London Evening Standard/London
Ukip leader Nigel Farage yesterday confessed that he would not make a good prime minister.
In an unusually candid revelation for a party leader 66 days before voters go to the polls, he said: “I don’t think that’s my role in life, I don’t think I’d be very good at it either.”
His admission came in a Good Morning Britain interview where he said politics helped to cause the breakdown in his first marriage. “It didn’t end very well, but then that’s life isn’t it, we have our ups and downs in life,” he said.
“Politics had begun to impinge and that did not help. Of that there is no question at all.”
He added: “I think my whole family would rather I had never gone into politics. I can’t even pretend to have a normal family relationship at this moment in time because I don’t.”
Of his second wife Kirsten, he said: “What I saw in her was somebody who was completely honest, with no particular side, who said pretty frankly what she thought and how she saw things and I quite liked that.”
Farage described Ukip as “a DIY political party”, adding: “I mean most of us have never been involved in politics before.”
He denied that Ukip was anti-immigrant but said that immigration had to be controlled. “If you control immigration sensibly and do it properly it can be a benefit to the country and it can enrich the culture too — no arguments about that,” he said.
Asked to say how immigration benefited the UK, he said: “Just look at the food. I’m just about old enough to remember when it was awful, when going out was really quite difficult.”
David Cameron was yesterday under pressure to drop his failed pledge to cut net immigration to the “tens of thousands”.
Former Tory Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke said achieving such a reduction would “severely” hurt the UK economy. Baroness Warsi said it was an “unrealistic target”.
Farage: candid revelation
