Back in the 1970s, I went to the same school in south London as a stockbroker’s son called Nigel Farage. He was not much liked by the Dulwich College staff, who found him cocky and opinionated. My English teacher, Chloe Deakin, objected in a letter to the head (dated June 1981) that the future Ukip leader “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”; with a group of school army cadets he had “marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs”. On no account, Deakin wrote, should this goose-stepping liability be made a school prefect. (The letter was recently pounced on by Channel 4 News.)Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the left-leaning newspaper columnist, is no fan of Farage, it is safe to say. Her new book, Exotic England: the