quite openly sold the VHS tape at a not-for-profit £5 a throw for the information of our
members only. One punter who turned up claiming to be a party member from Portsmouth then revealed himself to be an officer of Surrey Trading Standards Authority, tipped off by a sorry and chagrined former member.

Since the film had otherwise sunk without trace and its makers had not instituted proceedings against me, I had had no idea that I was breaking any law. I merely thought that it was the same as taping an instalment of a favourite television programme for a friend. Apparently I was transgressing four separate Acts of Parliament.

A long, expensive and wearisome battle with the authorities ensued. In the end, it was accepted that I had acted in ignorance and had made no profit so no further action was taken.

The next pre-election assault from the press came in 2004, this time on the Sunday before the election, when the
Mail on Sunday
ran a
double-page
spread headed, as far as I remember,
The Wild, Drunken, Womanising Existence of Nigel Farage.
For myself and for UKIP, I was unconcerned. In fact, my response was, ‘I only wish it were all true'.

We had never set out nor claimed to be plaster saints, after all, but normal people with normal weaknesses, and I have perhaps more normal weaknesses than most. What I did not have was one half of the strength or stamina required for my alleged excesses. Still, I have on occasion behaved a little wildly and I have enjoyed the odd drink from time to time, so what the hell.

My sole reason for concern was that our principal backer at the time was Yorkshire millionaire businessman Paul Sykes, a determined, ascetic man of high moral principle who had consistently urged me to behave better. Monday's edition of the
Mail
carried still worse allegations.

I need not have worried. On the Tuesday morning, Paul rang to tell me that he and his wife were ‘right disappointed' that there were to be no more instalments.

In January 2006, I blundered into my very own media embarrassment. Just one week after the Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten was exposed as having rented a fastidious Polish former ballet-dancer called Tomasz for ‘a gross act of humiliation which only a few punters ask for … quite revolting really', the
News of the World
printed a story about me.

This time it was a 25-year-old Latvian girl named Liga whom I had met in the local pub one evening when I was far too well lubricated to occasion a similar effect in her, but I had been flattered and foolish enough to accept her invitation home for a drink.

This is because I am a male of the species and so easily flattered, for which I apologise. She claimed that I was a beast in bed and ‘we must have had sex about seven times'. Given the amount that I had drunk on the night in question, the former statement was probably accurate – or would have been had I got to a bed. The second was a physical impossibility.

She was, as far as I remember (which is not much), a sleek and seductive creature, and I will not splutter and expostulate that, after the first bottle, I would necessarily have behaved like Galahad in full armour and been immune. I hope that I would have, but I can give no guarantees.

There are, however, occasional merits to excess. On that night it saved me. I fell asleep on her sofa where, by her no doubt truthful account, I ‘snored like a horse'.

But of course, as any nineteenth-century maiden could have told me, protestations of innocence will avail you nothing if you have spent the night with another. The altar or the scandal sheets await you. Liga wasn't screwed. I was.

I don't think that this fantasy did our election prospects any harm, not least because none of the UKIP faithful believed a word of it. It did get me into fearful trouble with Kirsten. She did not find Lothario Nigel after a hard night's drinking credible, but she was furious at me for being so bloody stupid and inconsiderate as to pass out three miles from home. That made two of us.

There have been media heroes in the UKIP story – journalists and broadcasters who, even if not unquestioning supporters, have been
open-minded
enough from the outset to acknowledge that we represent many of their readers, listeners and viewers and that our cause is just.

Booker and Jamieson knew enough about the EU and its workings and had met enough of its victims to become involved in their own story. They have been crucial elements in our development.

Simon Heffer has always given us a fair crack of the whip and has shared a platform with me at every election in which I have stood. Kelvin
MacKenzie has given me good advice; James Whale and the late Mike Dickin of TalkSport gave our message a priceless platform when those serving themselves or the metropolitan elite declined to do so. James, who is now with LBC, even wanted to stand as the UKIP candidate in the London mayoral election, but Ofcom informed him that he could not be mayor and a broadcaster, and the notion of James sans mike was unthinkable, the thing itself probably dangerous.

