Nigel Farage is the perfect folk devil for the British liberal left. He is robustly patriotic, cheerfully irreverent about modern pieties, and a Barbour-wearing libertarian smoker and beer-drinker. He represents – in both the literal and figurative sense – the Britain that the Sensible classes dislike and ignore and would like to see consigned to irrelevance: a Britain made up of ambitious City boys, the aspirational middle class, farmers, left-behind coastal towns and small business owners.

Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but there is something rather feeble and underhand about playing the informer on contemporaries from your schooldays

What makes it worse for them is that none of their attacks seem to stick. Reform are comfortably the single most popular party in Britain, with some polls giving them a seven or eight point lead and others putting them as far as 15 points ahead.

And so the Guardian has fallen back on an old favourite line of attack: the suggestion that, as a schoolboy at Dulwich College, Farage said some naughty words. Similar allegations have been dredged up before. As long ago as 2013, Channel 4 obtained a letter sent to the head of the college in 1981 objecting to Farage’s appointment as a prefect, on the grounds that he held ‘racist and neo-fascist views’. This time round, we have new accusations of racial........

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