Nigel Farage’s personal life has been thrust into the spotlight after the Reform UK leader discussed his daughter during a lengthy televised statement today.
In a bombshell speech where he called a by-election in his Essex seat in a bid to silence his critics, the politician claimed the media has been “haranguing” his family.
“For some reason, last week the editor of the Times newspaper decided to publish a picture of where my daughter lives,” he said.
“There is no public interest in my daughter whatsoever. She is not involved in current affairs, doesn’t seek to be involved in current affairs, and has never been used by me once at any point in my political career.
“I’ve always done my absolute best to protect the privacy and safety of my family,.”
Farage continued: “By publishing that photograph, the editor of The Times has directly threatened her security… She now has broadcasters haranguing her.”
“Sky News were one of them, and when I questioned them on it, they willfully and deliberately lied and said on their channel that they hadn’t contacted the family.
“I will not tolerate intimidation of my family. I will not tolerate the location of where they live being revealed.”
Sky News said it had made “reasonable efforts” to contact Nigel Farage with “legitimate questions to answer” after reports convicted criminal George Cottrell had provided undeclared funding for security and staffing in the year before he was elected as MP for Clacton.
“We acknowledge that Sky News was part of a broadcast pool operation outside a property linked to Mr Farage yesterday.
“We approached the property off-camera on a single occasion, identified ourselves, and the occupant chose not to engage.”
Columnist for The Times Alex Massie has denied the publication published Farage’s family address on X.
An expressed desire for privacy is nothing new for Farage. He might be loud about his politics, but he has preferred to keep his love life a little more under wraps, especially in the years since he separated from his second wife, and mother of his two daughters, German-born bond broker Kirsten Mehr sometime before 2017.
Here’s everything we know about his love life
A car crash that resulted in marriage
Farage and his first wife Gráinne Hayes — an Irish nurse — met when they were both in their early twenties when she treated him in hospital after he was run over by a car in November 1985.
“My recovery was a miserable period: I was put on traction — a series of pulleys and weights — but the treatment saved my leg," he told the Telegraph years later, in 2015. “It put paid to any more golf — but I married the nurse who treated me. A cliché, I know, but not only did I get my life back, I got a wife and two fantastic sons.”
The couple married in 1988 and went on to have two sons who are now both in their thirties — Sam, a Dulwich College and Exeter graduate last understood to be working for a major accountancy firm, and Tom, whose last known profession was in City trading — but their marriage did not last.
After just over a decade together, they divorced in 1997. Hayes' last known location was in Rochester, Kent.
Second time unlucky — was politics to blame?
Farage married his second wife Kirsten Mehr — a German government bond broker — in 1999, just two years after his divorce from Hayes.
They are understood to have met in Frankfurt, Germany in 1996 while Farage was travelling on business and Hamburg-born Mehr was working in government. "She was a stunning government bond broker whose brisk efficiency at first sight belied her ethereal appearance," he later told reporters. "She could have stepped into a pre-Raphaelite painting no questions asked."
The couple went on to marry and have two daughters, Victoria and Isabelle, who both have German passports and are bilingual in English and German.
According to reports, Mehr gave up her City job working as an interpreter for a German bank to look after the girls and work as her husband's PA, writing all his emails because he disliked using computers.
"I do a very hard job," she told reporters back in 2014, "and Nigel's a very difficult person to work for". At the time, she admitted that the job required long hours, which she often did wearing a nightie, and that their two daughters didn't see much of their father, who drank and smoked too much. Insiders said she liked to keep a low profile, sitting anonymously in the audience at UKIP party conferences.
According to insiders, Farage and Mehr are still technically married, but have reportedly been separated for the best part of a decade. Even six years ago, in 2017, it was reported that the pair had been living apart "for years" after Mehr was photographed without her wedding ring. She later revealed in a statement that Farage had moved out of the family home in Kent "a while ago" following reports that he was living with another woman.
Farage has since told journalist Rachel Johnson in a radio interview that politics had left him "separated" and "skint". ”I’m not very married at the moment, let’s put it like that. I think separated is my legal status," he said. "I don’t think anything would have survived what I’ve been doing for the past five years.
