Claim 995f0660Checked 09 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club.”
Interpreted asmetaphor
“When I joined the City, it was in its final days as an exclusive, clubby environment.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
Farage did join the City in 1982, and official history places the Big Bang reforms in 1986, when the London Stock Exchange’s closed-shop rules were dismantled and screen-based trading and wider participation by banks and financial institutions followed. Historical reporting also describes the pre-1986 City as a small, personal, club-like world that was largely swept away by Big Bang. So the claim that he joined during the City’s final days as an exclusive, clubby environment is broadly accurate. Sources: HMRC/GOV.UK "Financial markets: background: big bang"; The Guardian, "Special report: an outsider’s guide to the City of London"; Financial Times profile of Nigel Farage (via euro2day translation). (gov.uk)
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened+ 114 search hits considered
| [1] | theguardian.com |
| [2] | gov.uk |
| [3] | repository.essex.ac.uk |
| [4] | euro2day.gr |