The Purple Revolution Nigel Farage ★★★★★

Nigel Farage wants the reader to know just how much he’s given up to be the leader of Ukip

Of all the party leaders going into the General Election, Nigel Farage is probably the most talented.

He’s a more gifted debater than Nick Clegg, a better manager than David Cameron and he has a clearer sense of purpose than Ed Miliband.

Thanks to his relentless drive, he’s transformed a party of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ into a formidable fighting machine.

At first glance, The Purple Revolution: The Year That Changed Everything reads like a celebration of this success.

The year in question is 2014-2015 and you’re supposed to come away with the idea that Ukip is poised to make a major breakthrough this May.

But the book is surprisingly amateurish, full of repetitions, and Farage ends up revealing more than he probably intends about himself.

It’s as though he dictated it to some scribe in between speaking engagements and it has been published without having gone through any sort of editorial process.

He repeatedly draws our attention to just how hard you have to work in the front rank of politics.

He complains of how exhausted he always feels, rarely having more than four hours of sleep a night.

‘Of all the times that I have done Question Time, which was probably the nearest I had got to doing a live television debate, I don’t recall ever doing it when I felt well, or having any energy,’ he says.

There’s more of this scattered throughout the book. He’s always ‘flat out’, his life is ‘utterly frantic’.

This self-pitying tone suggests Farage feels misunderstood.

He wants the reader to know just how much he’s given up to be the leader of Ukip, a party he describes as ‘riven by arguments and in-fighting’.

He complains that, at times, the hostility reaches an intensity he finds difficult to bear

He talks at length about his three ‘near-death’ experiences – a serious car accident at 21, a bout of testicular cancer and the famous plane crash of 2010.

As a result of these injuries, he claims to have the body of a 70-year-old.

‘I am still in pain and I have some very bad days – not helped, of course, by sitting for hours in the back of a Land Rover, travelling up and down the country.’

Another constant theme is how much money he could have made if he had stayed in the City.

After a successful career as a commodities trader, he set up his own business called Farage Futures which was soon making a tidy profit.

He shut it down in 2002 in order to devote himself to Ukip full-time, and he stresses again and again what a colossal sacrifice this was.

‘I feel sure that, had I kept my business going in the City, I wouldn’t be living in a modest semi-detached house in Kent and driving an ageing Volvo estate,’ he writes.

Yet far from being appreciated for his sacrifice, he is constantly under attack.

Throughout the book, he complains about the ‘nastiness’ of the Conservatives, the ‘bias’ of the mainstream media and the ‘disdain’ of the political class.

All of this mud-slinging has left him a paranoid wreck.

In one passage, he accuses the Conservative Party of tapping his phone at the time Conservative MP Mark Reckless was defecting to Ukip.

He complains that, at times, the hostility reaches an intensity he finds difficult to bear.

The most vivid section in the book deals with the death threats he received from the mentally disturbed pilot who was at the controls for his plane accident.

Is this his reward for devoting his life to public service?

Farage seems almost baffled by the injustice.

Indeed, he is constantly surprised by people who fail to see things from his point of view, using phrases like ‘it is frankly outrageous’, ‘it beggars belief’ and ‘it is quite frankly astonishing’.

IT'S A FACT Farage once lost a seven-figure sum trading on the zinc market... in a single morning’s business, when he was a broker in the City during the Nineties. Advertisement

Farage has said that he will step down as party leader if he doesn’t succeed in getting elected as Member of Parliament for South Thanet, where he’s standing in this year’s General Election.

And reading The Purple Revolution it’s not hard to see why. Farage has set out to write a tub-thumping political tract, but it reads more like a cry for help.

In the penultimate paragraph, in what is supposed to be a rousing call to arms, he breaks off to make yet another plea for sympathy.

‘I have learnt so much – chiefly that the higher up you go, the fewer people you can trust,’ he says.

‘This journey has increasingly become lonely.’

All of this makes The Purple Revolution one of the most revealing political memoirs in years.