The deputy prime minister, David Lammy, has found himself in hot water after claiming in an interview with the BBC that Nigel Farage “once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger”.
Sources at Farage’s Reform UK party responded by calling the comment “disgusting and libellous”. Lammy has clarified his remarks. “He [Farage] has denied it and so I accept that he has denied it and I would like to clarify that position because in the end the prime minister is keen for us to focus on the policies not the individuals,” Lammy said.
For all that Labour claim they are focusing on policies not personalities, the party conference season spat suggests Farage’s character – and his past – are likely to be front and centre of political debate for the next few years. Here is the background to the row.
What was David Lammy talking about?
Speaking on BBC’s Politics Live after Keir Starmer’s Labour party conference speech, Lammy was asked whether he thought Farage was a racist. The deputy prime minister said that Starmer had been attacking Farage’s policy on ending indefinite leave to remain, which would make obtaining British citizenship the only route to permanent residence in the UK. People who now have such settled status would lose it under the Reform policy, and would have to follow the same new rules as new immigrants coming to Britain.
He said: “It’s not British. It doesn’t respect our values. I’m not going to play the man. I’m playing the ball, as our leader did. I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgments about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger.”
Lammy was referring to allegations first aired by Channel 4 News over a decade ago and repeated in a book published in 2022 by the journalist Michael Crick, One Party After Another. Crick had unearthed a letter from Chloe Deakin, formerly an English teacher at Dulwich College, the public school attended by Farage in the 1970s. Deakin had been appalled by a decision to make young Farage a prefect.
She said in her letter to the master of Dulwich College, David Emms, that she had no personal knowledge of Farage but went on to recall the testimony of other members of staff, including those who had described the young man as a “fascist”.
She wrote: “Yet another colleague described how, at a [combined cadet force] camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs; and when it was suggested by a master that boys who expressed such views ‘don’t really mean them’, the college chaplain himself commented that, on the contrary, in his experience views of that kind expressed by boys of that age are deep-seated, and are meant.”
What else did the English teacher claim?
In her letter, Deakin said that during the lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, a colleague had remarked that Farage was a “fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect”.
Another colleague had “described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views; and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set that he had to be removed from the lesson”, she wrote. “I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are our nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.”
Did Crick’s book make any other allegations of racism about young Farage?
Stuart Dunbar, a classmate of Farage in his first year at Dulwich, recalled that the future politician “had this thing about the National Front [the far-right movement], and would run into classrooms and chalk NF in the board, but obviously that was his initials as well. But also, he got on really well with Paul Cousins, the black kid, so he didn’t have a problem with that at all … I do remember asking him once why he said those things, why he didn’t like black people? And what about Paul?” Dunbar did not recall the response. A former English master, Bob Jope, recalled staff being concerned that “Nigel had voiced views that were not simply right wing but views that were racist”. He recalled throwing Farage out of a class for shouting, “shut up you Jew”.
An unnamed Jewish pupil claimed that he remembered Farage sidling up to him to say, “Hitler was right”, or “gas ’em”, in a reference to the Holocaust, although he also said Farage was “quite capable of being reflective, and intelligence and quite charming”. In 2019, an anonymous article was published by the Independent newspaper from a Dulwich old boy that claimed Farage would frequently cry out, “send ’em home” and sing “gas ’em all, gas ’em all, gas them all”, to the chorus of George Formby’s wartime rendition of the song Bless ’Em All.
Another former student said Farage used to talk about voluntary repatriation and would refer to our “black and brown friends”. “He was a deeply unembarrassed racist,” another contemporary, David Edmonds said. “He used words like ‘wogs and ‘pakis’. He didn’t like Jews very much and came out with the usual antisemitic tropes. We could never be friends, but although I am Jewish – and this may seem off, and I would feel very differently today – I didn’t dislike him. He relished rubbing people up the wrong way.”
Did Crick conclude that Farage was racist as a young man?
Crick writes that the picture was confused. Old boys were said to divide equally between those who recalled Farage voicing extreme views and those who said they never heard anything untoward. “I would never have said he said anything racist or insulting to people,” said Jonathan Mayne. “He was larger than life and also quite self-deprecating in his humour. I don’t think he was seen to be malicious. He was unconventional. He said things that were not everyone’s cup of tea.” In 2013, Emms, the master of Dulwich College, defended his decision to make Farage a prefect. “I thought of him as a naughty boy who had got up the noses of the teaching staff for reasons that are his chirpiness and cheekiness. I think it was naughtiness rather than racism. I saw considerable potential in this chap and I was proved right.” Emms’s deputy, Terry Walsh, said Farage adopted a “sort of facade … You know: ‘If you think I am that sort of chap, then I am that sort of chap’. But I don’t think he ever, ever believed that. You know he was too caring and considerate of other people.”
How has Farage responded to claims of racism and antisemitism?
In a statement published in Crick’s book, Farage said: “Let’s get one thing straight, I joined the Conservative party in 1978 and thought all of the far-right parties/movements to be ludicrous/barmy/dangerous. There were some hard left class-of-1968 masters [who] joined the college and several of us thoroughly enjoyed winding them up. Terms of abuse thrown around between 15-year-olds were limitless; there were no boundaries. I think red-haired boys fared especially badly.”
When confronted about the claims about singing Hitler Youth songs by Channel 4 in 2013, Farage said the accusation was “completely silly” and he did not know the words of such songs. As for racist remarks, he added: “Yes, of course, I said some ridiculous things … not necessarily racist things … it depends on how you define it.
“Was I a difficult, bolshie teenager who pushed the boundaries of debate further than perhaps I ought to have done? Yes … Have I ever been a member of any extremist organisation, left or right? No.”
