Voters need to know if a party leader said racist things at school. Interviewers have a duty to keep pressing for fuller facts
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or one contemporary, it is the hectoring tone of today that evokes what it was like to be at school with Nigel Farage. “He would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Gas them’,” Peter Ettedgui recalls when asked about life at fee-paying Dulwich College in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Later, he adds: “I’d hear him calling other students ‘Paki’ or ‘Wog’ and urging them to ‘go home’.”
For others, including some in the college’s combined cadet force (CCF), what lingers is the image of the young Mr Farage in uniform and his renderings of a racist anthem titled “Gas ’em all”. Tim France, a CCF member from those years, remembered Mr Farage “regularly” giving the Nazi salute and strutting around the classroom. “It was habitual, you know, it happened all the time,” he recalls.
Jean-Pierre Lihou was a school friend of the future politician. He too confirms that the teenage Mr Farage would say things like “Hitler was right” and “gas ’em”. Mr Ettedgui would be addressed as “Jude”, two syllables as in German. “He used to stomp around the playground and chant ‘Oswald Mosley’,” adds Mr Lihou. Another contemporary, Andy Field, says that he saw Mr Farage set fire to the school roll after it was said that there were more Patels than Smiths among the pupils.
