It is the hectoring tone, the “jeering quality”, in Nigel Farage’s voice today that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui.“He would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right,’ or ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers,” Ettedgui says of his experience of being in a class with Farage at Dulwich college in south London.Ettedgui, 61, is a Bafta- and Emmy-winning director and producer whose credits include Kinky Boots, McQueen and Super/Man: the Christopher Reeve Story.Back then he was a 13-year-old boy at a loss as to how to handle what he describes as a sudden and inexplicable intrusion of antisemitism in his life.This is the first time Ettedgui has spoken in such detail of his alleged experiences, but he is not the only one.

In recent weeks, the Guardian has heard allegations from more than a dozen school contemporaries of Farage who recount incidents of deeply offensive behaviour throughout his teenage years,This is not the whole picture,Others who knew Farage then remember he was bumptious, rude, provocative and enjoyed being the centre of attention, but do not recall the behaviour described by Ettedgui and others,There is no claim that Farage the man must still hold the same views as the ones ascribed to Farage the boy,But their memories of him left marks – ones that haven’t dissolved with the passage of time, and are often revealed again when he talks about issues such as immigration.

They say they want to see more moral clarity from a man who could be Britain’s next prime minister.What is troubling, one explained, is the lack of contrition in the intervening decades.A couple of ex-pupils who have spoken to the Guardian say they are deeply ashamed of their own part in singing “racist” songs.The question some want answered is: what about Farage?When claims of this kind were first made about him more than a decade ago, Farage admitted saying “some ridiculous things … not necessarily racist things… it depends on how you define it”.Now, though, the man whose party is leading in all major opinion polls and says he expects to be in Downing Street, appears to have changed tack.

In legal letters to the Guardian, he has emphatically denied saying anything racist or antisemitic when he was a teenager,He has also questioned whether there is any public interest in airing allegations that date back over 40 years,The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know,If you have something to share on this subject, you can contact us confidentially using the following methods,Secure Messaging in the Guardian appThe Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories.

Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs.This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu.Select ‘Secure Messaging’.SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and postIf you can safely use the Tor network without being observed or monitored, you can send messages and documents to the Guardian via our SecureDrop platform.

Finally, our guide at theguardian.com/tips lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each.After weeks of asking, a spokesperson for Reform UK gave a statement.“These allegations are entirely without foundation,” they said.“The Guardian has produced no contemporaneous record or corroborating evidence to support these disputed recollections from nearly 50 years ago.

”For Ettedgui, it is a question of character.“My grandparents had escaped from Nazi Germany, and had always talked with deep gratitude about how they felt welcome in the UK,” he says.“I’d never experienced antisemitism growing up, so the first time that this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage’s mouth was deeply shocking.But I wasn’t his only target.I’d hear him calling other students ‘Paki’ or ‘Wog’, and urging them to ‘go home’.

I tried to ignore him, but it was humiliating.It was shaming.This kind of abuse cuts through to the core of your identity.”Ettedgui said he didn’t feel he could talk about it with his family or teachers.“So I just buried the whole experience and got on with life.

Many years later, a friend sent me a link to a video of Farage berating EU commissioners.Just hearing that aggressive, hectoring tone again, my blood ran cold.”Farage could suddenly “switch from hostility and become disarmingly affable, even charming”, Ettedgui says.“But from my experience, there’s no doubt in my mind that he was a profoundly, precociously racist teenager … I’d like to know why he’s never owned up or shown the slightest contrition.”Farage at the time was 13 or 14.

Too young to know better? A second pupil from a minority ethnic background claimed he was similarly targeted by a 17-year-old Farage.“I was very small in one of the junior classes of the time, and you know that the sixth-formers were probably 17, very tall, much taller than me,” he said.“And that person’s walk, it’s the same walk he has now, I’ll never forget it.“He walked up to a pupil flanked by two similarly tall mates and spoke to anyone looking ‘different’.That included me on three occasions; asking me where I was from, and pointing away, saying: ‘That’s the way back,’ to wherever you replied you were from.

“And it was a very horrible ordeal.Honestly, at the time it was just quite perplexing.Walking from the upper school, via the middle school, past different amenities, through a gap into the lower school playground, right?“You’ve walked all that distance to do what you want to do.I thought to come over and just say that? I mean, he will never be forgotten.”The former pupil said sometimes Farage and others would wait at the lower school gate for pupils being dropped off by their parents.

“The thought of it still creates fear and anger within me, and the look you get from a person who does not see your humanity but just that you look different and has reached a conclusion about you before you even open your mouth to speak.“It’s a look I have received many times in my life and it’s a look you simply never forget.That feeling you get when being dropped off at school and just as you have got out of the car, happy to go to school, you can see the group of taller pupils waiting to inflict mental damage and then you are totally deflated.Aged nine, no one should have to go through that.“It is hard to understand why such a person would dedicate so much time to [it], but it is even more worrying that if such a person misused his minor position of power at that time so instinctively, what such a person would do with more power.

”Critics and supporters of Farage may argue over whether it is fair to judge him on what he is alleged to have said as a teenager, but one thing seems certain: the scrutiny of his life will continue and probably intensify,For more than three decades, he has been a fixture of the British political scene, arguably a weather-maker like no other,He helped to secure Brexit in 2016, and Reform is posing an existential threat to the Conservative party, as well as eating into Labour’s vote,It is why Keir Starmer made Farage the focus of his speech at the Labour party conference, accusing him of crossing a “moral line”,In the run-up to it, the prime minister had labelled Reform’s policy of scrapping indefinite leave to remain as “racist” and “immoral”.

