Announcing his decision today to quit as an MP and spark an expensive and unnecessary by-election in his lesser-visited Clacton constituency, Nigel Farage broke his silence on an awful experience in a pub car park 11 years ago.
The Reform leader said he faced daily calls online for him to be murdered and “for some reason that doesn’t seem to worry the police”.
“One little example you probably never heard of, it was Sunday afternoon, a few years ago, in the local village pub,” he said.
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“In come the mob, about 50 of them, we decided the safest thing to do was as quickly as possible to get into the car and to drive away, but the mob surrounded the car, banging on the bonnet and the windscreen, kicking the side of the doors.
“It was a genuinely dangerous and terrifying situation to be in. The car was written off. I didn’t even bother with an insurance claim, and did everything I could not to make it public, but these are the kind of things that I’ve had to put up with over many, many years.”
It is entirely possible, though, that you have heard of Farage’s one little example, as his doing “everything I could not to make it public” including speaking about it to numerous journalists at the time, and it being widely reported.
The incident is understood to be the one which took place in Downe in Bromley, south-east London (Farage insists on it being in Kent, which it hasn’t been since 1965) in March 2015. The then UKIP leader was in the Queen’s Head in Downe with his then wife and two children, then aged 10 and 15, at the time. According to reports anti-UKIP protesters chased the family out of the pub and jumped on his car bonnet as he drove away.
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Farage said at the time: “I hope these ‘demonstrators’ are proud of themselves. My children were so scared by their behaviour that they ran away to hide.
“A relative has gone to look for them, and they are not yet at home. These people are scum.” The group said they were holding a “cabaret of diversity” in support of those UKIP was seeking to marginalise.
The incident was so hushed up by Farage that it was only reported by the BBC, ITV, Sky News, the Telegraph, the Guardian and others. How’s that for doing “everything I could not to make it public”!
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