Even Nigel Farage should welcome fierce scrutiny of his school days

Editorial: An opinion poll for The Independent suggests that the electorate is unmoved by stories from the Reform leader’s school days – but no potential leader of this country should be able to shrug off allegations of this seriousness without a proper defence

Claims that Nigel Farage was a racist bully in his schooldays appear to have left most voters unmoved, according to an opinion poll for The Independent. The survey by JL Partners found that, while a few respondents said the allegations had changed their view of the Reform leader from positive to negative, just as many had changed their mind in the opposite direction.

The net effect is that Mr Farage’s standing with the electorate is broadly unchanged. More people have a negative opinion of him than a positive one, but he is less unpopular than Sir Keir Starmer and is rated about equally with Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the official opposition.

According to James Johnson of JL Partners, Mr Farage benefits from opinions of him being well established. As with allegations of personal misconduct against Donald Trump, Mr Farage’s supporters “shrug off” the charges as being politically motivated.

This is unfortunate because the allegations against Mr Farage are serious. More than 20 former pupils who were at Dulwich College at the same time as him have claimed that he expressed racist, antisemitic and fascist views.

Chloe Deakin, a former teacher at the school who objected to the 17-year-old Farage becoming a prefect in 1981, has spoken out this week to stand by her actions. She rejected his claim that his offensive expressions were just “banter” and that he never “directly” abused fellow pupils. “Of course Farage directly abused pupils,” she said. “He was being referred to, quite specifically, as a bully.”

Mr Farage’s supporters seek to dismiss his behaviour as, in effect, youthful folly that he has long since put behind him. This may be true, but it needs to be demonstrated rather than simply asserted. Mr Farage was, after all, an adult, aged 18, in his final months at the school.

Michael Crick, author of several biographies of politicians, including one of Mr Farage, in which the allegations about his behaviour at Dulwich College were first reported, recently wrote in The Independent: “I don’t believe that Farage has been an antisemite during his adult life, and he has been a strong supporter of Israel. Nor do I believe he is racist these days, though he sometimes seems to pander to those who are.”

It is true that Mr Farage has kept his distance from Tommy Robinson, the holder of extreme views that Mr Farage rightly rejects, even at the cost of sundering Reform’s relationship with Elon Musk. Yet Mr Farage has frequently trodden close to, or even over, the line. His comments about not hearing English spoken on a London suburban train, about not wanting to live next door to Romanians, and about denying HIV treatment to foreign nationals, for example, were all made as an active adult politician.

His comments about HIV were too much even for Douglas Carswell, one of only two MPs for Mr Farage’s previous party, Ukip. Mr Carswell called them “ill-advised” and left Ukip two years later – one of many people to fall out with Mr Farage in his long career.

And this is another reason for scrutinising Mr Farage’s character closely. As the subtitle of Mr Crick’s biography, One Party After Another, suggests, Mr Farage has so far not been able to demonstrate the kind of sustained team effort that might be capable of governing a nation.

He and his supporters should welcome the attention paid to Mr Farage’s personal history. It is because he is a credible candidate to be prime minister – or at least to be playing a role in a post-Labour government – that the persistent questions about his beliefs and his temperament are justified.

Instead of using his press conferences to launch diatribes against his alleged enemies among journalists, he should use them to set out how and why he has changed from the obnoxious young man he was at school.