Who is Nigel Farage? Net worth, who is his girlfriend, when was helicopter crash, where does he live, how old is he?
For nearly three decades, Nigel Farage has been the face of Euroscepticism in the UK - and he is the leader of Reform UK.
He campaigned for Brexit as leader of UKIP and then went on to lead the Brexit Party and now Reform UK. He has moved between politics and media roles and between political parties during his career.
The son of a stockbroker, he was born in Kent and attended private school Dulwich College, in South London. Fellow pupils would later remember a student keen on provoking students and teachers with controversial statements. At 18, he decided not to go to university, becoming a trader on the London Metal Exchange in 1982.
Mr Farage quit the Conservative party after the UK signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which called for an "ever-closer union" among European nations. He was a founding member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
He was elected to the European Parliament, as MEP for South-East England, in 1999 and stayed there until 2020. After becoming leader of UKIP for the first time in 2006, he became a familiar face on TV and achieved a breakthrough at the 2009 European elections, where UKIP got more votes than Labour and the Lib Dems.
He played a leading role in the 2016 Brexit referendum. After the vote in favour of the UK leaving the EU, he resigned from UKIP.
In the period after the UK voted to leave the EU, but before it left, he launched the Brexit Party in April 2019. After Brexit, his party changed its name to Reform UK. Mr Farage left front-line politics in 2021 and embarked on a television career as a presenter on newly established GB News.
He took part in reality TV series I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2023 and was in the news when his bank account at Coutts was closed. Mr Farage had spent most of the lead up to the 2024 UK general election campaign insisting he would not stand for the House of Commons.
But on 3 June, he said he will be Reform UK's candidate in Clacton and take over as the party's leader once again. A precise figure on his net worth is not publicly available, however it is said that he has a net worth of around £3.2 million.
His girlfriend is Laure Ferrari, who was working as a waitress when she first met Nigel Farage 17 years ago. She was flown out to Australia to meet Mr Farage as he finished his stint on I'm A Celebrity.
She is 45-years-old and Farage is 61. His home is in the quiet and quaint village of Downe, which is around 17 miles from Westminster. Downe, nestled in the London borough of Bromley, is renowned as the residence of Charles Darwin, the legendary 19th-century naturalist and "godfather" of evolutionary biology.
Situated just a stone's throw from Orpington, the village is enveloped by Kent's countryside, golfing greens and stately private residences. Mr Farage was born in Farnborough, Kent, to Guy and Barbara Farage.
He has also had his fair share of real-life drama, including a brush with death when his light aircraft crashed as he campaigned for votes during the 2010 general election. On the day of the 2010 election, a small plane Farage was flying in crashed after its UKIP promotion banner got entangled in the plane's tail fin.
Recalling his injuries, he said: ”I don’t recall being unconscious, but I do recall the explosion, the plane flipping over, being stuck in there, everything broken… every rib front and back, split sternum, punctured lung… it was bad.”
Farage said he discharged himself from hospital because he “got bored”, adding: ”When bad things happen to you in life you’ve got to make a decision. Have I been unlucky, have I been lucky?”. Farage suffered fractured vertebrae and ribs, as well as a fractured sternum, and needed surgery on his spine, while the pilot of the plane was also seriously injured.