“He is being fundamentally dishonest in everything that he says there.”
One of Nigel Farage’s former classmates, Peter Ettedgui, said the Reform leader’s claim he did not racially abuse fellow pupils at school is “fundamentally dishonest”.
Ettedgui, a Bafta-winning director, was the first to tell the Guardian on the record that Farage had racially abused fellow pupils at Dulwich College in the 1970s and 80s.
More than a dozen former classmates told The Guardian Farage made antisemitic comments as a teenager, including “Hitler was right” and “gas them”.
He also allegedly called other students from ethnic minority backgrounds the P-word and the W-word.
Farage told ITV News on Monday he never abused classmates “in a hurtful or insulting way” or “with intent.”
The journalist questioned the “caveated” nature of Farage’s response to the allegations.
Responding to Farage’s denials, Ettedgui told the BBC: “This is a man who has power, influence, has had a massive impact on the direction of this country, for which, you know, hats off to him.”
He added: “And he is being fundamentally dishonest in everything that he says there. So I feel upset and angry about that.”
Ettedgui said that one of his “most vivid memories” of school “is Farage repeatedly coming up to me and, knowing that I was Jewish, saying Hitler was right and ‘gas ’em’.
He added: “That was frequently followed by a ‘sssss’, you know, kind of imitating the sound of escaping gas”.
He said that the abuse happened “quite consistently” over the year that they were in the same class.
“And it was pretty vicious, it was pretty nasty, it was absolutely directed in a very personal way at me,” Ettedgui added.
In Monday’s ITV interview, Farage said he had never “engaged in direct, unpleasant personal abuse” and “never directly really tried to go and hurt anybody”.
Ettedgui told the Times that Farage’s denial of the allegations came as “no surprise”.
“This is no surprise, he has been denying any kind of racist behaviour since 2013,” he said.
He continued: “Last week a spokesman from Reform not only denied it but said the Guardian was trying to smear him, but maybe yesterday actually felt like a tiny step forward. At one point, he admitted to ‘probably misspeaking in my younger days when I was a child’, and then saying it was just banter.”
“It wasn’t banter,” Ettedgui added, “Banter was calling someone a y**, this was different, it was persistent.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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