As Nigel Farage swaggered into a Chelsea townhouse on Wednesday night for the biggest Donald Trump fundraiser this side of the Atlantic, he was ebullient about the night ahead. “It’s a Holly party – you can guarantee it’s going to be enormous fun,” he told reporters.
The Holly in question, the former actor and pop star Holly Valance, has rapidly risen to become radical-right royalty.
Valance, 41, and her property tycoon husband, Nick Candy, 51, are increasingly influential in British and American politics. The couple’s recent social life reads like a Who’s Who of the populist right. They have stayed with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort, attended Liz Truss’s “PopCon” convention for rightwing conservatives and made frequent visits with close friends Boris and Carrie Johnson.
Valance is credited with encouraging Farage to stand for MP and said she had been “whispering in his ear for a long time”.
British audiences were first introduced to Valance as a teenager when she played the right-on schoolgirl Felicity “Flick” Scully in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. The character’s friends thought she would end up working for Amnesty and she was said to be “too busy saving the world to have hobbies”.
Valance’s politics are a little different. At PopCon in February, she told GB News: “Everyone starts off as a lefty and then wakes up at some point” and realises “what crap ideas they all are”. In the same interview, she said of Jacob Rees-Mogg: “Jacob for PM.”
Valance’s fundraiser on Wednesday was attended by Donald Trump Jr and is understood to have been successful, raising in excess of $3m (£2.4m) and leading to her being asked to host more.
A vocal supporter of Reform UK, Valance gave them “a substantial cheque” after Farage announced he was standing. She told the Guardian she had been “honoured to say a few words” at Farage’s 60th birthday party in April, describing him as a man of “strength and conviction” whom she felt “very protective of”.
She was briefly rumoured to be considering standing for Reform in the Essex constituency of Basildon and Billericay, and did not rule out a future as an MP.
One veteran Brexiter said they were “100% certain” that she would run as a candidate in the next election and was confident she would do well, adding: “She’s great fun and speaks fluent human – no filter, which is why she’s popular.”
But Valance, who has two primary school-age daughters with Candy, said being an MP “would be a tough job” that “deserves your full attention”. She added she would “need to be immersed in my constituency and that would take time away from my daughters if I was to do the job right. Which I’m not prepared to do right now.”
Valance grew up in a suburb of Melbourne. She was born Holly Vukadinović to a Serbian father, Rajko Vukadinović, and a British mother, Rachel Stephens. After her initial soap stardom she pivoted to pop, with hit singles including Kiss Kiss.
If the roots of her rightwing views come from childhood, they do not appear to be shared by her younger half-sister Olympia. When asked about an interview Holly had given where she described Trump as “fabulous” and said Australia had gone too woke, Olympia was quick to distance herself from her sister. She told a radio show: “Oh God! Everyone’s going to think that that’s what I think! And I don’t … that’s not my opinion on anything.”
Valance moved to London when she was 18, before relocating to Los Angeles. She returned to London to live with Candy after meeting him at a dinner party and they married in a lavish Beverly Hills ceremony in 2012.
Candy’s politics appear to be more centrist than Valance’s. He has previously donated at least £290,000 to the Conservative party but said in February that Keir Starmer was a “decent man with good values and morals” and that it was “time for some change.”
She acknowledged that their politics were not identical, however, saying: “We’re a little bit different in our opinions but respect each other’s. I don’t need to surround myself with people with identical politics.”
As for the evolution of her own, he cites a perspective gained from an international career: “So you’re living on three continents simultaneously watching how things work, or don’t work, paying bills, mortgages, school fees, watching cultures change and it just gives you an interesting perspective that’s fairly wide.”
Valance said her top political priority was Britain coming out of the European Convention on Human Rights and the establishment of a British bill of rights, saying “the trickle-down effect would be a huge step in the right direction”.
During the pandemic she tweeted that she was reading George Orwell’s 1984 and had a penchant for political literature. Her list of recommended books includes “absolutely everything by the British conservative commentator Douglas Murray” and You’re Teaching My Child What? by the controversial American psychiatrist Miriam Grossman.
Her plan for election night next month was to “read something excruciatingly heavy, then even it out with some Love Island, and bed early ready for the school run.”
She is bemused by her burgeoning political popularity. “I’m a stay-at-home mum with enough food in the fridge and the school fees sorted, and that’s about all I require,” she said.
Her glamour and straight talking will make her useful to Reform, whose candidates are not known for their polished looks. As one Brexiter said: “Pretty, famous women are allowed to be rightwing too. Not just fat, balding blokes.”
