Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence party, has claimed that Barack Obama was unwittingly responsible for pushing Britain out of the European Union.



“I’m a huge fan of Barack Obama,” Farage said on Wednesday during a visit to the Republican national convention in Cleveland. “Without him we wouldn’t have won the referendum. He was very helpful.”

The US president visited London in April and made an impassioned plea to Britons to remain in the EU. The UK would be at the “back of the queue” in any trade deal with the US, he warned, speaking alongside David Cameron. The leave victory in last month’s Brexit referendum caught the White House by surprise.

Farage, speaking at a fringe event after meeting Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, suggested that Obama’s intervention had backfired and that politicians should not meddle in another country’s affairs.

Had a very good meeting with @Nigel_Farage. We must support our critical ally as they move through #Brexit process. pic.twitter.com/cN6RPYnFel — Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) July 20, 2016

“I shall always be grateful, eternally grateful to Obama because he came to our country, he was rude to us, he told us what we should do and he led to a big Brexit bounce of several points,” the leading Brexit advocate said. “So thank you, Obama, for helping us to win this referendum.

“The moral of the story is I shan’t say at the end of this week who I think you should vote for, although I have to say, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary if you paid me. Her sense of entitlement kind of puts me off.”

About 40 people came to hear Farage at the McClatchy media event at a live music venue decorated by vinyl album covers and a 1967 Rolling Stone magazine featuring John Lennon on the cover. Outside, overlooking a river that once infamously caught fire due to pollution, was a mock-up of a giant hamburger, a quirky statue of Abraham Lincoln holding the stars and stripes, and Mount Rushmore recast as “Mount Duckmore” with an additional duck’s head.

Wearing a grey suit and pink and purple striped socks, Farage was asked about past comments in which he described Obama as the most anti-British US president in history. “There’s definitely, I felt, a certain sense of resentment from Obama towards the United Kingdom,” he replied. “It was interesting, when we had the oil spill [in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010] and it was BP of course, he just couldn’t say ‘British Petroleum’ enough and I thought yeah, you’re saying something here.

He continued: “Frankly, I thought that the way Obama behaved during his visit during the Brexit campaign, he was talking down Britain, he was telling us that we should stay part of an organisation where our parliament was overruled, our courts were overruled. He was telling us to do things that he wouldn’t for a moment suggest that the American people should do.”

The state department and the whole of the American political establishment had misread its ally’s relationship with the EU, Farage added, and now the UK could pursue the special relationship independently. “I think Washington has had this wrong for a long time.”

Some commentators have drawn comparisons between Farage’s nativist populism and Republican nominee Donald Trump. The ex-Ukip leader acknowledged that he has never met Trump, who hailed the Brexit vote as a “great victory” during a visit to his golf course in Scotland, but would welcome a chance to do so this week.

Barack Obama answers questions at an event in central London in April. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

“Post-Obama, people are looking for something different, and what Trump gets right, it seems to me, is he’s prepared to talk about some of the issues that perhaps others find a bit awkward, a bit uncomfortable, they’d rather brush them under the carpet, and Trump’s talked about those things and that’s generated a huge level of interest.”

Farage did admit reservations, however. “I’ve been called over the top once or twice, but I think some of Donald Trump’s comments are pretty out there. I think to say you would ban all Muslims from coming into America – apart from being very difficult to enforce given that what if your citizens are working overseas or they’re serving in the US army overseas and they’re Muslim – I can see what he’s trying to do, he’s trying to get some big messages out there, some big wedge issues, he’s trying to reach voters who feel frustrated, who perhaps feel a bit scared. I get what he’s doing but just occasionally the style of it makes even me wince a little bit.”

Farage, who has not been invited to next week’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, declined to predict the election result but was dismissive of the party’s nominee. “My analysis of Hillary Clinton is that there’s almost this sense of entitlement, as if this country now has its own hereditary principle; you might as well introduce the House of Lords into Washington. I think there is that sense of entitlement, that sense that she’s part of a politics that is gone, and people need to move on.”