Of the national columnists aside from Booker and Heffer, Quentin Letts of the
Mail
, Stephen Glover and early Eurosceptic Andrew Alexander have all been fair and sympathetic to our libertarian message and respected our sincerity. Trevor Kavanagh of the
Sun
and Michael White of
The Guardian
have always treated us as a serious party with a genuine, dedicated and therefore important following.

That seems to me a pretty distinguished roll of honour. In fact, if it had been left to the bright, bolshy, opinionated columnists whose business it is to see
sub specie aeternitatis
and to understand the moods and movements of the nation, we would have had favourable or at least fair coverage from the outset.

It has been the time-serving trendies, more anxious to impress their fellows than to serve truth, who have consistently prejudged us.

We have often been outspoken and careless. Real people often are, particularly when they are angry. We have, however, always tried to answer questions rather than evading them and, if we don't know the answer, to admit it.

But for all my occasional idiocies and those of my fellows, I believe that we have an authenticity and sincerity alien to the professional politician. Maybe one day it will change and we too will be infiltrated by those more interested in glory than in the freedom of the British people.

For now, however, I think that we can assert with certainty that no one who has battled through the years of routine calumny and derision, squabbling and monetary sacrifice, negligible election returns, wilful neglect by the media and empty meeting halls has done so from anything but conviction.

I think too that such authenticity has nowhere been more clearly seen than on the most democratic and largest platform of them all, more
immediate even than
Question Time
and accessible to millions who would never watch a BBC political programme or attend a village hall meeting.

On YouTube, my speeches can be seen for what they are, spontaneous outbursts from the heart – or the spleen – unpolished, unfiltered by sneering comment and captions. I am now daily hailed in person or receive encouraging emails from people of my children's age, here and abroad, who have seen me on the web.

Of course, the other parties have a much larger and certainly a much more professional presence online, but they cannot compete with us. Why? OK. Sincerity? Energy? Roughness round the edges? Anger? Marginalisation? Occasional excess alcohol? The thrill of the unquestionably authentic?

Maybe it sounds absurd to those who merely look at the ages of some of our party faithful, but Clapton and Stephen Stills are sixty-five this year and Jimmy Page sixty-six. Janis Joplin would be sixty-seven.

Labour is over-produced prog-rock with full orchestra, lasers and interminable dreary solos. The Tories are a made-up boy-band doing cover versions for the weenie-boppers and the grannies. The Lib Dems are Enya, an indoors, studio-enhanced celebration of fictional nature.

What you are witnessing and what I feel up there, with all its absurdities, all its strutting, all its occasional discords, is something very closely akin to real, live rock and roll.

Those who in future follow in our footsteps and attempt to storm the fiercely guarded citadel of the established parties can rest assured. Play it straight, roll with the punches, shed liabilities as fast as possible – and the jury of press and public opinion will at last give you a fair hearing.

It took us many frustrating years, but, in the 2009 European elections, we suddenly found ourselves afforded the same amount of airtime and media coverage as our rivals. I was party leader by then, and running that campaign.

At last I had a chance to express to the British people without snide interventions or dismissive sneers from pundits the message which so
desperately needed to be expressed and the passions which had moved us and motivated our lives for so long.

Because the public share so many of those passions and recognise sincerity on the rare occasions that they see it, we came second in that election.

We were beaten only by the Tories. Their leader, David Cameron, made a stab at sincerity about Europe too. He made two pledges.

The first was that his party would form a new Eurosceptic group – the European Conservatives and Reformists. So far, the ECR's record is shameful. Without their support, that most curiously constituted butterfly José Manuel Barroso, who entered the chrysalis of political power a dedicated Maoist and miraculously emerged a ponderously flapping, right-of-centre social democrat, would not have been retained as EU Commission President.

