Should people have things they said and did decades ago at school held against them today? The question has come up in Britain recently, with reference to Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, whose overtly Nazi comments whilst a teenager at Dulwich College in the 1970s have re-emerged to discredit him in recent days. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2025/nov/18/deeply-shocking-nigel-farage-faces-fresh-claims-of-racism-and-antisemitism-at-school.)

In response to this, Farage veers between denial; claiming that the language he used was normal at the time; dismissing it as mere ‘banter’; insisting that none of it was targeted at individuals; and attacking (irrelevantly) the BBC. But the evidence against him, much of it coming from twenty-odd of his contemporaries at Dulwich, and truly shocking – telling Jewish pupils that ‘Hitler was right’, for example, and making hissing sounds in their ears to mimic the gas chambers – is convincing. Perhaps more damning is that he has never apologised for any of this, which is usually the form for people who are truly embarrassed by their schoolboy (and I suppose schoolgirl) errors. That may be because he doesn’t want to lose the support of the racists and anti-Semites on his side. But it also seems to confirm Reform’s reputation – or stigma – as a ‘racist’ party.

As it happens, I was at a similar school to Farage’s, albeit a decade earlier. One of its alumni is David Irving, the well-known holocaust denier. I’ve no idea of how he behaved at school – we didn’t overlap – but I recognise some of the characteristics attributed to Farage in the attitudes of some of my own contemporaries there. In a school mock election we had a ‘Right-Wing Nationalist Party’, headed I think by a fellow called Hutt, who persuaded me, as the school artist but too young to participate directly in the election, to design some political posters for him. None of them as I recall was racist or anti-Semitic. (Most were simply anti-communist.) So I don’t feel any need to apologise retrospectively for them.

The point is, however, that in the vote the RWNP came nowhere; and the election was won by a joke party called ‘The Intellectual Extremists’ – slogan ‘Sideways With Daddy’ – to the open disapproval of the headmaster, who had intended the project to be a lesson in serious politics. People like Hutt, and I presume Irving before him, were seen as beyond the pale of normal boyhood culture; which found it quite easy to avoid Farage’s type of racist ‘banter’. So, if Dulwich was anything like the same, Farage probably shouldn’t blame his time there for his opinions. He could have avoided the minority right-wing culture there if he’d wanted; or properly disowned it today.

Now sexism is something different. That was more difficult to avoid, in single-sex schools. I’m sure that both Farage and I imbibed some sexual chauvinism from our schoolfellows. For which I’m quite prepared – indeed, eager – to apologise today.