“Not that I’ve been perfect — I’m not — but it’s been pretty awful. Just hellish, really. I’m talking about the sheer nastiness and aggro that comes with this, that this whole Trotskyite and hard-left movement are now the Remainers. There is no life left. The last time I went out with the family, we were assaulted by 80 people.”
A 12-year affair with an aide, revealed years later
2004. This is the year that Annabelle Fuller — Farage's Oxford-educated speechwriter and trusted adviser, at the time and 17 years his junior — later told reporters that her 12-year affair with Farage started, and the same year Mehr spoke out about working as her husband's PA long into the night.
Ukip “parliamentary researcher” (nudge, nudge) Annabelle Fuller had “12-year affair with Nigel Farage” who is 17 years her senior. I do wonder how she got the job as Ukip “parliamentary researcher” (nudge, nudge) eh?https://t.co/kAttvVFXTD
— John Clarke (@JohnClarke1960) April 21, 2019
Fuller, now 44 and just 24 at the time, finally spoke out publicly in 2017, admitting she'd had an extramarital relationship with the Brexit boss from 2004 until 2016. Among her bombshell claims were that the pair had had sexual encounters in MEP offices in the European Parliament over that time; that Farage had declared his devotion to her with "heart and body" in a secret love letter; and that the affair had sent her into depression, self-harm and even suicide attempts in the ladies' toilet of the European Parliament. Fuller also claimed that Farage's wife Mehr was behind her ejection from the UKIP party in 2014.
Colleagues have since said the affair was an open secret within Westminster circles. "He was thinking about leaving his wife for her... everyone in the party knew they were having an affair," one MEP told reporters at the time.
From a German broker to a Westminster aide to a French waitress
Moving in with Farage as his 'lodger'. Taking the bins out from his £4m Chelsea home. Twerking up against him on a dimly-lit dancefloor at a Brexit anniversary party.
Speculation as to whether French politician Laure Ferrari was in fact Farage's girlfriend had been swirling for years now, ever since he hired the then-28-year-old - 15 years his junior - as his parliamentary assistant in his role as an MEP in 2007 and the pair were seen enjoying a drink at a London pub together before leaving in a chauffeur-driven Range Rover.
In 2023, it was finally confirmed by Farage's team: Ferrari is indeed the former UKIP leader's girlfriend, but she wouldn’t be travelling to Australia to meet him when he exited the Jungle — or so they claimed at the time. At what point that decision was overturned is not clear, but Ferrari did indeed meet Farage as he exited the jungle in third place before Christmas, saying that her U-turn on going public about their relationship was partly born from a “duty to support him”.
Pictures shows the French politician smiling as she touched down in Brisbane airport, posing on a beach in a pink bikini on Australia's Gold Coast and appearing to fall over as she carried a set of shopping bags after a shopping spree at the Gold Coast's Surfers Paradise. She was later seen chatting to other contestants' loved ones with her arm in a sling after reportedly suffering a minor surfing injury, but appeared sling-free just hours later, smiling in a khaki playsuit as she hugged Farage for the first time in several weeks — a sign many took to mean that the UKIP leader was working on boosting his optics amid plans to launch a political comeback.
The couple's public displays of affection certainly came in stark contrast to their behaviour in the years before. In November, sources close to Farage said he was insistent on keeping his family and romantic life private — much to the disappointment of gossip columnists keen to finally see the couple in public together.
Farage met Ferrari in 2007, back when she was an English graduate working as a waitress in Strasbourg and just three years after Fuller claims her own affair with Farage started. Ferrari had claimed to be uninterested in politics until two years previously, believing it to be the preserve of “old men who sat around talking”, but her interest spiked when France voted no in a referendum on a European constitution in 2005. She ended up befriending former UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom — a fellow Eurosceptic who used to visit the restaurant she worked at and describes her as “bright as a button” — in 2007 and Bloom went onto introduce her to Farage, with whom she reportedly developed an immediate rapport.
Farage went on to appoint Ferrari as a parliamentary assistant in charge of environmental issues in the UK — her first-ever job in politics — and moved her into his three-bedroom west London home as a 'lodger', claiming she had nowhere else to live. It was around this same time that she led a Eurosceptic think tank accused of illegally diverting £400,000 of public funds to UKIP ahead of the UK general election and Brexit referendum.
