Nigel Farage ‘thought about women’ during 2010 plane crash

Josie Gibson said she would not have thought Farage was a ‘lady magnet’ but sounded like he had to ‘bat them off at one point’.
Nigel Farage is entering the jungle on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here (ITV/PA)
Ellie Iorizzo9 December 2023
The Weekender

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Nigel Farage said his final thoughts were about women during a plane crash in 2010.

The former Ukip and Brexit Party leader, 59, spoke about surviving a plane crash at an airfield in Northamptonshire on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!.

This Morning presenter Josie Gibson asked if his life flashed before his eyes, with Farage replying: “Do you know what I thought about? Women.”

Gibson, 38, asked whether he meant the woman he loved the most, to which Farage replied: “All that stuff, yeah. Children obviously and just thought, ‘Let’s hope this is over quickly’.”

In the Bush Telegraph, Gibson said: “The thing is he said women, not woman.”

Farage later described the crash as a “bang, cartwheeling through the air and then stuck, upside down in the seat, everything broken, in a bad way”.

“I thought, if I get through this it’ll be a miracle, after that, I never let little things annoy me,” he said.

He said the crash had left him with a bruised spinal cord and a problem with his right hand which “doesn’t do directly what the brain tells it to do – I even find writing quite hard”.

The former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) said after the crash he was “straight back to work”.

“I was back in the European Parliament, shouldn’t have been because I still had broken ribs,” he said.

“I’m the biggest name the European Parliament’s ever had in terms of international news that I made, I put them on the map globally.

“I said to them one Christmas, ‘You should all be grateful to me, I’ve made you all famous’.”

Farage said he misses the “theatre” of being an MEP, describing the “amazing lifestyle”.

He said: “You get to the airport, there’s a chauffeur-driven Mercedes waiting for you.

“You want to go out for dinner, the chauffeur takes you, you get 300 euros a day spending money, cash.

“The members’ dining room, wonderful crab and lobster buffets, every day. The Ukip table was often the noisiest in there because we drank and had a laugh.

“People looking at us in horror. And if you’re an MEP the power that you have is incredible. You are treated like the elite.

“Women throwing themselves at you.”

In the Bush Telegraph, Gibson said she would not have thought Farage was a “lady magnet”, but she said it sounded like he had to “bat them off at one point”.

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