igel Farage has a gin and tonic in his hand and is wondering what to do next.

The sun is shining in Brussels on a lovely May afternoon. While other European parliamentarians are debating the EU’s budget, Farage is out for lunch. Some places in this town don’t serve him, he says, but this one, Invictus on Rue de Trèves, is willing to oblige, and he takes a table under an olive tree in the walled courtyard out back.

He is dressed in a dark gray pinstripe suit, a stiff white shirt and a spotty blue tie, and tucks his napkin into his collar as his fruit de mer linguine arrives.

The man U.S. President Donald Trump dubbed “Mr. Brexit” freely admits that, whatever comes next, he’s already peaked.

"There’s UKIP possibilities, there’s setting up a national movement, there’s trying to do a 5Star type job. All those things are possible" — Nigel Farage

“I remember thinking, the week before Christmas [2016], about what had happened that year, and thinking the great secret with this is to savor it. To never even believe for one moment you could ever repeat it. Otherwise the rest of life will be a disappointment … Whatever I did in the future, it could not get any better than that.”

The U.K.’s vote to leave the EU two years ago this week was the fulfilment of a 20-year obsession for Farage. In the same year, America elected a president who shares Farage’s anti-globalist, nativist worldview — the icing on the cake. Trump then hosted Farage in New York, fêted him and posed for a photo — the cherry on top. That photo still holds pride of place on the desk of Farage’s Brussels office, facing inward so he can look at it while he works.

So, what does a dog do when he catches the car he’s been chasing for so long?

Farage talks a lot about a return to “frontline politics” if Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government “[makes] a balls of Brexit.” But he’s vague about what that means and what his comeback might look like. Farage stood down as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party in 2016 and now says he is “very detached” from the party.

“We’d just have to see wouldn’t we. There’s UKIP possibilities, there’s setting up a national movement, there’s trying to do a 5Star type job. All those things are possible,” he muses.

But he doesn’t really want to. With the sun streaming down on him in Brussels, highlighting a little dark spot of linguine sauce on his napkin bib, he says serenely: “People say to me things like, ‘Oh no, you’re not on the frontline the way you were.’ Great! Good, I’m perfectly happy where I am. I’m not craving that level of attention.”

He is clearly still craving some attention though. And he has a new role in mind to help him get it.

“If you’re a real opinion former, and you want to shift things,” he says later that day, “you’ve got to make people think. And sometimes, sometimes you do shock them a little bit — to wake them up.”

“There are examples of people who forged amazingly successful — and lucrative — careers in America doing that,” he continues. “I see that as a thing I could do, going on from here. It would be very, very interesting.”

Au revoir Jean-Claude

t’s the day in May when the EU’s next seven-year financial plan is unveiled, the first without the U.K. as a contributing member. Farage, who arrives in town from London in the morning, hadn’t planned on taking part in the debate in the European Parliament. He didn’t think it would be seemly to get involved in a discussion about the EU’s direction after the U.K.’s departure, which he had worked for so long to try and bring about.

Then he was reminded European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was going to be there.

So he spent the best part of an hour in the chamber, before returning triumphant to his seventh-floor office in the European Parliament building.

“I high-fived Juncker!” he announces as he walks into the sun-dappled room. “I hope the photographers got it, I’m sure they did.” He pauses thoughtfully for a moment. “I’m sure they did.”

After his exertions, a series of phone calls and meetings with staff who drop in and out, it is time for lunch.

Walking through the European Parliament building is like running a gauntlet for Farage. He attracts looks — curious ones, scornful ones — everywhere he goes, and shows every sign of enjoying it.

“That blonde girl in the lift gave me quite a look didn’t she,” he remarks. “I didn’t know whether it was a good look or a bad look. The astonishing thing is if I go downtown. I’m very careful in the evenings. We have had some troubling incidents, some real aggression.”

Crossing the Espace Léopold with Aurélie Laloux — the French secretary-general of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy parliamentary political group that Farage chairs — he plots another moment of mischief.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel is addressing MEPs the next day, and Farage says he is going to “tease them horribly.” (He does so, prompting a brief flurry of headlines the next day by telling Michel “Belgium is not a nation.”)