It was also around this time that she was seen slow-dancing with Farage at a party celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, her reportedly grinding up against him. "There was no question they were a couple," one onlooker said. "Laure was putting on quite a display. She seemed to twerk a bit and was all over Nigel. From the look on his face, he was loving every minute."
That year the pair were seen drinking together at an unnamed London pub, locked in conversation. Reports at the time claimed that Farage's attention was "only on one woman all night", but Farage denied any claims of romance between them. "She is someone I have worked with and known for a long time who wanted somewhere to stay for a week that wouldn't cost her any money," he told reporters in February 2017. "It's a working relationship. You can inflate it however you want to."
War of the mistresses — did Ferrari win?
The same month as Farage and Ferrari's pub outing, it was announced that Farage and his German wife Mehr had been "living separate lives" for several years and that the father-of-four had moved out of the family home in Kent. "This is a situation that suits everyone and is not news to any of the people involved," Mehr told reporters amid rumours that her husband had been having a decade-long affair with Fuller, another aide of his.
Annabelle Sanderson (nee Fuller) on Alex Phillips defection to Cons: "I'm happy cos it's a good day at conference." pic.twitter.com/9O8zL80Wgp
— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) September 16, 2016
Why exactly Fuller and Farage's affair came to an end in 2016 is not yet known, but it might have had something to do with another young woman he is believed to have become involved with during their affair: his now-girlfriend Ferrari.
Fuller says she first became aware of Ferrari when she tried to visit Farage in hospital after he was involved in a near-fatal plane crash in 2010. The two-seater plane had been towing a 'Vote UKIP' banner but flipped and nose-dived into a Northamptonshire field. When Fuller tried to visit him in Horton Hospital in Oxford, there were reportedly two other women either there or on their way to see him: his wife Mehr, and a French woman she now knows to be Ferrari, who reportedly barged her out of the way.
"I was shaking with worry by the time I got there [Horton Hospital]. I didn't even make it inside before a woman who said she was his local aide barred my way," Fuller told reporters after the crash. "I'm told that UKIP members were trying to calm her down and move her out the way before Kirsten got there. They definitely didn't want me to meet Laure either."
The bitter battle between Fuller and Ferrari did not stop there. Two years later, in 2012, Ferrari reportedly sent an explosive email to Fuller, branding British women "drunken tarts" who "can put themselves in embarrassing situations with well-known married men whom they kiss in public".
Meanwhile, the email claimed that French women "can be very discreet and respectful hiding a sincere love affair for 3 years and 6 months... not looking for any kind of publicity at all." Fuller reportedly forwarded the email to Farage's office, claiming it was from Ferrari and demanding his team "print out and show to Nigel" after the politician had allegedly accused Fuller of "lying about her".
A (not-so) secret new girlfriend, outed at last
Exactly how the three-woman hospital tussle for Farage panned out is not known, but one woman seems to have come out on top in the years that followed: Ferrari, who is been believed to have been living with Farage ever since 2007, and has held many roles connected with his since then.
But despite Ferrari's pointed email to Fuller back in 2012, it was only at the end of 2024 that Farage publicly admitted to the relationship being a romantic one.
Ferrari claimed the admission was partly born from a “duty to support him” but commentators had other suspicions as insiders claimed Farage was “on manoeuvres” to relaunch his career in frontline politics — suspicions that have now turned out to be correct.
Even today, the politician remains coy about his love life. In September last year, Farage publicly admitted he had wrongly claimed to have purchased a home in Clacton, saying the property was in fact solely owned by Ferrari. In an interview with Sky News he said: “All right. I shouldn’t have said ‘I’. I should have said ‘we’. It’s her money. It’s her asset. I own none of it. But I just happen to spend some time there.”
Farage added: “You know what? It’s a really funny thing in life. But sometimes we all say things that we perhaps shouldn’t quite have said.
“I should have rephrased it. I didn’t want to put her [Ferrari] in the public domain.” A sentiment about his personal life that clearly, still rings true for the Reform leader today.