The second was a ‘cast-iron undertaking' that the British people would be graciously permitted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Here is my Health and Safety warning: Do not let your infirm antecedents sit on a Tory-made bench on a hot day.

Tory cast iron melts at a slightly lower temperature than ordinary people's butter.

Mere months after the election was won, the undertaking was withdrawn. It was replaced by a new one: to, er, reclaim for Britain various sovereign powers. He might just as well have undertaken to give every voter a million pounds and a luxury holiday on Venus, since any such alteration in the provisions of a European treaty requires the unanimous approval of other member-states.

Needless to say, David Cameron knows full well that this will not be forthcoming.

But hey, it sounds good, and we're too stupid to know any better.

Aren't we?

The pre-election attack on me in 2009 had nothing to do with drink or doxies. This time, the
Observer
led the pack with an unimaginative claim that I had ‘boasted’ of taking £2 million in expenses from the EU system.

The story did not fly.

It did not fly because, as soon became quite apparent to a perceptive reader, I was not boasting about an MEP’s expenses but condemning them.

I had been asked by former Europe Minister Denis MacShane how much
I had received in expenses over and above my salary since my election a decade earlier.

The paper pretended that it had engineered a brilliant bit of investigative journalism and had caught me out by ingenious subterfuge in the public interest. My statement, it was claimed, had been ‘discreetly taped’. No, it hadn’t. The Foreign Press Association openly tapes all its debates with permission and posts them on its website. I was fully aware that I was on the record.

Attempting to indicate the enormous cost to the taxpayer of maintaining a useless and unwanted employee, I told the gathering, ‘It is a vast sum. I don’t know what the total amount is but – oh lor – it must be pushing £2 million.’

‘Last night,’ the
Observer
continued, ‘as UKIP circulated new party literature saying Westminster MPs had “ripped off taxpayers”, Farage, who employs his wife to help run his office and pays her from his allowances, faced a backlash as opponents accused him of hypocrisy. MacShane suggested that UKIP’s attempt to pose as more honourable on expenses than other parties had been exposed as shameless and hollow.

‘“Far from being the party of the little man in Europe, Nigel Farage’s astounding £2m raid on the taxpayer shows he is up there with any other politician, happy to line his pockets with gold.”’

And that,
mes enfants
, is how a dishonest news story is created.

Since it is a subject which has been painfully central to the last decade of my existence, tells us a lot about the EU and is seldom truthfully discussed, I thought that I should tell the next section of the story as viewed through the prism of filthy lucre.

The common perception is that MEPs are on easy street – underworked, oversexed, overpaid and over there. And so they can be. So most of them are. It all depends how well (for which read poorly) you do your job.

If you do your job for your employers (your constituents) really, really badly, you can live like a movie star. If you do it well, you can damned near go bust.

An MEP’s basic salary is the same as that of an MP – some £65,000 per
annum (of late enhanced a fair bit since we are now paid in euros and the pound is weak). Considering that I had had to employ a new man in my office at a cost of £40,000 to fill in for me in my absence, I was not exactly crowing when first I arrived in Brussels.

But no matter. All I had to do was play the system.

I at once learned about the travel expenses racket. We were awarded £600 for every return journey to Britain, no matter whether we flew club class, by economy airline, by train or in a shared car. We could have
hitchhiked
. As long as we submitted a boarding-pass or ‘proof of travel’, £600 was paid into our accounts without further question.

I bought advance Ryanair tickets from Stansted for a fraction of that sum. Given that, as I have said, I had indefinite free parking at BAA airports and that a free limousine picked me up on arrival in Belgium or at Baden-Baden, I could easily have pocketed an extra £15,000 a year just for travel home for the weekends.

So soon as this institutionalised corruption was explained to us, Jeffrey Titford and I broadcast it. Since there was no mechanism for returning the money, we agreed that we would not ‘pocket’ it but put it to good use in funding the victims of the EU.

