There’s a strange irony to Nigel Farage, a man who wears Union Jack socks and made his career fighting the EU, says Bagehot in The Economist. “He is probably Britain’s most European politician.” The Reform UK leader often talks of his “love” for the continent, hailing its “social, economic, political, cultural diversity”. He met his German second wife while gallivanting around Europe as a metals trader – often for French banks – and now has a French partner and a private life as complicated as it is fiercely guarded. “How European.” During his MEP years the “bibulous” Mr Farage found a natural home in Brussels, where there is “still plenty of opportunity for lunch”.

Politically, too, he is more European than people think. His vision of Europe – mainly churches and battlefields – may jar with more cosmopolitan views. But it tallies with a region long-dominated by Christian Democratic parties and where the wartime traumas of the 20th century remain its “moral bedrock”. On Russia, Farage’s views are dovish by British standards but well within the mainstream in, say, Italy. On healthcare, he is one of few UK politicians to acknowledge that the NHS is “lousy” compared with its European equivalents. This “peculiar Europeanness” stems not from an ignorance of Europe but from a deep understanding of it. He has “worked, lived and loved” across a continent that most Britons know only from their summer holidays. And unlike David Cameron types, who blithely assumed EU membership was just “a swap of a bit of sovereignty for extra GDP”, he recognised it as a far more profound shift. “Farage helped make Britain leave the EU. But Europe will never leave him.”

🥊🇩🇪 The Reform leader’s claim of being descended from 17th-century Huguenot refugees is “probably made up”, but he does have European ancestry. His great-great-grandparents on his father’s side, Nicholas and Bena Schrod, moved to London from Frankfurt in the 1860s. In 1870, when Nicholas overheard a man beneath his window telling his friend that “40 Englishmen could beat 80 Germans” in a battle, he “stormed downstairs and assaulted them”.

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