Reform
leader made reputation in 2010 speech calling former Belgian PM Herman Van
Rompuy a ‘damp rag’
Jennifer
Rankin
Jennifer
Rankin in Brussels
Thu 11 Jul
2024 06.00 BST
It was the
speech that made Nigel Farage’s reputation: inflammatory, insulting and riddled
with distortions. Speaking on the floor of the European parliament, Farage
addressed Herman Van Rompuy, an erudite, softly spoken former Belgian prime
minister, appointed to the new post of European Council president. “I don’t
want to be rude,” Farage began. “But, really, you have the charisma of a damp
rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk and the question I want to ask
is: ‘Who are you?’”
Van Rompuy’s
job was to chair meetings between EU leaders, rather than, as Farage put it, be
“the political leader for 500 million people”. Amid heckles and boos in the
far-from-full Strasbourg chamber, Farage said Van Rompuy’s intention was to be
“the quiet assassin of European democracy”, before going on to insult the
Belgian’s home nation as “a non-country”.
The new MP
for Clacton, who was sworn in on Wednesday, is not likely to get away with such
unparliamentary behaviour in the House of Commons. (Farage was fined for the
attack on Van Rompuy in 2010.) But allies and EU officials agree it was that 1
min 24 sec speech in 2010 that propelled him to public attention – and
notoriety – all across Europe.
“Suddenly
the media sat up and took notice,” said Gawain Towler, Reform UK’s head of
press, who has been working with Farage for 20 years. “That really put Nigel
Farage on the map,” he said, recalling “hundreds of thousands of views” on
Greek, Italian and Dutch YouTube.
For EU
insiders, the insults were not a surprise. “It was the usual stuff,” said Guy
Verhofstadt, the veteran Belgian MEP, who is standing down from the European
parliament and was in the chamber that day. “His style of debating was always
like that,” Verhofstadt said. “What he did was attack everybody that stood for
Europe. You could know from the start of the debate what he was going to say.”
But it took
time for the Ukip MEP to craft his style.
Farage was
first elected to the European parliament in 1999, benefiting from proportional
representation, introduced by Tony Blair for the UK’s European elections that
year. He was not yet the boisterous performer he would become, but his message
was consistent. In one of his first speeches in 1999, his notes shake slightly
in his hand as he urges the government to “leave this club and get into the
real trading world”.
He and his
MEPs were known for stunts: heckling, wearing protest T-shirts and fixing
little union flags to their desks in the chamber. But they struggled to get the
British media attention they craved. Towler – who along with a later Ukip
leader, Paul Nuttall, once dressed up in a chicken suit for a photo opportunity
about EU leaders’ alleged cowardice for not holding referendums on a treaty –
complained that the British press ignored them.
The arrival
of the European parliament’s streaming service in 2008 combined with the rise
of social media was a gamechanger. Short, punchy clips of Farage haranguing
European politicians went viral on social media, getting far more views than
the EU’s official channels at that time.
Richard
Corbett, a long-serving Labour MEP, recalls initial puzzlement over speeches
from Farage and his Ukip team. “They’d get up and start doing a rant about
something that had sometimes nothing to do with what was on the agenda, it was
completely out of context … but of course, the reason was that it was geared to
making a YouTube clip.”
In their
occasional meetings on trains or planes, Corbett recalls someone who was
“chatty” but “tried to avoid getting caught into discussing facts, figures”. EU
civil servants remember a disrespectful attitude: “It was clear that he
despised the civil servants, he despised any rule or custom,” said one former
civil servant. “His demeanour was very dismissive, unpleasant.”
“He never
did any proper work,” the person added. “He was really just there to disrupt
things.”
He had
frequent run-ins with officials over expenses – and was docked half his MEP
salary in 2018 over allegations of misuse of public funds. And he appointed a
woman he met in a Strasbourg bar, long rumoured to be his girlfriend, to a job
as a parliamentary researcher.
While the
chamber was an important stage, Farage made no impact in the committee rooms,
where the legislative work was done. Over a three-year period, he attended only
one of 42 meetings of the parliament’s fisheries committee when it was
negotiating decisive reforms. In 2014-2016, he took part in four in 10 European
parliament votes, the worst voting record of all British MEPs.
For the
anti-EU party, that was the point. Farage and his MEPs “were voted [in] to
fight it, not to take part in it”, Towler said. “And they won. In 2016, they
won.”
As an MP,
Farage will face new demands from his 78,000-strong constituency in Clacton.
“The one thing we know from his time as an MEP is that he likes being in the
limelight,” Simon Usherwood, a professor of politics at the Open University,
said. “He is not a great paperwork guy.”
Towler,
Reform’s spokesperson, said Farage saw his constituency work as “absolutely
vital”, as was “ensuring you had a good team of caseworkers who can pick it up
and do the job”.
Usherwood
will also be watching to see whether Farage and the other Reform MPs join House
of Commons committees. “He could justify not participating in the life of the
European parliament because he rejected its legitimacy and its authority, but
clearly he can’t do that with Westminster,” Usherwood said.
The jury is
out, he added, on whether Farage tries to be “constructive and useful” or uses
his seat “as a platform for protest”.
“I can
imagine that [Farage] wants to be seen as being in parliament and speaking from
the green benches. It is going to be part of that curation of an aura of
respectability, which is presumably the next stage of his plans for getting
ahead in the world.”
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