Why does he do it? “Because that’s how you get attention. And then you’re on the television. And then people want you to write articles. And you’ve got a chance then to make your arguments. Plus, also it’s fun, which should never be forgotten.”

Social media allowed Farage's acts of subversion to reach an audience unimaginable in another era.

At the restaurant, he and Laloux are joined by the EFDD’s head of communications Hermann Kelly, who is wearing a crisp blue suit.

“What do you think of the new suit?” he asks Farage.

“I went to the chamber, I high-fived Juncker!” Farage tells him by way of response.

Kelly, a tall, broad former Irish journalist, “doubles as a bodyguard,” Farage jokes, and sometimes refers to his boss as “Il Duce.” (“Oh, well that’s just a bit of fun isn’t it,” Farage says later when asked about it.)

Lunch proceeds with talk of the “Revolution of ’16”, as Farage refers to it, and of Trump: “He can be very, very funny.” Kelly says that in politics, humor can be “the murder weapon supreme,” and Farage agrees.

When Trump visits the U.K. in July, for the first time as president, Farage expects to meet him, he says later. “I should think it will be very brief. He’s got a lot to do, and also he can’t be too provocative against [May’s] government by seeing me.”

It was a great honour to spend time with @realDonaldTrump. He was relaxed and full of good ideas. I'm confident he will be a good President. pic.twitter.com/kx8cGRHYPQ — Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) November 12, 2016

He makes a point of giving interviews on “Fox and Friends” whenever he can, and says he’s conscious when doing so of speaking directly to the president. He is on Fox a lot, sometimes rising before 4 a.m. to do an interview.

It’s America — and the realm of entertainment — that has given Farage inspiration for life after Brexit.

“What next for me?” he asks himself over lunch. “I’ve spent a lot of time in America. I think that effective broadcasters and journalists who have got a high profile as being opinion people can have probably far more effect on public opinion and events than being an elected politician.

“Would Sean Hannity in America have changed more minds as a senator rather than the radio and TV host that he is today? The answer is obvious.”

As the waitress arrives to take the plates away, Farage scans his emails on his smartphone and reads out loud: “‘Juncker high five caught on camera’ … Goooood.”

Farage 2.0

arage’s most notable post-Brexit venture is a call-in talk-show on LBC, a London-based radio station.

Broadcast nationally for an hour from 7 p.m. Monday to Thursday and two hours on Sunday morning, his on-air diatribes sometimes prompt a news story on the website of the sympathetic Daily Express newspaper — but otherwise the show goes largely unnoticed by inhabitants of the Westminster bubble.

But they are not whom Farage is interested in reaching.

Nor is the live radio broadcast, which LBC says has 523,000 listeners each week, his priority. He is more concerned about the photos, livestream and video clips that will go on his Twitter feed and his Facebook page. Video clips of the show were watched 11 million times on Facebook in the past year, LBC said, creating 52 million “news feed impressions” on the social networking site.

Farage himself has 1.1 million Twitter and 800,000 Facebook followers, more than any politician on the right of British politics. Only Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn outdoes him on social media impact. Farage’s team proudly points out that in some weeks this year he had the most site interactions on Facebook of any British politician.

For many British voters, the sight of Farage attacking the Brussels establishment on democratic accountability and, critically, immigration would have been the first time they ever paid attention to the European Parliament.

The week after budget day in Brussels, Farage is back in London. It is another bright May afternoon, 5 p.m., and a gleaming white BMW with tinted windows pulls up outside the Speaker pub on Great Peter Street, about a 10-minute stroll from the Palace of Westminster. Farage’s driver-cum-bodyguard Martin (his team declines to give his second name for “security reasons”) gets out and opens the door for Farage, who heads in for a pint.

He calls this his “sharpener,” and he has one before nearly every LBC evening show. There is a seasoned Westminster journalist who says that they only ever took one bit of advice from Farage — a little alcohol before public speaking is a good idea.

Alongside Farage is Dan Jukes, his press aide, who looks after the social media accounts. He calls them the “nuclear football.”

