Is Farage more out-of-touch than the Tories?

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

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

Politics must be completely corrupt if Nigel Farage is accurate in his claim that he doesn’t know anybody in politics as poor as himself and his wife.

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?

7 Comments

  1. hstorm December 4, 2014 at 11:52 am - Reply

    Seeing he’s never actually been an MP yet, and his followers are almost all disgruntled millionaire cry-baby defectors from the Tories, it is just possible that everyone he knows in politics is richer than him. Still underlines how hopelessly removed from reality he is though.

  2. david pearce December 4, 2014 at 12:17 pm - Reply
    • Mike Sivier December 4, 2014 at 1:46 pm - Reply

      Satirical, it seems.

  3. Neil Mac December 4, 2014 at 12:20 pm - Reply

    I would say that, far from being cut off from reality, the man is a thoroughly dishonest liar.

  4. foggy December 4, 2014 at 4:39 pm - Reply

    Does he have to go to the foodbank regularly to ensure he has food in his belly ? – I think not !!

    More on his ‘poverty’ over on LL; http://labourlist.org/2014/12/six-figure-salary-farage-whinges-im-so-poor/

  5. Mark December 4, 2014 at 6:46 pm - Reply

    Farage is far more in touch with voters compared to Cameron which is exactly why UKIP came first in the recent EU elections and have won every by-election since. Taking recent Daily Mirror polls into account, I would say Farage is even more in touch with the average person than the posh millionaire with millionaire parents, who was Eton and Oxford Educated and has never really struggled at all in life – Milliband!

    • Mike Sivier December 4, 2014 at 7:22 pm - Reply

      So your thesis is that a posh millionaire with an expensive education is slightly less out-of-touch with the common people than two other posh millionaires with expensive educations?
      It’s entirely possible that you’re correct.
      But it would still be hugely irresponsible for the British people to give him any responsibility over the running of this country.

Leave A Comment