Last night, I was swapping matey WhatsApps with an old school pal. He was on holiday in South Africa and was just back from the beach; I was on a bus in the cold London rain. It was warm, friendly stuff between two blokes who have known each other for more than 50 years.
But in the case of my “old friend” and me, there had been a rather significant gap of half a century when we were very much not in touch. The man, John Dickens, a charming and liberal-minded retired headteacher in Swindon, had been an obsessively antisemitic bully in our schooldays. When Nigel “Banter” Farage was accused of using similar racist and antisemitic slurs at school, I decided to get back in touch with Dickens to tell him how his behaviour had affected me and where he got all this nastiness from.
In a new interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Farage said he had not “for a single moment worried about whether he upset anyone”, saying: “I think there were two people who said they were hurt, all right, and if they genuinely were then that’s a pity and I’m sorry, but never, ever did I intend to hurt anybody. Never have.” As Kuenssberg has since suggested, it has the flavour of the classic political apology – sorry if anyone felt hurt by what happened all those years ago.
When I finally confronted Dickens, I fully expected that, like Farage, he would dismiss it as schoolboy joshing. I could not have been more wrong. Unlike Farage, and in one of the most remarkable acts of decency I have witnessed, my school nemesis apologised profusely. On hearing my voice, and without prompting, he raised some of the awful things he had said and tried to explain what had been going on in his life. We had been 11, he said, and he had been trying to look tough in front of older boys.
Farage, by contrast, has repeatedly rejected allegations that he behaved in a racist or antisemitic way at school, arguing that the claims relate to events decades ago and describing the atmosphere as “banter” or typical schoolboy behaviour. He has also dismissed accounts from former contemporaries who recall offensive remarks, suggesting some critics may have had political motivations. Even though the young John Dickens was, by comparison, less extreme in his behaviour – no talk of gas chambers, no “go back to your own country” rhetoric – I never forgot what he said to me barely 20 years after the Holocaust had ended.
The experience marked me so deeply that, later in life, I sometimes pretended to be Greek – helped by my Greek-sounding surname – simply to avoid similar hostility. In a strange way, it prepared me for later encounters with far more explicit and vicious antisemitism.