Farage doesn’t get quite so many stares here as in Brussels, but a few people ask for selfies, and one man who says he is a civil servant spots him from halfway down the street and walks up to congratulate him on his work and complain that, as a government employee, he cannot speak his mind. “It’s worse than slavery if your mind’s enslaved,” the man says.

“That’s a great philosophy. You should be in politics,” Farage replies.

Over pints of Hophead ale, Farage and Jukes discuss what he’ll cover on tonight’s show. Italy’s 5Star Movement and the League are in negotiations to form a government. He knows both parties well, having previously been in a European Parliament group with the League, and now chairing one which includes the 5Stars. Matteo Salvini, who has since become Italy’s interior minister, is an old friend, Farage says.

“Italy’s interesting isn’t it? Social media in Italy is really big. Really, really big.”

In Beppe Grillo, the comedian who founded the 5Star Movement, he sees a potential model for his new career outside the traditional bounds of elected politics.

“What’s fascinating about Beppe is the extent to which he’s changed Italian politics without ever even standing for office. These traditional routes that people had to go down to change political thinking — it’s out of the window now. It’s gone. It’s changed. Grillo proves that more than anybody. He’s never even stood, never even considered it.”

American right-wing political commentators like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are the main inspirations though. He knows Hannity “reasonably well,” and while he has not sought direct advice, has “watched what people like him have done. He’s a very good example.”

InfoWars founder Alex Jones is also on Farage’s radar and he has attracted criticism in the U.K. for a recent appearance Jones’ radio show, which has promoted conspiracy theories about, among other things, the Sandy Hook gun massacre. Farage is unapologetic. “People can scream and shout all they like. He is a phenomenon,” he says, and points out that Trump used to go on InfoWars too. Jones was one of the first people to help Farage gain an audience in America, he says. “Even though I may not agree with some of his stuff, I stay loyal to my friends.”

‘Pinstripe revolutionary!’

fter the sharpener, Martin the bodyguard/chauffeur drives Farage and Jukes to the LBC studio overlooking Leicester Square.

In the green room, Farage goes through topics and timings with LBC producer Christian Mitchell and does a pre-recorded trail. He is good at it, hits his cues and doesn’t need to do many retakes. He says broadcast journalists used to call him “one-take Farage” and attributes his media profile over the years, partly, to being good at soundbites. He recalls how a BBC correspondent in Brussels once told him other MEPs were complaining about the amount of coverage UKIP was getting. “He said to them: ‘That’s because Farage turns up on time, does it in one take, and there’s no fuss.’”

He does an Instagram story and a photo for Twitter.

“We do, even though it’s a radio show, have to be aware of visuals,” he explains. In the resulting picture, partly aided by Jukes’ iPhone X on ‘portrait mode,’ Farage looks reasonably tanned and healthy for a 54-year-old who famously smokes and drinks liberally.

Is he cleaning up his act for life as a media star? In Brussels recently, a fellow MEP asked him whether he was using a tanning cream. “I won’t tell you what I said to him, but it was two words!” Farage says. He declines to say what those two words were, but adds when pressed on the topic of skincare regimes: “I don’t use anything very special at all.”

American right-wing talk-show hosts Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are the main inspirations for Farage's future life.

The radio show is a slick, compact vehicle for Farage to talk about what he wants to talk about.

Every episode starts with a recording of Donald Trump’s voice, introducing Farage on stage at an election rally in Mississippi back in August 2016: “Mr … Nigel …. Farage!”

Then in comes Farage himself, live on air. “Thank you Donald, and good evening everybody!”

He introduces today’s topic — the House of Lords — by quoting the front page of that day’s pro-Brexit Daily Mail newspaper. “TRAITORS IN ERMINE!’ he reads. “Wow! I’ve said one or two things in my time about the establishment and the pro-EU order, but they are really very, very strong words.” (Ermine is a reference to the fur lining of the traditional gowns of members of the House of Lords.)

The night’s debate is over whether the Lords are exceeding their constitutional role as an unelected revising chamber, and instead seeking to overthrow the will of the people as expressed in the Brexit referendum.

