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| Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, pictured in London in October. |
Indeed, twenty former classmates have surfaced with some jolting allegations regarding the teenage years of Nigel Farage: Nazi salutes, antisemitic slurs, targeting a nine-year-old Black child. As he stands on the cusp of becoming Britain's next PM, his past has caught up with him finally.
The ritual was grotesque in its symbolism. A teenage boy at one of Britain's most elite private schools would count the surnames in the student roll—tallying Smiths against Patels. When the Indian names outnumbered the English ones, he would stage a "public ceremony" and burn the book in protest.
That boy, according to former classmate Andrew Field, was Nigel Farage—the right-wing populist who may now become Britain's next prime minister.
Now 20 of Farage's contemporaries at the prestigious Dulwich College have come forward with allegations of deeply offensive, racist and antisemitic behaviour throughout his teenage years in the 1970s and 1980s. The accusations paint a disturbing portrait of a young man who allegedly gave Nazi salutes, told a Jewish classmate "Hitler was right", and systematically targeted minority students with racial abuse.
For a politician who has invested years attempting to "detoxify" his party's reputation and position himself as a legitimate candidate for Downing Street, the scandal could threaten everything. And this time, the usually Teflon-coated Farage might not be able to shake it off.
"Hitler Was Right": The Testimony of Former Classmates
The film director Peter Ettedgui had been in the same class as Farage, aged 13 and 14, and they would have sat in alphabetical order, so the future politician was never very far away. What Ettedgui remembers is chilling.
"The minute he knew I was Jewish - that was it," Ettedgui told CNN. "He would say, 'Hitler was right,' in a sneering, contemptuous way. In other words, 'You shouldn't be here.'"
And worse: "He'd say, 'gas them,'" Ettedgui recalls, sometimes extending a long hiss to mimic the sound of a gas chamber. This wasn't casual teenage edginess, but targeted, personal, venomous abuse.
"Whenever I hear the guy speak today, my blood turns cold," said Ettedgui.
Andrew Field, a doctor with Britain's National Health Service who was two years younger than Farage, corroborates a pattern of systematic racism. He said he frequently witnessed Farage giving Nazi salutes and goose-stepping. "Those were really common sights," Field told CNN.
A nine-year-old boy, the only Black child in his year, was "recurrently picked on" by the much older Farage, Field claimed. "He would go to him and say, 'Africa is that way. Why don't you f**k off there?'"
The Abuse of Power: Random Detention for an Indian Child
Perhaps most disturbingly, there is an allegation of what Farage was like once he had been invested with power as a prefect—a senior pupil trusted to police his peers and act as a good example.
Field recounts how Farage took it upon himself to show the newly appointed Field "how to make use of his new powers."
"He took me down to lower school, where the younger kids were playing, and he put an Indian kid in detention completely at random," Field said. "For no reason whatsoever did he do that. I was absolutely appalled by it."
Field stressed that Farage's racism was at its "most florid" when he was aged 17 and 18 and had been made a prefect—not during his early teens as Farage has suggested. "It's when he had a little bit of power, and he was picking on much younger children," Field said.
A Pattern Several Decades Old
These are not new allegations; they are the surfacing of accusations that have followed Farage for a decade-long period.
According to reports, journalist Michael Crick uncovered a letter in 2013 from an English teacher at Dulwich College opposing the decision in 1981 to make the 17-year-old Farage a prefect. The reason? His "publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views."
He said at the time: "some ridiculous things… not necessarily racist things–it depends how you define it." Typical of Farage, it was an evasive response by a politician who has made a career out of dog-whistle politics and plausible deniability.
But the latest wave of allegations, first reported at this scale by the Guardian newspaper last month, involves some 20 former students going on the record with specific, detailed accounts of Farage's behavior. The sheer volume and consistency of the testimonies makes them harder to dismiss.
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Nigel Farage attended the elite Dulwich College in south London in the 1970s and 1980s. |
Farage's Evasive Denials
The response of Farage to the new allegations has been characteristically evasive for a politician known for his forceful, confrontational style.
In one broadcast interview last month, he proffered a cocktail of heavily caveated denials: "Have I ever tried to take it out on any individual on the basis of where they're from? No." When asked what the comments meant, he told ITV he had never abused anyone "with intent," nor "directly really tried to go and hurt anybody."
He claimed the allegations referred to a time "49 years ago," when he had "just entered" his teens - a chronology which directly contradicts that described by Field, who says the worst of the behaviour happened when Farage was 17 and 18.
In a subsequent statement to CNN, Farage was more unequivocal: "I can categorically say that the stories being told about me from 50 years ago are not true."
Reform UK's deputy leader Richard Tice went further and described the allegations as "made-up twaddle", accusing Ettedgui of lying, again with no evidence.
But Field says Farage is simply lying. "The abuse was directed and deeply personal. And it was venomous, which is why I always remembered it," Ettedgui said - directly contradicting Farage's claim that he never targeted anyone "directly."
