He once claimed his EU salary and expenses were worth £250,000 a year. His wife is also on the Brussels payroll, earning more than £30,000 a year. But Ukip’s leader, Nigel Farage, has now claimed the couple are “poor”.
Mr Farage, who has been an MEP since 1999, initially described his role in the European Parliament as “a good job” after he was first elected. He claimed that if he had been working for Goldman Sachs he would need to earn £250,000 to match what the EU paid him because of taxation, secretarial allowances and “all the other games you could play”.
So with his own fiscal evaluation meaning he must have earned the equivalent of £3.75m over the past 15 years, his claim in a new Channel 4 documentary about the couple’s wealth – that “I don’t know anybody in politics as poor as we are” – is rather surprising.
Anyone with an ounce of decency would not have picked up his salary for NOT doing his job. Instead, he was paid a fat salary for running UKIP and campaigning. It's like picking up a salary from the RSPCA to run an illegal slaughter house.