The Guardian’s hitjob on Nigel Farage is a sinister new low

The Blob is panicking. It can feel the flames of populism licking at its cankles. How else to explain the latest – and hands down the maddest – smear campaign against Nigel Farage? Now they’re coming for Farage not for anything he’s said or done in his 30 years in the bruising world of politics but for his alleged bikeshed ‘banter’ at school 50 years ago. Trying to drag down a 61-year-old bloke over things he supposedly said when he was 13? That thing you can smell is the rank desperation of a conceited elite worried its world is about to be turned upside down by oiks warming to Reform.

The Guardian – natch – is behind this lowest of hitjobs. It has spoken to various men who went to posh Dulwich College at the same time as Farage. They claim he sometimes said iffy and outright racist things. Peter Ettedgui, a Jewish Emmy-winning documentary maker, recalls Farage saying things like ‘Hitler was right’ and ‘gas them’. Another pupil says he used the word ‘Jude’ about Jews. Another says he was the ‘school pet racist’. ‘My overriding memory’, says one alumnus, ‘is just nasty little shit’.

The claims are making waves. Keir Starmer, eyes always peeled for an opportunity to bash Reform UK, says ‘spineless’ Farage must ‘explain the comments… as soon as possible’. Brave of a politician with about as much backbone as a jellyfish to accuse others of spinelessness. ITV News pressed Farage on his alleged childhood infractions. ‘No’, he said when asked if he had ever racially abused fellow pupils. Seemingly allowing for the possibility that he did say some dumb shit – as most kids do – he says he never said anything in a ‘hurtful or insulting’ way. A Reform spokesperson says Farage ‘emphatically denies’ the accusations against him.

It’s hard to know where to start with this hatchet job. I guess the oldness of the alleged events is as good a place as any. We’re talking about 1977. Jim Callaghan was in Downing Street. The Sex Pistols were No1 (and wearing t-shirts adorned with swastikas). Farage was a literal child. Halfway through its ‘exposé’, the Guardian says: ‘Farage at the time was 13 or 14. Too young to know better?’ Erm, yes. Have you met a 13-year-old boy? They are not mature. Some are socially awkward, others – to borrow that line from Farage’s old classmate – are ‘nasty little shits’. It’s in their very nature to say stupid things.

The other thing – I don’t even know if you’re allowed to say this – is that the Seventies were like a foreign country. The Eighties, too. In 1976, David Bowie – who was 29 – said Hitler was ‘one of the first rock stars’ and Britain might ‘benefit from a fascist leader’. Yet the Guardian fawns over Bowie (rightly so – he was a great artist). Children were spectacularly – and sometimes horribly – ‘politically incorrect’. They used the phrase ‘nig nog’ on Grange Hill well into the 1980s. We watched it with tea at 4pm every Tuesday and Friday. Was that good? No. Is it better now that kids don’t use phrases like that? Absolutely. But that’s how it was. I could right now write down the names of 10 old schoolmates who said openly racist things in the playground. But I won’t because they were 13 years old, it was in the last millennium, and they’ve since matured into decent blokes. I would never seek to destroy a man’s life on the basis of his boyhood follies – I guess I lack the Guardian’s cruel streak.

That’s the most chilling thing about this smear campaign – the fact that a child has essentially been dragged into the town square for self-righteous adults to ridicule. It feels medieval, this public shaming of a boy from the 1970s. I accept Farage’s ‘emphatic denial’ that he issued those insults (when there is no evidence either way, we should always accord more weight to the denials of the accused than to the claims of his accusers). But even if he did say those things, he should not be judged for them. Because he was a child. And in decent, democratic societies, we do not damn adults on the grounds of their long-past childish antics.

For all the Guardian’s tub-thumping about Farage’s alleged playground jibes, it’s actually the Guardian that has committed a moral transgression. In digging up allegations from when Farage was 13 and 14, it has made childhood fair game for the interrogation of hacks. It has made children into political actors, to be held up as wicked beings in an effort to shame the adults they will later become. It has erased the moral distinction between childhood and adulthood – the distinction that makes civilised life possible – all to get one over on a politician it dislikes. The cynicism of these turbo-smug adults in 2025 horrifies me far more than the alleged behaviour of a boy from 1977.

Here’s what is unforgivable – the Guardian is poring over allegations of juvenile anti-Semitism from 50 years ago while overlooking the rampant anti-Semitism all around us today. We have people in politics right now who have referred to a rabbi as an ‘animal’ for serving in the IDF. We have political candidates who referred to Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023 – the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust – as an act of ‘resistance’. For two years our streets have thronged with that unholy alliance of affluent ‘liberals’ and radical Islamists who chant for the destruction of the Jewish homeland and compare Jews to Nazis. And you want us to be concerned about what a 13-year-old boy might or might not have said back when Elvis Presley was still alive? Get real.

They’re scared. They know legions of working-class voters intend to vote Reform to send a message to complacent, bigoted elites like them. And they’ll do anything to take Farage down – even set fire to the moral principles of public life. Funnily enough, they’re behaving like children.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.