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| Peter Ettedgui, pictured at the 68th BFI London Film Festival in 2024. |
The Stakes: Can a "15% Party" Become a "30% Party"?
The political implications are enormous. If Farage were to stand in an election tomorrow, most polls suggest he would have a good chance of becoming Britain's next prime minister—a remarkable trajectory for a politician who spent years on the fringes as leader of UKIP before successfully campaigning for Brexit.
Now, as the head of the anti-immigrant Reform UK party, the 61-year-old former commodities trader has set his sights on Downing Street. The next general election isn't due until 2029, but Reform's momentum has been building.
Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank researching integration, immigration, and race, says Farage has routinely won around 15% of the vote—some 4 million people—in general and European elections. His hardcore supporters might not be put off by allegations of teenage racism.
But winning a general election requires becoming a "30% party" that can attract moderate voters—and that's where these allegations become politically lethal.
"There's more danger for them than they'd realised," said Katwala, of Reform. "If it is not unthinkable that Farage can win, if a third of the public think trying him as prime minister is a dice worth rolling, I think the majority of people need to be indifferent to letting people roll the dice in that way."
Reform isn't there yet. Although Farage has sought to "detoxify" his party's reputation, the latest YouGov polling from September reveals the challenge: a plurality of white British voters sees Reform as a racist party with racist policies, by about 46% to 36%. Meanwhile, just 13% of ethnic minority voters have a favorable opinion of Farage, while eight in 10 see him negatively.
The "Anyone But Reform" Coalition
The allegations raise the prospect of a concerted "Anyone But Reform" tactical voting campaign to keep Farage from power—similar to how voters in France recently mobilized to block Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour party won a landslide last year with just over a third of the vote, made possible by what Katwala calls the "indifference" of most voters to a Labour victory. But a Farage-led government would likely mobilize fierce opposition from the two-thirds of voters who don't support him.
It is the difference between indifference and active opposition which could be crucial in Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, where tactical voting may lead to sudden changes within marginal constituencies.
Governing a Multi-Ethnic Britain?
The most fundamental question these allegations raise is whether Reform UK is ready to govern a diverse, multiethnic nation of about 70 million people—and whether Farage himself has any moral right to lead such a country.
At Dulwich College, a school which today can cost around $85,000 annually, teenage Farage allegedly burned student rolls when the Indian surnames outnumbered the English ones, gave Nazi salutes, and told minority children to leave the country. Fast forward decades, he now leads a party campaigning on anti-immigration policies and presents himself as a defender of traditional British identity.
For his old classmates, the link between the kid who was counting how many Patels versus Smiths and the politician who harnessed anti-immigrant outrage into a career is impossible to overlook.
"He was a pompous, isolated loner who enjoyed strutting about in school uniform," Field remembers. That image—of a boy drunk on small amounts of authority, using it to target vulnerable younger children—sits uncomfortably alongside Farage's current bid for the ultimate power in British politics.
Can Teflon Nigel Survive This?
Farage has survived countless scandals that would have ended other political careers. He's been photographed drinking in pubs during lockdown, made inflammatory comments about immigration, and faced accusations of stoking xenophobia during the Brexit campaign. Each time, he's emerged relatively unscathed, protected by loyal supporters who see him as an authentic voice against political correctness.
But this scandal feels different. These aren't policy disagreements or a difference of opinion; they're specific, detailed allegations from multiple witnesses about systematic racist and antisemitic abuse of children, behavior which Farage is alleged to have engaged in when he had institutional power over younger students.
It is a narrative that's harder to dismiss or deflect because of the consistency of the accounts, the status of the witnesses, and the disturbing nature of the allegations. Secondly, unlike those controversies which energized his base, these accusations threaten to repel exactly the moderate voters Reform needs to win power.
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| Farage, center, celebrates after being elected the member of parliament for Clacton in eastern England, on July 5, 2024. |
The Boy Who Burned the Roll
The image that stays is of the teenage Farage ceremoniously burning the student roll because it had too many Indian names. It was a small act with enormous symbolic weight—a rejection not just of diversity, but of the very idea that Britain belongs to anyone other than people who look and sound like him.
That same impulse, his critics argue, has animated Farage's entire political career-from UKIP to the Brexit campaign to Reform UK. The language has become more sophisticated, the dog whistles more subtle, but the fundamental message-that Britain is for the British, and immigrants are the problem-remains unchanged.
For 20 of his former classmates, the sight of Farage's political rise has been disturbing enough that they have broken decades of silence to share what they witnessed. Whether their testimony will be enough to derail his march to Downing Street remains to be seen.
But as Britain readies for the next general election, voters will have to decide whether they are comfortable with a prime minister whose former schoolmates say used racial slurs, gave Nazi salutes, and told a nine-year-old Black child to "f**k off" to Africa.
Years later, the boy who burned the roll may finally face some consequences for the fire he started.
Follow ZOSIO for Nigel Farage's political future and the growing scandal over his school days.