Nigel Farage has spent 30 years selling himself as the man of the people. The bloke at the bar. The lone voice against the establishment. The outsider.
He has also spent 30 years being paid by the establishment to be that voice. Some of the bills are public. Most are not.
This is the playbook.
Step 1. Be born to a City stockbroker in Kent.
Step 2. Attend Dulwich College. Day fees currently £30,618 a year.
Step 3. Skip university. Walk into a job at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the American junk-bond firm that would collapse in scandal four years after you left. Become a City commodities trader.
Step 4. Run one of your metal broking firms into insolvency.
Step 5. Get elected to the European Parliament. Spend the next 21 years drawing a salary from the institution you are paid to dismantle.
Step 6. Claim £15,500 a year in expenses for a constituency office your party was given rent-free by two of its own supporters.
Step 7. Put your wife on the EU parliamentary payroll at £27,000 a year. Take her off only when the rules force you to.
Step 8. Get investigated for misusing EU funds. Have half your MEP salary docked to recover £35,500 in misspent public money.
Step 9. Throw a Brexit victory party at the Ritz. Decry the professional political class to a room containing Arron Banks, Lord Ashcroft and the Barclay brothers.
Step 10. Take £450,000 in personal gifts from Arron Banks. House. Car. Lifestyle.
Step 11. Lose your platform when Brexit ends your MEP seat. Take £1.5 million for three weeks on I’m a Celebrity. The highest fee in the show’s history.
Step 12. Take £5 million, undisclosed, from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire. Weeks later, U-turn and announce you are standing for parliament after all.
Step 13. Win Clacton. Take the £93,904 MP salary.
Step 14. Add £97,928 a month from GB News for 32 hours of work. Become the highest-earning MP in the House of Commons at roughly £3,000 an hour.
Step 15. Add £4,000 a month writing for the Daily Telegraph.
Step 16. Promote gold bullion for Direct Bullion. Earn at least £400,000 since becoming an MP.
Step 17. Invest £215,000 in a crypto venture called Stack BTC. Tell LBC that London should become a global trading centre for crypto and stablecoins. Continue to insist that the £5 million from the crypto billionaire was a personal gift with no political strings.
Step 18. Apologise for 17 breaches of the MPs’ code of conduct after failing to declare £380,000 of income on time.
Step 19. Accept £9,000 of Abu Dhabi Grand Prix tickets from the Emirati government. Accept a £50,000 Davos ticket from an Iranian-Kazakh billionaire. Accept £85,000 in flights and accommodation from your Thailand-based donor. Tell voters you are a man of the people.
Step 20. Speak in parliament fewer times than any other party leader. Fly to America at least nine times in your first year as an MP. Refuse to hold in-person constituency surgeries. Holiday in France while parliament is sitting.
Step 21. Become eligible, on your 63rd birthday, for a £73,000-a-year pension from the European Union. The institution you spent 21 years calling a fraud will pay you for the rest of your life.
Step 22. Tell the working class you are one of them. Tell them to vote against their own interests, over and over again.
