The Guardian view on Nigel Farage’s youthful views: the past still matters

Voters need to know if a party leader said racist things at school. Interviewers have a duty to keep pressing for fuller facts

For one contemporary, it is the hectoring tone of today that evokes what it was like to be at school with Nigel Farage. “He would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Gas them’,” Peter Ettedgui recalls when asked about life at fee-paying Dulwich College in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Later, he adds: “I’d hear him calling other students ‘Paki’ or ‘Wog’ and urging them to ‘go home’.”

For others, including some in the college’s combined cadet force (CCF), what lingers is the image of the young Mr Farage in uniform and his renderings of a racist anthem titled “Gas ’em all”. Tim France, a CCF member from those years, remembered Mr Farage “regularly” gi