Nigel Farage: the American Rand Paul is my soulmate from the Tea Party
In the ninth and last exclusive extract from his new book, The Purple Revolution, the Ukip leader reveals his kinship with a leading member of the Republican Right
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The visit would also afford me the opportunity to meet Rand Paul, the Republican senator for Kentucky, and, at the time of writing this book, a frontrunner for the 2016 presidential election and one of the Tea Party’s most convincing candidates. In September 2014, in an office five minutes’ walk from Union Station in Washington DC, we began to talk about immigration, non-intervention in Syria, and Brussels. Over the course of that half-hour, I realised that in Rand Paul I had found my political doppelgänger. Raheem later said the point that you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between the two of us on the issues we discussed.
I liked Paul enormously: he is a realist, he is down to earth and very modest. He certainly comes from a political family – I knew his father Ron – but he is not a career politician. He trained as an ophthalmologist and set up his own clinic, so he knows something of the world. It is unsurprising that Ukip and the Tea Party have plenty in common. The Tea Party has its own share of oddballs and mavericks who sometimes espouse pretty extreme stuff, but they also have truly impressive politicians, like Rand, who believe that the state is too big, too costly, too powerful, and robs the individual of inherited rights and freedoms.
They believe that there is no reason why America has to be run like Europe. They have come to their conclusions via similar routes to me. The Tea Party did the numbers and took the view that there is simply no reason why the American state should cost more than 30 per cent of GDP. I left the meeting thinking that Rand was a man I could do business with in the future – there are plenty within the Tea Party with whom I could not. The truth is their party has been hijacked by the religious right. If you look at people such as Sarah Palin, they are just downright scary.