The Daily Mail has referred to the Lords as “traitors in ermine”. @Nigel_Farage asks: Has the paper gone too far? https://t.co/L9agVD4OXl — LBC (@LBC) May 10, 2018

He takes calls from those who agree and those who disagree, and LBC strives for balance. But he is most enthused when building his own personal brand. Steve, calling from Islington in north London, argues against Farage’s wish for sweeping House of Lords reform, accusing him of wanting “revolution.”

“Absolutely,” Farage replies joyfully, conscious he’s got a soundbite. “I am a revolutionary, a pinstripe revolutionary!”

On a good night he gets about a hundred calls — more in one hour than in three hours of other shows, says Assistant Producer Thomas Danielian, who is in the control room tonight.

“Usually the lines are completely full the entire time,” he says. “He’s great at steering them. Not all politicians can handle callers. He can.”

The phone rings again. Someone else wanting to join Farage’s discussion about the House of Lords. Danielian picks it up: “LBC. What would you like to say? ... Ok … And why do you hate them?”

Emerging from the studio after the show, Farage banters with Jukes and Mitchell about how it all went.

“It’s actually an interesting form of the democratic process. Doing that show is not dissimilar to walking on the street and knocking on doors. I try and be very polite,” he says.

“You’re never nasty,” Jukes chips in.

“Well, unless they are completely cretinous. But I think talk radio plays a very important part in the whole democratic process. In America it is just massive. Every single state, state radio, national radio, town and city radio. It’s just huge over there and I think it’ll grow here. Interest in politics is the highest it’s been for decades.”

Video made this political star

hen after 20 years as MEP, Farage finally leaves Brussels in March next year, there is only one thing he will miss, he says: “the cut and thrust and the theater of the chamber.” In another life, he jokes, he could have been on the stage — an “end-of-the-pier show entertainer” or a stand-up comedian.

He can certainly deliver a line.

“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?’” — Google former European Council President Herman van Rompuy and one of the first results is a YouTube clip of Farage declaiming him with these words in the European Parliament in 2010.

Despite his reputation among supporters as a straight-talking, old school Englishman, Farage is a much more modern figure than many give him credit for, acutely conscious of the link between technology, the internet and populist politics.

Social media allowed his acts of subversion to reach an audience unimaginable in the pre-YouTube era. For many British voters, the sight of Farage attacking the Brussels establishment on democratic accountability and, critically, immigration would have been the first time they ever paid attention to the European Parliament.

“YouTube was the great savior for me,” Farage admits, sitting in his Parliament office. He lights a Rothmans cigarette. He’s not allowed to smoke in here but has ignored complaints about it from neighboring MEPs.

“I remember thinking back in 2006, 2007 — I’m coming over here, I’m doing all this stuff, I’m making things happen and no one’s noticing. Then YouTube came along and people started to notice. It changed everything, really.”

It is partly this realization that makes him believe his next calling will be to adopt what he calls “a multimedia approach to campaign and comment,” weaving together radio and television appearances with “a bit of writing and a lot of social media.”

“What I enjoy about this is moving arguments on,” he says. “The challenge of being a bit like a magnet and dragging things in the direction I want them to go. And that’s what I’ve been good at, really.”

'Spiritual leader of the Conservative Party'

re you shifting the Overton window — the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse? “Yes, that’s one way that some of academia put it, but yes, the limits of acceptability some would say,” he pauses.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say it in that way,” he says.

Farage has certainly shifted the Overton window of British politics. Whether for better or for worse generally depends on your political standpoint.

Born in Farnborough, in southeast England, to stockbroker Guy Farage (whom he still sees regularly) and Barbara Stevens, the younger Farage went straight from private school at Dulwich College to a job in the City of London secured via an acquaintance at his golf club.

Farage remains a highly divisive figure in the U.K., but even his critics concede the influence he has had. Up to a point anyway.

After a modestly successful spell on the London Metal Exchange, he embraced politics full time, was a leading figure in the newly-formed UKIP, became an MEP in 1999 and UKIP’s leader in 2006. It was under electoral pressure from UKIP that then-Prime Minister David Cameron, in 2013, promised a referendum on the U.K.’s EU status.