One such use became almost immediately apparent when, in July, 2000 some sad little undercover officer for Sunderland City Council entered one of Steve Thoburn’s three shops in the city and made a ‘test purchase’ of bananas, criminally advertised as selling at 25p per pound. They
were
selling at 25p per pound. They were, by all accounts, first-rate bananas. The price was a fair one. The crime lay in the fact that they were sold in pounds.

Napoleon and his bureaucrats could not count without using their fingers. The EU wanted to homogenise the whole of Europe, whether the people of Europe wished to be homogenised or not. The infinitely superior Imperial weights and measures system which had evolved for purpose over centuries was thus a tiny tussock in the level playing-field. The EU brought out a fleet of steam-rollers and dreary little people with theodolites and spirit-levels.

Steve Thoburn’s customers could count without using their fingers. They actually preferred to use pounds and ounces. So he let them.

Soon afterwards, two further sad little trading standards officers (OK. They were ‘only obeying orders’, but they must have been sad for all that) arrived to impound Steve’s wicked scales. Since these were the tools of his trade, Steve not unreasonably objected. At that, the police were called.

The scales were removed. Steve was compelled to buy dual-purpose scales at considerable expense and went right on selling in pounds and ounces because that was what his customers preferred. If they wanted to buy in kilograms, he was quite willing to let them do that too. He was liberal about these things.

Despite understandable furore at this quite extraordinary, pointless exhibition of what can be achieved by a combination of weak brain and enormous power, Sunderland City Council decided to prosecute.

Now we had the perfect use for our unwarranted travel expenses. We – well, the EU via us – also contributed to the defence fund of a publican charged with selling T-bone steaks on the bone and to fishermen’s organisations at a time when thousands were being put out of business. We then told the world what we were doing.

The EU accepted that MEPs routinely pocketed their travel expenses for foie gras and floozies. That they should put the money to good use in their own communities was quite intolerable.

Michael Charmier, director of finance for the European Parliament, summoned me to his office and presented me with a bill for £10,500 for excess expenses – the sum which I had publicly declared that I had thus far donated to causes which I deemed good. I protested that, had I retained the money for my own use, there would have been no problem, that the money was therefore mine and that how I elected to spend it was my business.

Charmier now showed me how the rest of the parliament justified its expenses, at least to itself. ‘There shouldn’t be any excess!’ he objected. ‘After all, there are cups of coffee and newspapers to be paid for on your journey!’And, he might have added, excess baggage fees and hospital bills if MEPs insisted on spending £500 on newspapers and coffee on every Eurostar journey.

Jeffrey was presented with a still larger bill.

These were just the preliminary blows intended to soften us up. Now the parliament went in for the kill. We were called in by a quaestor.

Richard Balfe had been a devout servant of the Labour Party but he became a still more devout servant of the EU. He had been so anxious to stand for the position of quaestor (financial overseer or senior prefect) in the parliament that, when his party forbade it, he defected to the Tories.

He was a very shrewd political operator, one of those men who, even in so unwieldy and massive an organisation as the EU, can make things happen.

His first words to Jeffrey and me were, ‘All right. Do you both want to be martyred?’

‘Martyrdom’ in this context meant that we would have to pay the outstanding bills and be under scrutiny day and night thereafter.

‘Or,’ Balfe continued, ‘the documents could be “misfiled”…’

If we accepted a little creative misfiling, we could continue to accept the expenses and to contribute them to whatever cause we would, provided that we did not mention how we had spent the money.

The stinking Golden Delicious cart must not be upset, because beneath that shiny pale-green top layer, the worms are feasting.

It was a very difficult dilemma for us. They had known that it would be.

If we were compelled to repay the money, we would attract a great deal of publicity and cause the EU a deal of embarrassment for a while, but we would be all but spent forces, monitored wherever we went and whatever we did. We would be compelled to withdraw our support for cases which depended on us and which were affording valuable and enduring intelligence to the general public about the practical consequences of European rule.

We conceded.

So now, officially, we drink our excess travel expenses – or rather, we spend them on coffee and newspapers – like every other law-abiding MEP.

