The Problem is Always Nigel Farage

Over the last week, history has repeated itself on Britain’s hard right. I interviewed Godfrey Bloom, the former United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and he spelled it out very directly. Britain’s hard right, of the last 20 years, always manages to collapse into bitter infighting and central to this is one man: Nigel Farage.

The problem is always Nigel Farage. In both 2004 and 2009, UKIP saw large numbers of MEPs elected to the European Parliament and by the end of both parliaments about half of them no longer had the whip; they’d been chucked out of the parliamentary party or resigned from it. Why? They had fallen out with the party leader, with Nigel Farage. When Farage resigned as leader of UKIP the party collapsed into chaos. Why? Well, anybody who received any public attention, anyone who appeared competent and charismatic, ended up being purged from the party because they were regarded as a threat . . . to Nigel Farage.

If politics is a battle for power, then your political party is an army and you need to ensure that if the commanding officer is killed, someone with similar abilities can immediately step in and replace him. However, if you’re someone like Nigel Farage, you have removed all of these people as threats to your position, meaning the replacements are utterly incompetent and lead the troops to their deaths. This is Nigel Farage: An inspirer, a great performer but not a leader of men.

This has all been put into sharp relief with Farage’s treatment of one of his five Westminster MPs, the affable and diligent Rupert Lowe. An articulate and persuasive House of Commons speaker, Lowe shocked the opposition with his meticulous dissection of the grooming scandal. He has been brave enough to espouse the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, where Farage is too cautious to advocate actually enforcing English Law, lest it cause controversy among the Woke. For these actions, Lowe was declared, by Elon Musk, to be someone better suited to leading Reform than Farage, after which he was obviously going to be regarded as a threat. But Lowe then himself questioned how suitable Farage was to be Prime Minister, noting that there was something rather too Messianic about his leadership. And what a coincidence!

The next day, Reform suddenly announced there was an internal party investigation into Rupert Lowe in relation to allegations of bullying and threatening violence, led by a senior barrister; they had reported Lowe to the police, Lowe might even be senile, they had withdrawn the Reform whip from him, and they wouldn’t be returning it even if he was exonerated because they found him uncooperative. What a coincidence!

This has led to a massive online backlash against Farage by Reform supporters. But returning to what Godfrey Bloom told me, what did we expect to happen? Farage is a classic example of a Grandiose Narcissist and, for some reason, nobody appears to have looked into how this personality disorder might have developed in him, but all the signs are there. With Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you deal with intense negative feelings by telling yourself that you are special and wonderful. This “Grandiose Narcissism” manifests in entitlement, extreme confidence and in manipulative behaviour such that you can obtain Narcissistic supply: a world that tells you how magnificent you are.

These Grandiose Narcissists are, thus, attracted to performance and they ooze confidence. They are low in Agreeableness, high in Extraversion and, when they actually have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, high in Neuroticism, in negative feelings. When something potentially confronts them with their true self, and threatens their ideal self, or threatens their ability to obtain Narcissistic supply, they can react with Narcissistic Rage in order to deal with this and they can, sometimes, briefly break down; with the damaged true self revealed. Such people will always want to seem powerful, to bolster the false self via which they have learned to cope with the world.

Godfrey Bloom pointed out to me that any UKIP MEP who seemed to be obtaining prominence, including himself, was regarded, by Farage, as a threat. Farage and Farage alone had to be in the limelight. Let us not forget that Farage handed over the leadership of Reform to Richard Tice and then returned to the leadership, and had himself parachuted in as the parliamentary candidate for Clacton, only when it looked like Reform might win seats and would certainly win Clacton. Only when it seemed that Reform would get him attention and status was he interested in it anew.

To a significant degree, Grandiose Narcissism is simply genetic. Nigel Farage’s father was an alcoholic who walked out on his family when Farage was 5 years old. This is the kind of selfish thing a Narcissist would do, with the alcoholism implying the Neuroticism, Extraversion and lack of impulse control inherent in the disorder. However, even if Farage has the genetics of the Narcissist, this childhood trauma is likely to make it much worse. At a very young age, Farage experienced being abandoned by his father, who is supposed to love him. And even before that, as his father was an alcoholic, the boy was presumably exposed to frightening and possibly violent arguments. The world is telling this boy, at an extremely sensitive age, that it is unstable, scary and unloving.

Worse still, as my colleague, the Narcissism coach Richard Grannon, pointed out on a recent live stream, Farage was the eldest child. This may have led to him feeling parentified; feeling that he has to be the man of the house; the replacement for his father, helping his presumably devastated mother. This is extremely difficult for a child, because other people should be looking after them. It further renders the world terrifying and unpredictable, leading to overwhelming negative feelings.

But the childhood trauma doesn’t end there. As Genetic Similarity Theory has shown us, like attracts like. A Narcissistic male will often fall for a female that has some of these traits. Narcissists don’t respect people’s boundaries; they will test how far they can go. They have a sense of entitlement, they lack emotional empathy and they like to control and dominate others (lest they threaten their Narcissistic supply). For this reason, they will often say things that seem slightly off. When Farage was in “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!” he was filmed having a shower, naked. His mother publicly remarked, having seen this, what a good body her son had for his age. This is a creepy comment for a mother to make, almost like emotional incest. It implies poor boundaries, which implies Narcissistic traits. We can imagine a woman with such boundaries treating her young son like a friend, talking to him about her emotional problems when that dynamic should be reversed . . . parentifying him.

We might suspect that on the one hand she idealises her son, as an extension of her, and tells him how fantastic he is, but on the other, whenever he fails to worship her, he may have induced splitting, where she suddenly moves from loving him to hating him. This further renders the world unstable, makes love something that has to be earned. It creates this bizarre paradox where the boy concomitantly feels special but also feels the nagging doubt that he is worthless from the same person. It is precisely such an upbringing that creates a Grandiose Narcissist.

Godfrey Bloom also pointed out that Farage changed after his infamous plane crash during the 2010 General Election campaign. Post-2010 Farage was a different man; much less affable, much more paranoid. If the crash caused brain damage, then this would potentially have elevated Narcissistic traits. If it caused Post-Traumatic Stress, as may have Farage’s loss of a testicle to cancer when he was a young man, it may have done the same.

Either way, for many people Farage’s Narcissistic supply-inducing persona – clubbable fellow in country clothes with a pint and a fag – has, due to his appalling treatment of Rupert Lowe, finally been seen through. He surrounds himself with sycophants and is threatened by men of talent because he is the ultimate Grandiose Narcissist and this, unlike with Trump who seems to have cooled towards him, is insufficiently balanced with other traits to allow him to lead a party into Downing Street. He’s all about the attention and the praise. He’s not true leadership material, Rupert Lowe may well be, so Rupert Lowe needed to be publicly destroyed. The problem is that Farage, in Rupert Lowe, may have finally met more than his match.

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