Nigel Farage is a British politician on whom John Kiriakou gave a considered assessment in September 2025, when a viewer asked what he thought of the prospect of Farage in Congress.
The rehabilitation
Kiriakou dates the change precisely. “As recently as five years ago, Nigel Farage was a joke. He was like a kind of a neo-Nazi fascist weirdo fringe weirdo from the British right wing.”[1]
What produced the shift, he says, was the collapse of the alternative: “just over the last 5 years, with the electoral humiliation that the Conservative Party underwent, Farage has come out as like a real voice on the right.” The man himself, in Kiriakou’s view, did not move, “he’s no less fascistic than he was five years ago. He just has been accepted by the mainstream as a legitimate” voice. He finds this “nuts.”[1][2]
The prediction
On a visit to London in March, Kiriakou read a piece in the Times, “a conservative paper, and it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch”, saying Farage would likely be the next leader of the Conservative Party.[2]
His forecast if that happens is unequivocal: “I could see the end of the Conservative Party as a viable political force.” The mechanism is defection. Conservatives “who aren’t that conservative, they’re called wets”, would move to the Liberal Party, “which is not liberal, it’s actually quite conservative, especially on foreign policy”, and the Farage conservatives who remained “would just be sort of a rump party.”[2][3]
The historical parallel
What Farage reminds Kiriakou of is not a person but a period: “what I’ve read happened in the UK in conservative politics in the run-up to the Second World War. There were a lot of Brits who thought Hitler was a-okay. And a lot of those Brits, you know, it took years for them to change”, the Mosley types.[4]
The detail he and his host settle on is the respectability of it at the time: “people forget that the British Fascist Party was a real thing”, and “there were members of the royal family that were members of it.”[5]
Boris Johnson
Asked in the same run of questions about Boris Johnson, “two peas in a pod”, as the questioner put it, Kiriakou gave a shorter answer. “There was nobody in the UK more shocked when Boris Johnson became prime minister than Boris Johnson. He was a joke.” Not merely a joke, he added, but a type: “a provocateur journalist who made a career by pissing people off on purpose”, one of the original I-have-an-opinion right-wing journalists.[6]