Do we like Nigel Farage?
Our score: 2 out of 10. His own words and policies on trans people, Pride and net zero add up to real harm, and we could verify very little good to set against it.
Farage is the Reform UK leader and MP for Clacton, and he sells himself as the outsider taking on the establishment. He won Clacton in 2024 with 46.2 per cent. In August this year he won it again with 22,239 votes and a bigger share, in a by-election the main parties boycotted. Count Binface came second.
The gift is the story that put him back in the headlines. The Commons standards commissioner is investigating whether a £5m gift from crypto investor Christopher Harborne in 2024 should have been declared. Farage says there is no case to answer, and that the money was needed for private security. The Sunday Times separately reported that an old friend, George Cottrell, helped cover costs for his operation. Farage called that an establishment hit job and Reform says no rules were broken. He resigned his seat in July, saying he had done nothing wrong, and the commissioner had interviewed him by early October. We found no ruling yet.
Then there's the schoolyard. Last year The Guardian reported former Dulwich College classmates accusing him of racist and antisemitic behaviour as a teenager, and the number of contemporaries making such claims reached 28. His lawyer categorically denied it. He later said he may have said things in banter that look different today, but never with malice. Asked whether classmates remembered it differently, he said “Recollections may vary.” No formal findings exist, so it stays an allegation.
On the harm test, his record on LGBTQ+ people is the clearest problem. He said he didn't support same-sex marriage and called it “wrong”. In June he said he had no objection to a Reform council scrapping its Pride festival, claiming gay and trans voters have “got everything they campaigned for”. The party platform he fronts calls for a school ban on gender-questioning, social transition and pronoun swapping, and its opening statement says “Transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children.” He says Reform leads polls with gay and trans voters, but the report gave no data for that.
The planet doesn't fare better. He has called net zero an act of self harm and campaigned for a referendum on the 2050 target. In 2015 he called wind energy “the biggest collective economic insanity I've seen in my entire life”. DeSmog, a climate-focused outlet, found that about 92 per cent of Reform's roughly £2.5m in donations since 2019 came from oil, gas and heavy-polluting interests or people linked to climate science denial. That figure dates from 2024. Where you land depends on whether you read the net zero push as cost-of-living politics or as denial.
Fact-checkers have caught him out on the small stuff too. Full Fact found his claim that Reform came second in a June Scottish by-election was wrong, because it came third. It also found his claim that a million people can't speak any English wasn't backed by the 2021 Census. To be fair, Full Fact also knocked down fake content aimed at him, including a doctored video and bogus hospital photos, so not everything online is his doing.