Delegates on the convention floor have frequently demanded that Clinton be jailed, angrily raising fists and chanting, “Lock her up!” Farage commented: “The American style of politics, the way they express themselves at this convention, is completely different. There are no direct parallels to the way we do things back in the United Kingdom. ‘Lock her up’ is quite strong stuff, isn’t it?”

He expressed a mock sense of disappointment at the demonstrations held outside the convention so far. “I was expecting proper protests. They’re really quite small and not very threatening at all. I was very disappointed, I really was. I’ve had much better protests outside my public meetings than that.”

Once the session was ended, a handful of enthusiastic guests descended on Farage and posed for photos with him. He told one: “We’d never, ever have got Ukip off the ground without the internet.” A man said he was tired of Obama “wagging his finger” at him.

Mark McCaig, a convention delegate from Houston, presented Farage with a gift in the form of a red Texas-shaped lapel badge and offered to buy him a pint.

McCaig, sporting a cowboy hat, explained later: “I admire that he’s willing to fight the British political establishment. He stands up for what he believes in. He wants his country to be strong and I think there’s a lot of comparisons between his platform and the platform that Donald Trump’s running on.”

The 33-year-old lawyer added: “I’m an American and I support a strong America. Mr Farage is a proud Briton and I respect that and he wants his country to be released from the shackles of a European Union that he believes is preventing his country from fulfilling its full potential and full prosperity and I respect that.”

The low-key event, branded with the names of newspapers such as the Idaho Statesman and Wichita Eagle rather than the New York Times or Washington Post, felt like the equivalent of an off-off-Broadway show. But Steve Thomma, politics editor at McClatchy, who interviewed Farage on stage, predicted: “Nigel Farage is going to be treated like a rock star here. He is first of all successful at what a lot of them want to do, which is to cut off some of this immigration, although there’s a difference between the US and UK definitions.

“He told me how he was greeted just walking the hallways up in the big suites in the convention hall last night when he got in and he said he could not get out: people wanted selfies with him, they wanted to talk with him. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear Republicans say they’d like him to come to their districts and appear.”

Later, in an interview with the Guardian, Farage denied that he shared Trump’s habit of exaggeration and distorting facts. “I’ve never been accused of stretching the truth,” he said, distancing himself from the official leave campaign. “Lots of things but not that.”

He added: “All I can tell you is the pro-EU side have lied to us for half a bloody century so the fact there might have been a couple of factual inaccuracies on the official leave side – after all, my parents were lied to, they were told it’s a common market with no political ambition. So I think on the lying game we’re on pretty much terra firma.”

Republicans are eager to learn and apply the lessons of Brexit to the presidential election in November, Farage continued. “Personalities are not comparable. The culture isn’t comparable. The taking on of an establishment that had kind of become very samey is very much the same but the key is that Brexit was won by the little people. Brexit was won by those people who voted who don’t normally vote. Period. Clearly there is massive interest in how did that happen, why did that happen, and from their perspective how do we harness that, how do we get into that?”

Farage also gave insight into his meeting with Corker, who at one point was touted as a possible running mate for Trump. The role of Liam Fox, the new international trade secretary, and the future of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which the US has been negotiating with the EU since 2013, were on the agenda.

“Obviously what Corker wanted to talk about was there’s a whole new world here,” he said. “I think he is very positive about the Fox appointment, he is aware he’s one of the genuinely pro-USA politicians. Clearly TTIP is such a tortuous process and I think what they’re trying to analyse is what’s the new priority. Is the new priority TTIP or is it now the other way round: is the new priority the United Kingdom and see what follows on the back of that?

“In terms of foreign policy, I think there are some here – not many because they haven’t fully seen it – that realise that the increasing power of [EU foreign policy chief Federica] Mogherini, the increasing level to which the UK government has been happy for the development of European foreign policy: suddenly that game changes and it changes quite a bit. America’s not always willing ally, but America’s best ally, post-Brexit is a lot freer to make its own decisions. So it’s very positive.”

