Nigel Farage’s worst quotes to remind you who you’re really watching on I’m A Celeb

Nigel Farage is reportedly the highest paid I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here contestants ever with a rumoured appearance fee of £1.5million. He garnered fame as the so-called snowflake-melting leader of the UKIP party by shocking Britain with his absurdly nationalist views and drumming up public division with his “plain speaking” speeches. And now we’re meant to clap our hands with glee as he’s forced to eat various animal anuses on national TV.

Gradually, this is becoming par for the course with controversial politicians. Like Matt Hancock before him, Nigel may well be hoping to gobble insects in Australia until he’s won enough of an audience for us to see him as a “good sport”. A bit iffy but ultimately harmless— like that one uncle with right-leaning view you nod politely beside at the Christmas dinner table.

But Nigel Farage’s I’m A Celeb appearance isn’t the punishment it’s pedalled to be. It’s doing only one thing: making him more popular. So, as Nigel attempts a redemption arc by showing the supposed “real him” on camera, here are his worst quotes to remind you who he actually is:

His defence of UKIP candidates using homophobic and  xenophobic language

When Kerry Smith stood down after it emerged he’d called gay UKIP party members “poofters”, joked about shooting people from Chigwell in a “peasant hunt” and referred to someone as a “Chinky bird”, Nigel defended him. “If you and your mates were going out for a Chinese, what do you say you’re going for?” he asked.

His belief that women don’t deserve to be paid as much as men for their work

While taking part in a Q&A on the European Union in 2014, Nigel claimed women are paid less because they are “worth far less” than men and then claimed the gender pay gap wasn’t actually down to discrimination at all: “A woman who has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off – she is worth far less to her employer when she comes back than when she went away because that client base won’t be stuck as rigidly to her portfolio,” he said.

Trying to blame immigrants for a myriad of things— including making him late

When Nigel was late to his own UKIP event in Wales in 2014 he blamed immigrants. “It took me six hours and 15 minutes to get here – it should have taken three-and-a-half to four,” he said. “That has nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a country in which the population is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be.”

His racial slur about Romanian people who’re living in London

When Nigel appeared on LBC in 2014 he said: “I was asked, if a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned? And if you lived in London, I think you would be.” And, when pressured to apologise for the comment, he doubled down, saying: “I do not wish for people to feel in a discriminatory manner towards Romanians but I do say there is a very real problem here, that everybody else has run away from, brushed under the carpet, the whole organised crime element and the impact that has had on London and other parts of the country. That is a serious issue.”

His views on the way women should behave when breastfeeding in public

During another LBC interview in 2014, Nigel Farage claimed that women should “sit in the corner” when breastfeeding their babies in public. “I think that given that some people feel very embarrassed by it, it isn’t too difficult to breastfeed a baby in a way that’s not openly ostentatious,” he said. “Or perhaps sit in the corner, or whatever it might be.”

Featured image credit via ITV/Alan Davidson/Shutterstock

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