GREAT minds continue to contribute to the dominating debate of our times: was Nigel Farage a teenage Nazi?
I have no new facts to add to the arguments that have done so much to enhance the reputation of Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, and to pad out the yawning minutes of late-night TV current affairs. Lammy, you may recollect, asserted that as a schoolboy Farage had ‘flirted with the Hitler Youth’, then decided that perhaps after consideration he hadn’t.
The fact that the Hitler Youth was compulsorily disbanded nearly 20 years before Farage was born may have contributed to Lammy’s rethink – not his first on the subject of other people’s alleged racism.
What I can offer is a little irresponsible speculation.
The teen fascist story was originally spread by former BBC journalist Michael Crick, who found a letter from Chloe Deakin, once an English teacher at Farage’s school, Dulwich College. She wrote: ‘Another colleague described how, at a camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs.’
This is hearsay, of course, from a teacher who wished to stop Farage’s promotion to prefect, and the rest of the buzz about Farage’s alleged far right leanings amounts to no more than 50-year-old gossip. But it has stuck around. Perhaps there is a germ of truth in it.
The first question to ask is: how many Hitler Youth songs do you know? No? How many people do you know who know any Hitler Youth songs? Round figure, I’d guess. How many people do you know who ever heard a Hitler Youth song? About the same.
The reason nobody knows any Nazi songs is that they were absolutely terrible. Their favourite was the Horst Wessel Song, about an early party martyr, and while lots of people know what it was called, can anybody hum it? Didn’t think so.
The Nazis did films and propaganda radio, and they had tame composers to produce high opera. But popular music, a non-starter. There was a jazz band aimed at correcting Germans who might disturbingly have been drawn to decadent American black music. All you can say about them is, well, they tried.
This historical gap affected other people than, possibly, the teenage Nigel. In particular, it was a problem for a pair of American songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb.
Mark Steyn has set out how Kander and Ebb were writing for a new stage musical with Nazis in it, and they looked for a Nazi song to include in a scene they had in mind. There was nothing nearly good enough. So they wrote their own instead.
No one who has seen a stage performance or the film of Cabaret forgets the impact of Tomorrow Belongs To Me. In the film, in a rare moment of genuine horror in a musical, the camera pulls back from the beautiful boy singing the lovely tune in a beer garden to show his swastika armband and Hitler Youth uniform.
By the time the schoolboy Farage hit the sixth form at Dulwich College, in the autumn of 1980, the song and its twist were very widely known, and it wasn’t unusual for the occasional teenage boy to sing it, especially after a pint or two.
Some, however, made the mistake of assuming it was a genuine Nazi song. I wonder if Miss Deakin’s colleague was among them.
My guess is that if there is any truth in the story, the young Farage was singing not a Hitler Youth song but a hit number from a hit musical written by two Jewish gays in upstate New York in around 1965.
He was, if he was singing, singing songs from the shows. The post-pub singsong – which it almost certainly was – could just as well have included Springtime for Hitler or Sixteen Going on Seventeen.
Hitler Youth flirtation? Not guilty.