The biggest single expenses pot for MEPs is that for the General Expenditure Allowance, which works out at an average £3,500 per month per member. This is intended for running an office in the constituency, ‘relevant’ entertaining and travelling within the home member-state.

I have been receiving the General Expenditure Allowance for ten years and have never yet had to prove that I have actually spent a penny of it. As
it happens, I do not think that even my bitterest political foe will deny that I have been the hardest-working of all British MEPs, continually travelling around Britain (my battered Volvo records a punishing 30,000 miles a year in Britain alone), entertaining constituents and journalists and garnering constituents’ tales of injustice and woe.

I spend considerably more than my General Expenditure Allowance, but then, I am known to my constituents, which I believe to be my principal duty since I purport to represent them. Can you name your MEPs or put faces to them? No? And yet they contrive to spend over £100 a day in your very area.

I am afraid that I know plenty of British MEPs who live full-time in Brussels. They keep a single room office in their British constituencies, but it does not cost £42,000 a year.

But they have much more important things to do. If they are working in their constituencies, they cannot claim the all-important Attendance Allowance.

Yes. For clocking in at the EU Parliament, whether they do anything there or no, they receive £270 per day.

Stay in Brussels, then, claiming the General Expenditure Allowance and remembering to drop in on the parliament daily, so proving that it is a working, democratic institution, and you are on easy street.

No matter that your constituents never see you. You were appointed by your party anyhow, not returned by popular acclaim. You cannot lose your seat for abusing your constituents or ignoring them altogether and deciding that, although elected as a Lib Dem, you now represent the Charles Manson Memorial Trotskyite Mass-Murderers’ Party. This is not a
representative
parliament. It exists for show.

By living like that, you can easily double your income as an MEP. Oh, and if you buy a stylish little apartment in Brussels on a mortgage, expenses will leave you with a nice capital nest-egg when at last you retire.

Of course, there are other living expenses which must be taken into account. A man or woman must eat. Don’t worry. That too is taken care of. Over half of your voluminous correspondence consists of invitations. Every night of the year, you will be bidden to receptions and dinners. So
long as you are prepared to accept fifth-rate company in exchange for the Krug and foie gras, you need want nothing more for the rest of your days.

I knew that Tom Wise, one of the new intake of UKIP MEPs in 2004, was a wrong ’un when, two weeks after the election, I told him that there was to be a Gadflies dinner. (In that year, Conservative leader Michael Howard had dubbed UKIP ‘cranks and gadflies’. In the great British tradition of adopting an insult as a badge of honour which gave rise to the Old Contemptibles and the Tories’ own Vermin Club, I had founded a Gadflies dining-club, which meets once a month in Strasbourg.)

Wise apologised. He had a prior dinner engagement, so he said, with the Sicilian League of Federalists.

I was standing above him as he sat at his desk. Sooner than look at him as I ingested this outrageous intelligence, I looked at his computer. He had stuck a label at the top of his screen. It read, ‘HAVE YOU SIGNED IN YET?’

Wise had always been fat and greedy. Now Billy Bunter was let loose in a confectionery factory carpeted with postal orders. We had lost him. I knew then that whatever tenuous loyalty he might have had to the party was gone.

I stated as much, but it was not until the following year that we had it confirmed that Wise had built up ‘a surplus of funds’. I instantly raised the matter at the NEC and threatened to resign unless there were an investigation. The results of this investigation were alas suppressed by an excessively loyal leader.

In the end, it was shown that Wise had used £36,000 of his permitted secretarial allowance of £125,000 to pay off credit cards and to buy a car, wines and other luxuries.

Oh, he was far from the only MEP to abuse the system and his predations were small-change compared to some, but a lazy man can live a life of luxury without breaking any of the parliament’s rules. In UKIP, which exists not to exploit the system but to drag Britain out of it, such personal enrichment was mortal sin. Wise was in the end sentenced to two years imprisonment for fraud and money-laundering.