The deputy prime minister, David Lammy, went on to claim in a television interview that Farage had “flirted” with the Hitler Youth as a young man, a comment that was described as “disgusting and libellous” by unnamed Reform sources.Lammy subsequently clarified that Farage had denied such claims.The deputy prime minister had been referencing allegations reported by Michael Crick when he was a reporter for Channel 4 News in 2013, and then in a book he published in 2022.Crick had obtained a letter from an English teacher at Dulwich college, Chloe Deakin.In it, she had opposed a decision in 1981 by the master of Dulwich college to make Farage a prefect when he was 17, describing him as having “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”.

Deakin, who did not know Farage personally, went on to say that a colleague had reported that at a combined cadet force (CCF) “camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs”,Bob Jope, 74, a teacher at the school at the time, told the Guardian he remembered Deakin’s letter, and how it had been written after a staff meeting where the issue of prefects was discussed,“On this particular meeting … it was by Dulwich standards quite dramatic,A number of people spoke up expressing anxiety about Farage being a prefect,“And a few spoke in his defence, fewer in fact.

The main thing seemed to be that his attitude towards some of the younger boys and his attitudes towards those of other races weren’t necessarily making [him] an ideal prefect.“That was the feeling – that [he] wasn’t kind of the right thing to be sort of prefect material.Some staff had heard things about things he’s meant to have said on CCF training weekends and so on.Which he later denied having ever said or done, but again, these things came [out] at the meeting.“The reason I think things were so controversial was that at the end of the meeting the master said words to the effect: ‘This doesn’t sound quite the right sort of person to be made a prefect.

’ Very soon after, the list of new prefects went up on the board and his name was there.”The CCF at Dulwich college was a youth organisation sponsored by the Ministry of Defence, and Farage was a keen member in the army division.The Guardian has spoken to seven fellow members of the CCF, including two who marched with Farage in Sussex where Deakin alleged he sang Hitler Youth songs.None of them recalled those specific songs being sung.But there are other memories that some feel have not been acknowledged in Reform’s angry denunciation of Lammy’s comments.

“I was in the CCF with him from 1979 to 1982 or so,” said one former pupil.“[Farage] did teach the younger members of the CCF the infamous ‘Gas ’em all’ song, or at least led the singing of it on CCF coaches to training areas,” he claimed.The song, variants of which were heard on English football terraces in the 1980s, is sung to the tune of George Formby’s Bless Em All.One version runs: “‘Gas em all; Gas em all; Gas em all; And into the showers they crawl; We’ll gas all the niggers; We’ll gas all the Jews; Come on you lads gas em all’.The former pupil added: “There were black, Asian and Jewish CCF cadets on the bus.

As I say, one of them asked me not to sing it or make those sort of comments.And I didn’t.“I liked him.I was just being a bit silly.I suppose from that perspective you could put it down to schoolboy racism,” he said, but added that he believed that with Farage a “sort of divisive behaviour seems to have persisted”.

He added of his motivation for talking about events that took place more than four decades ago: “Just look at the Nolan principles [on the required standards in public office]: integrity, honesty, selfless commitment, that sort of thing.Nigel just doesn’t have these qualities.”The former pupil noted that Farage had previously conceded in response to Crick’s reporting that “he might have said silly racist things which some might consider to be racist or not” – but that a vehement denial had then been issued in response to Lammy’s comments.“You know there’s just no consistency, so it’s a trust thing.He would be a terrible leader,” the former Dulwich pupil said.

Patrick Neylan, 61, an editor, who was in the year below Farage, recalled the singing of the “gas ’em” song on CCF camps and expressed his own shame at being involved.The song was sung in the CCF on coaches to annoy the teachers, he claimed, although he did not directly recall Farage being involved.It was “boys being naughty to annoy the grown-ups.You knew they were wrong, that was the thrill,” he said.He does not think Farage stood out in terms of his views and behaviour – but he added of the chants: “I’ve been deeply ashamed of it for 40 years.

”Tim France, 61, was in the same year as Farage and sat near him in the final year as a consequence of the class being organised alphabetically.For him, Farage’s behaviour did stand out.He recalled a similar song being performed by Farage, who would also “regularly” perform the Nazi “Sieg heil” salute, he claimed.“In the sixth form, you know, he became much more kind of political and very rightwing and shockingly so,” he said.“We all kind of grew up in the shadow of the second world war, our grandparents fought in the second world war.

So, you know, you didn’t question that Hitler was wrong.”“Somebody kind of outwardly doing Nazi salutes, strutting about the classroom, you know, doing, kind of saying things like ‘Hitler was right’ and all that stuff was pretty shocking and therefore very memorable,” France claimed.“It was habitual, you know, it happened all the time.He would often be doing Nazi salutes and saying ‘Sieg heil’ and, you know, strutting around the classroom.He was a member of the cadet force, [so] often being in uniform.

And, yeah, it might have been for shock value, partly, but I think, you know, clearly, he also is very rightwing politically,“He was saying really, really unpleasant things, really things that you just knew were wrong,You can’t really defend it as being a joke, or that he was too young to know any better,We were 18,”The British Movement, later called the British National Socialist Movement, was an extremist organisation active in the late 1970s