As for his personal life, he is no longer living with his second wife Kristen Mehr, a German woman, with whom he has two daughters. He told the BBC last year that he was “separated and skint.” He now says that while the latter situation has improved, the former remains the same — and he hated press coverage of the fact his daughters’ have German passports: “Ludicrous. What has it got to do with anybody?”

He remains a highly divisive figure in the U.K., but even his critics concede the influence he has had. Up to a point anyway.

“Farage deserves great credit for bringing about the referendum,” says Matthew Elliott, former chief executive of the official Vote Leave campaign. “Plugging away all those years before the issue became in any way popular or high profile” was key to forcing Cameron to go for a vote.

Andrew Adonis, the former Labour Cabinet minister-turned-anti-Brexit campaigner goes even further. In a book released this month, he devotes an entire chapter to “How Mr. Farage became leader of the Conservative Party.”

“Farage undertook a brilliant reverse takeover of the Tory Party,” Adonis says, becoming its “spiritual leader … It is the most remarkable coup in modern British politics.”

On the outcome of the vote itself, Farage’s influence is more questionable. The campaign group he backed, Leave.EU, was not designated the official pro-Brexit campaign. That status went to Elliott’s Vote Leave, fronted by senior Tory politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

Elliot believes Farage’s hard-line approach on immigration — exemplified by the controversial “Breaking Point” poster depicting a queue of refugees and migrants — was too divisive to win a national vote. “Had UKIP and Leave.EU run the referendum campaign they would probably have got about a third of votes. It would have been a two-to-one defeat,” Elliott believes.

Revolution of '16 lives on

he LBC show is a clue to what Farage’s third act might look like. For the remainder of the month, he keeps himself busy in various ways, all geared toward building the brand.

He reinforces his relationship with Fox News by showing them round London ahead of the royal wedding. “You’re so famous here, you were the man responsible for Brexit so they love you,” says presenter Ainsley Earhardt.

He takes a trip to Northern Ireland, mischievously appearing at an event with MPs of the Democratic Unionist Party — who guarantee Theresa May’s majority in parliament.

He also launches a new website, bringing together all those LBC clips, Fox News clips, and European Parliament set-pieces in one place.

Speaking for a final time over the phone at the start of June, he expresses excitement about the new Italian government, formed just days before. He thinks it proves him right — that the “Revolution of ’16” is far from over — and he predicts that Italy will “inevitably” end up leaving the euro.

“You could say that of every single author or journalist who has ever lived. All any of you f**kers do is chuck bottles" — Nigel Farage

“It’s going to be a bumpy road, a very bumpy road, but I still take the view that we will leave the [Lisbon] treaty on March 29th, because I think not to do so would be politically suicidal for the prime minister.”

Which leaves him plenty of time to reflect on where those YouTube videos — his savior 10 or 15 years ago — are taking him.

At Invictus restaurant in Brussels, Farage had resisted the idea that there is any contrivance — “some great media image portrayal” — behind his persona. The image, he had insisted, happened by accident. “Of course, when the ball was rolling, you play up to it. But it wasn’t designed like that.”

Now, he says, he “always thought there was an entertainment element to it, whether it’s elected politics or whether it’s influencer commentary … The way Trump does it is absolutely right.”

“The theatricality of the European Parliament — which of course I used on YouTube in the early days and, of course, the campaigning — was hilarious. I’d always be pictured in a pub, wouldn’t I? In whatever village or town I was in. It’s just so funny to see the other political leaders try to mimic me in the last couple of years, turning up in pubs and looking very awkward.”

Farage bristles when it is suggested to him that in trying to become Britain’s Hannity, leaving behind elected politics and the accountability of the ballot box for a makeup chair and studio lights, he is betraying the democratic values he says he holds dear. Hannity et al might be influential — but how accountable are they?

“You could say that of every single author or journalist who has ever lived. All any of you f**kers do is chuck bottles,” Farage says with a note of anger, before reflecting a moment.

“Look, it’s not the same as elected politics, I would accept that. But it is a reflection of the way the world is changing. The big multi-platform influencer of opinions, we’ve seen them in America. You say they’re not accountable, but they are accountable, aren’t they? Because if they make a mess of it people stop listening.”