At 5 foot 8 inches the architect of Brexit Nigel Farage was shorter than I had expected. We met in an upstairs room at Brixham Conservative Club around 40 minutes before he was to go on-air with his ‘Farage‘ show on the right-wing channel GB News in front of a live audience in the Margaret Thatcher Room downstairs. With us on that evening in early November was Totnes (and Brixham) MP Anthony Mangnall, a guest on the show.

Nigel was a Conservative himself until leaving the party in protest at the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 so with a government of largely Brexiteers in office was it time to rejoin?: “I’m a real Conservative unlike the current Conservative Party so I feel very much at home.” The people in power are careerists and in the end, once we got a referendum they chose the Brexit side and I’m very glad that Boris and Michael Gove did but they didn’t lift a finger before that did they?” The Conservative Party has been around for about 200 years. It is one of the most successful political parties in the world because it knows how to adapt. It has one wing which has been the landed gentry that only look after their own interests while the poor starve and on the other wing like (Sir Robert) Peel with the Corn Laws and the Reform Act. Today it’s more the big multinational companies, big merchant banks and big politics. Every 20 or 30 years a radical in the 18th century sense comes along. Thatcher was the last great radical. Since then we’ve gone back to the cosy consensus. If the party reforms with things like getting rid of the House of Lords, gets a grip on postal voting which in the cities is being abused in a horrendous way, if the party said the first-past-the-post system, is somewhat out-of-date and had an element of proportionality. If the Conservative Party was saying lift supply-side reform- in real English- lift the burden of regulation...” “At the minute I’m not tempted to join them at all.” “Any man that says never to anything is a moron but at the moment I feel with GB News and 3.3m followers across social media, even though I’m not directly elected to politics anymore I like to think I can still shape and influence debate.”

As we were in Brixham I decided to move on to fishing- has Brexit worked out for them?:

“It’s a mixed bag, there is a slight increase in quotas, yes, for the charter boats in Devon and Cornwall which are registered to catch Bluefin tuna as I was doing last Saturday off the Eddystone. There are some benefits coming through but nowhere near enough.” Nigel has often riled against Brussels red tape but I asked weren’t the fishermen, over 90% of whom voted leave, drowning in red tape? “I do understand that there are merchants in Brixham who say it’s difficult to get scallops into market because the French are being difficult. No fundamental change happens in life without some short-term disruption.” “The real annoyance is you’ve got 103 big French vessels fishing up to the six-mile line. On top of that you’ve got super trawlers which are more of a problem towards the Isle of Wight. What we want is a sustainable fishing industry that goes through the generations, provides us with what we want.” “Northern Ireland and fishing were the two parts of the Brexit deal that I railed against the strongest. You’ll find fishermen here some of whom will say its slightly better and some of whom will say its blooming difficult to get fish to market. I was in Brixham last year having breakfast with a group of fishermen at Rockfish and we weren’t drinking coffee!” ‘Look, we did not not negotiate a great deal and as far as fishing is concerned, its unfinished business.”

‘We have to chuck the Trade and Cooperation agreement out in the next few years. Yes the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone ) goes out 200 miles and Norway and Iceland impose that very strictly but I think the key for us is the 12, particularly here in the South West. Fewer than a handful of British boats are fishing inside the French 12 mile zone.” I asked if Nigel felt guilty about the way Brexit had panned out for fishermen: “I’d like a better deal for them. I still feel on balance we’re better off than we were. I get the products issue in the French markets but we’re still on balance better than we were, just not as much as we should be.”

Nigel big issue of the moment is the migrants crossing the Channel and landing on the beaches of his home county of Kent so how would he address the issue: “I first started going out to sea and filming this from March 2020. I could see this was going to explode into a massive issue. I think we are now at a point where the level of public anger is astonishing. I was in Sunderland last week and 17 more illegals were being housed in the North East than in the South East. it’s interesting isn’t it? Let’s put them all where he poor people live. A third of people who voted Brexit said they did it for one reason and one reason only and that was borders, another third were purely sovereignty, another third were a mixture of all different things but there’s no doubt to me we couldn’t have won the referendum without the immigration issue. They were the non-voters who hadn’t voted for thirty years but turned out to vote and they’re feeling very let down by this. I’d do what Tony Abbot did in Australia if I was in charge, turn the boats round and take them back to France and if a few threatened to kill themselves and jump in the sea well, you know what, ultimately you’ll save more lives than you lose.”

Next Nigel took a swing at the Conservative policy of levelling up: “Levelling up was a concept that applies to the north but actually Brixham needs levelling up and Brixham could be levelled up with a better fishing policy than we’ve got at the moment.

During the Donald Trump presidency in the US, it emerged Nigel Farage was a friend and supporter but were they still in touch: “Yeh I spent a week at Mar-a-Lago at the end of April and I saw “The Donald” and the family and he’s looking fit, he’s looking well. I’m very much in touch with his people. The Democrats are a complete catastrophe, Biden’s not fit for purpose, Harris is the worst, most unpopular VP (Vice President) that America has literally ever had in modern times, the Afghanistan withdrawal didn’t just hand the taliban back the country but gave the Chinese the most amazing strategic advantages with lithium, copper and goodness knows what else, the border crisis in America dwarfs the problems that we’ve got in the English Channel and there’s no doubt about it, the mid-terms will be stormed”

I asked if he was planning a return?: “There are some very talented people like (Ron) DeSantis the Governor of Florida who handled lockdown in a very intelligent way, there are some very bright intelligent people like Ted Cruz in the Republican Party, better than the Conservatives here but I don’t see anyone who can reach the blue collar, those sort of Democrat-Republican swing voters, in a sense the Mid-West is our Red Wall.

To finish off I wondered if Nigel had any west country connections: “Only that I had spent an inordinate amount of time in Devon and Cornwall because my great love is sea angling, hence I was down here off the Eddystone last week, my great aunt lived in Axminster so we used to visit her as kids in the 70’s and later on my uncle and aunt retired to Beer. My son was at the University of Exeter of four years so I’m not doing badly am I?”

I then had a chat with Anthony Magnall before heading down to join the audience for the one-hour ‘Farage’ programme. The audience were given a choice of a pint of beer or wine served up in ‘Farage’-branded plastic glasses. The show began with Nigel interviewing Anthony. It included a montage of vox-pop clips from people in Brixham which were very critical of Boris Johnson, Nigel spoke to a couple of fishermen, one of which had joined him at the battle of the Thames against Bob Geldof in the run up to the 2016 referendum. He also spoke to two local farmers who told him that the price of beef and lamb was rising but so too were the costs of production. Barrage Farrage followed with questions from the audience and it all finished with an appearance from a sea shanty band.