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]