What Would Lord Haw-Haw Make of Nigel Farage’s Bromance with Trump?
In the winter of 1939, a Brooklyn-born fascist sat down in front of a microphone in Berlin and began broadcasting to the people of Britain. His sneering, affected voice became one of the most recognisable sounds of the Second World War. His name was William Joyce, though history would remember him as Lord Haw-Haw: traitor, propagandist and the last man in Britain to face execution for treason.
Fast forward to this week. Nigel Farage boarded a plane to Florida, drove to Mar-a-Lago and sat down with Donald Trump to lobby the President of the United States to kill a deal negotiated by the British government. He did not go to warn a foreign ally. Nor did he go to seek clarification. Instead, he actively pressed a foreign head of state to torpedo his own country’s foreign policy. Trump, who had already called Prime Minister Keir Starmer a loser with no future, was presumably delighted to receive the visit.
The deal in question is the Chagos Islands agreement, under which Britain would cede sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius while retaining use of the Diego Garcia military base. Whether or not you think it is a good deal is beside the point. The point is that a British politician flew to a foreign country to help a foreign leader destroy it. William Joyce, who went to the gallows in 1946 for broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin, would have found the method admirably efficient. The microphone, it turns out, is optional.
“Germany calling, Germany calling…” The most chilling words on British radio. Now imagine them in a Florida tan.
The Original Lord Haw-Haw: A Useful Voice
William Joyce was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906 — a fact that would later prove legally crucial at his treason trial. After growing up in Ireland and England, he became a gifted orator who rose through the ranks of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, serving as Director of Propaganda before a falling-out with Mosley led him to found his own, even more extreme, National Socialist League.
In the summer of 1939, sensing that war was imminent and fearing internment, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Within weeks, Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Propaganda had snapped him up. What Goebbels needed was a credible British voice — someone who sounded authentically English, knew British culture, and could speak to ordinary people across the Channel to erode their trust in their own government. Joyce was perfect for the role.
His broadcasts on Germany Calling drew an estimated six million regular listeners at their peak, with up to eighteen million tuning in occasionally. The Daily Express gave him the mocking nickname Lord Haw-Haw, which stuck. Moreover, his core message remained consistent: the British working class was being exploited by a corrupt elite; the war was a racket cooked up by bankers and politicians; ordinary Britons had nothing to gain from it. Sound familiar? Anti-establishment populism travels well across borders, particularly when a foreign power stands ready to amplify it. Indeed, Britain has a long tradition of radicals who clashed with power — but Joyce took that tradition somewhere far darker, as our article on the history of British protest explores.
The Mar-a-Lago Dispatch
The Chagos visit is not an isolated incident. Rather, it represents the logical endpoint of a career spent cultivating foreign power at the expense of domestic accountability. Farage was among the very first British politicians to publicly back Trump’s 2016 campaign, and he appeared on stage at Trump rallies before Trump rewarded him with the suggestion that Farage should become Britain’s ambassador to Washington — a suggestion Downing Street promptly rejected. Trump dubbed him Mr. Brexit, a nickname Farage wore with the pride of a medieval vassal given a title by his lord. He attended Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. He has become a fixture on Fox News. In the most literal sense, he now functions as a presence in American political life that serves American political interests.
Meanwhile, Trump called Starmer a loser with no future. Farage flew to Mar-a-Lago. Joyce received the German War Merit Cross. The currency of foreign approval has simply changed denomination.
There is also the Russia dimension, which the Chagos story rather overshadows but history should not forget. During his years as a UKIP leader and MEP, Farage appeared multiple times on RT, the Kremlin-funded broadcaster. In 2014, he named Vladimir Putin as the world leader he most admired “as an operator.” That quote, and everything that has followed it, is set out with dates and sources in Very Brexit Problems’ register of Farage and Reform UK investigations. Furthermore, the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election identified him as a person of interest. Investigators never accused him of wrongdoing and he was not a suspect. Nevertheless, the pattern of usefulness to governments hostile to British interests has, at this point, become a recurring theme rather than a coincidence.
The Anatomy of a Useful Voice
Historians distinguish between two types of foreign-influenced political actors: the true believer and the useful idiot. Joyce belonged to the first category — a committed fascist ideologue who genuinely believed in the Nazi cause. The useful idiot, by contrast, is someone whose views happen to align with a foreign power’s interests: a figure amplified and cultivated by that power, yet largely indifferent to the role they play. Foreign actors have long understood that effective propaganda does not need manufacture. It merely needs discovery, funding and broadcast.
What made Lord Haw-Haw so valuable to Goebbels was precisely that he did not look like a foreign asset. He sounded British. He understood British grievances. His contempt for the political establishment was authentic, or at least authentically performed. As a result, the message landed harder because it arrived wrapped in a familiar accent. The same principle applies today. A domestic political voice, however closely aligned with foreign interests, carries a credibility that overtly foreign propaganda can never achieve. This is why Goebbels recruited Joyce. This is why Trump promotes Farage. The mechanism is identical; only the ideology has been updated. For a sense of how eccentric and self-destructive British political figures have historically behaved, see our piece on Britain’s greatest political eccentrics.
The Transatlantic Irony
The historical parallel carries a delicious irony. Joyce was American-born yet served Germany against Britain. Farage is British-born yet has spent years serving the interests of American political factions that show open contempt for British institutions and British foreign policy. Crucially, both men wrap themselves in the flag while working for the people who would burn it. Both attack the British establishment with borrowed fire: Joyce with Nazi ideology, Farage with MAGA talking points recycled for a British audience.
In addition, Lord Haw-Haw’s propaganda consistently attacked British politicians and the class system while claiming to speak for real Britons. Farage has followed the same rhetorical arc for thirty years: the outsider taking on the establishment, the voice of the forgotten working people, the man willing to say what others dare not. That this message has found enthusiastic amplification in Washington and Moscow is, at minimum, worth noticing. That Farage now actively travels to foreign capitals to act against his own government’s foreign policy moves the conversation from rhetoric to action.
The most effective propaganda does not need to be manufactured. It merely needs to be found, funded and broadcast.
The Verdict of History
On 3 January 1946, the British state hanged William Joyce at Wandsworth Prison. He was the last person executed for treason in the United Kingdom. His conviction rested on a narrow but decisive point: by obtaining a British passport, he had placed himself under the protection of the Crown, and by broadcasting Nazi propaganda he had betrayed that protection.
Nobody suggests that Farage should hang. The comparison has real limits and those limits matter. However, the flight to Mar-a-Lago to lobby against British foreign policy is not one of those limits. It is the parallel made flesh. Lord Haw-Haw broadcast from Berlin to undermine British government policy during wartime. Farage flew to Florida to undermine British government policy during peacetime. The legal distinction is enormous. Nevertheless, the political behaviour is the same: a British politician, working alongside a foreign leader, to frustrate the will of the British state. Every generation produces one. Furthermore, history is rarely kind to them.
Lord Haw-Haw would have recognised Nigel Farage immediately. Not necessarily as a fellow traveller, but certainly as a fellow craftsman. The same populist grievances. The same foreign patron. The same claim to speak for the people while serving power elsewhere. The microphone has changed. The suntan is new. Everything else is drearily familiar.
If you’d rather not be counted among his audience, VeryBrexitProblems makes the point on a shirt: I think, therefore I am not a Reform voter.
Historical sources: IWM (Imperial War Museum); National WWII Museum;. Contemporary references: Politico EU; Huffington Post UK; Washington Examiner; Guido Fawkes (March 2026).
More from the protest and revolution archive: The history of British protest: from Peterloo to punk · Poetic injustice: 5 British poets who died fighting Fascism
