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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has launched an attack on the BBC, demanding an apology from the broadcaster hours after a tense on-air confrontation between one of its journalists and his party’s deputy leader.
BBC presenter Emma Barnett clashed with Richard Tice during Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday morning as he dismissed allegations that Farage had directed antisemitic abuse at a Jewish classmate while a student at Dulwich College.
Barnett also pressed Tice on Farage’s purported “relationship with Hitler” and brought up claims that the future party leader had said “Hitler was right” or “gas them”.
Tice rejected the testimony from multiple former pupils as politically motivated “made-up twaddle”.
The interview prompted a backlash from Farage who insisted during a press conference later in the day that he had never said anything racist “with malice”.
Growing visibly irritated, he went on to denounce the broadcaster as “despicable” and “beyond belief”.
“I cannot put up with the double standards of the BBC about what I’m alleged to have said 49 years ago, and what you were putting out on mainstream content,” Farage said.
“So I want an apology from the BBC for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 80s,” he said, referring to old British TV programmes such as The Black and White Minstrel Show and Till Death Us Do Part that contained language that would be considered racist today.
The row follows a Guardian investigation in which several contemporaries of Farage at Dulwich claimed to have witnessed him racially abuse fellow students or claimed to have been victims of racially motivated insults themselves.
One also claimed Farage burned a copy of the school roll because it contained more pupils named Patel than Smith.
Peter Ettedgui, now an award-winning director, separately said that when Farage was 13 or 14 he would use phrases such as “Hitler was right” and “gas them”.
During the press conference, when asked again about his alleged racist comments, Farage said “let’s move on . . . you are wasting my time,” while talking over the journalist who tried to ask him the question.
He then read out a letter he claimed to have received from a former schoolmate at Dulwich College who said he never heard the Reform UK leader racially abuse anyone.