It was Napoleon who said that ‘To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.’ Nigel Farage is nothing if not a man of the 1980s. Big ambitions, loud suits, indoor smoking: for him, the greatest year to have been alive was 1988, the high noon of Nigel Lawson’s tax-cutting zeal. Farage was a City trader whose thinking remains defined by that era of Thatcherism: of buccaneering Britain and primary colours politics. ‘Everyone around him was doing well’, says one friend ‘and then he spent the next two decades discovering that it was not the case for the rest of the country’.

One person who recalls that era less fondly than Nigel Farage is Andy Burnham

One person who recalls that era less fondly than Nigel Farage is Andy Burnham

One person who recalls that era less fondly is Andy Burnham. Six years younger than Farage, he was a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate in 1990, having stood as a school boy for Neil Kinnock in a mock election.........

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