Hooray Henry? Nigel Farage sends himself up – or perhaps he really is like this [Image: Independent].

Don’t sharpen the knives yet – it doesn’t seem likely.

He makes his claim during a new Channel 4 documentary, Steph and Dom Meet Nigel Farage, in which the UKIP leader – who will contest the South Thanet seat in Kent next May – chats over drinks with the ‘posh’ couple from Gogglebox.

It’s an extraordinary remark, considering he once claimed his salary and expenses as an MEP were worth £250,000 a year (£3.75 million so far), while his wife – also on the EU payroll – makes £30,000 per annum.

His current official salary is £79,000, plus office allowances of £42,600 a year. His wife’s salary brings the total up to £109,000 per year, according to The Independent.

According to that paper, “The UKIP leader says he only has one ‘small semi-detached house in the country’, that he does not drive a ‘flash car’, and that he and Kirsten Farage ‘don’t have expensive holidays, we haven’t done for 10 years’.”

He should tell that to people living in fear of eviction from their flats because of the bedroom tax, who have never had a car of any kind and must rely on sketchy public transport services instead, and who have not had a holiday of any kind since before the Coalition came into office.

What response do you think he’d get?

His household earnings of £2,096 per week are more than four times as much as those of the average UK full-time employee (£517pw) and that house of his is said to be worth £540,000 alone.

He doesn’t understand poverty. In the documentary he falls down steps and smashes a glass of champagne. Champagne!

In a Radio Times interview about the show, Farage says he had drunk two-and-a-half pints in the pub with the couple, and then enjoyed a “steady consumption” of five or six glasses of wine and champagne. He goes on to blame the smashed glass on his injuries from the plane crash in which he was involved on the day of the 2010 general election (which itself tells you a great deal about his lifestyle).

It’s a good story because – like David Cameron’s use of his late son in defending the Coalition’s cuts to the NHS – it stops others from questioning him as that would suggest a lack of respect for what he went through.

However, Vox Political doesn’t believe it’s true for a moment – unless Farage is blaming his incessant (in the media) alcohol consumption on the crash.

Isn’t it more likely to have been because his lifestyle owes more to the Hooray Henries of the 1980s than the White Van Man of today?