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Peter Ettedgui is a well-known film-maker. But 40 years ago he was a nervous boy starting out at Dulwich College in South London. “I was 13. I’d come from a fairly small school into this slightly intimidating, kind of gothic structure. That was huge.”He loved performing and soon found his niche in drama, he told Annie Kelly. But one boy shocked him: Nigel Farage. “Once he found out I was Jewish, you know, that was it,” Peter says. “I have this incredibly clear memory of him persistently heckling and hectoring me as a Jew.“He’d kind of come up to me wherever we were. Might be in the classroom. It might be in the school grounds. And he’d say things like, “Hitler was right” and “Gas ’em” and “ssssss”, the sound of gas escaping basically.”It has made him watch with growing anxiety the rise of Farage. And he is not alone in his claims that Farage made antisemitic statements and used racist language at school, says the Guardian’s chief reporter Daniel Boffey.Over the years, Farage has denied that he was racist and antisemitic at school. And, says Daniel: “There’s absolutely no suggestion that Farage still holds the views that people have recounted.”But, he tells Annie: “Being prime minister is not any job. You can change a country, you can change a culture. The people deserve to know absolutely as much as possible about you, about your character, and that’s what we set out to look at.” Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
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