Far-right UK lawmaker Nigel Farage denies saying ‘Hitler was right’ as a schoolboy

Hard-right British lawmaker Nigel Farage, who is leading in the polls to become the UK’s next prime minister, is denying claims that he made racist and antisemitic comments while at school, his spokesman said Wednesday.

Former classmates have alleged that Farage made a Nazi salute, joked about gas chambers and said, “Hitler was right,” among other expressions of support for Nazism.

The Guardian newspaper reported on Tuesday that Farage engaged in offensive behavior while a pupil at the elite Dulwich College in south London in the 1970s.

The Guardian said its report was based on allegations from more than a dozen former pupils, including Jewish film director Peter Ettedgui, who said he had been verbally abused by Farage as a young teenager.

“These allegations are entirely without foundation,” a spokesman for Farage’s party, Reform UK, said in a statement sent to AFP.

He said the paper had produced “no contemporaneous record or corroborating evidence to support these disputed recollections from nearly 50 years ago.”

He also alluded to The Guardian’s left-leaning reputation.

“It is no coincidence that this newspaper seeks to discredit Reform UK — a party that has led in over 150 consecutive opinion polls and whose leader bookmakers now have as the favorite to be the next prime minister,” the spokesperson said in the statement. “We fully expect these cynical attempts to smear Reform and mislead the public to intensify further as we move closer to the next election.”

Ettedgui, 61, a BAFTA and Emmy-award winning director, told The Guardian that Farage would “sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right,’ or ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers,” or gas chambers, in Nazi death camps.

Ettedgui’s parents were refugees from Nazi Germany.

“I’d never experienced antisemitism growing up, so the first time that this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage’s mouth was deeply shocking,” he told The Guardian. “But I wasn’t his only target.”

Ettedgui recalled Farage using other racial slurs against students and telling them to “go home.”

“From my experience, there’s no doubt in my mind that he was a profoundly, precociously racist teenager,” Ettedgui added. “I’d like to know why he’s never owned up or shown the slightest contrition.”

Another contemporary claimed that Farage sang a racist song and performed the Nazi “Sieg heil” salute “regularly,” while another alleged that as a prefect at the school, the future politician put a child in detention because of his skin color.

“It was habitual, you know, it happened all the time. He would often be doing Nazi salutes and saying ‘Sieg heil’ and, you know, strutting around the classroom,” said classmate Tim France, according to The Guardian. “He would chant, ‘BM, BM, we are British Nazi men,’ that really sticks in my mind.”

A teacher recalled in a letter that a colleague said that “Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs.”

A former student recalled to The Guardian that Farage “did teach the younger members of the CCF the infamous ‘Gas ’em all’ song, or at least led the singing of it.” The CCF was a youth organization run by the UK’s Defense Ministry.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, a Reform spokesman said Farage was not going to sue over the claims “at this stage” but that “potentially, yes,” it was an option in the future.

According to The Guardian, more than 10 years ago, Farage acknowledged that when he was a youth, he said “some ridiculous things… not necessarily racist things… it depends on how you define it.”

Reform has led Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s struggling Labour party by double-digit margins in opinion polls for most of this year, although the next general election is not due until 2029.