“The work involved extremely high pressure.”

Nigel Farage worked as a commodities trader in the City of London from 1982, first at Drexel Burnham Lambert, then at Crédit Lyonnais Rouse from 1986. The claim that this work involved "extremely high pressure" is a subjective characterization of personal experience, but it is broadly supported by multiple lines of evidence about the nature of City trading in the 1980s: 1. Academic evidence: A peer-reviewed study published in Stress Medicine (Kahn & Cooper, 1990) surveyed 225 dealers in the City of London and found that male dealers showed "significantly higher anxiety scores than the normative population." The study specifically identified "the stress of taking risks and achieving high performance" as a key occupational stressor. Notably, dealers at US-owned institutions (like Drexel Burnham Lambert, where Farage worked) reported even lower job satisfaction and poorer mental health than those at British-owned firms. 2. Contemporary accounts: BBC reporting on the 1980s City describes it as becoming a "dog-eat-dog environment" after the Big Bang deregulation, with intense competition on pricing and a bonus culture that rewarded short-term performance. Traders described not stopping for lunch, snatching only half-hour breaks during busy periods. 3. Firsthand testimony from City traders: Multiple accounts from people who worked on trading floors during this era describe "relentless" pressure, fear of being fired, and a Darwinian competitive environment. One former banker described stress levels that were "stratospherically high." While "extremely high pressure" is inherently a subjective characterization of personal experience, the evidence consistently and strongly supports that commodities trading in the City of London during the 1980s was widely recognized as high-pressure work. There is no evidence contradicting this characterization of Farage's experience. Sources: Kahn & Cooper, "Mental health, job satisfaction, alcohol intake and occupational stress among dealers in financial markets," Stress Medicine (1990), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smi.2460060407; BBC News, "How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever," https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37751599; BBC News, "How banking culture transformed over the decades," https://www.bbc.com/news/business-19463343; Wikipedia, "Nigel Farage," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage; BBC News, "Profile: Nigel Farage, UKIP leader," https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-20543513