Nigel Farage’s surprise campaign for the upcoming British general election got off to a sticky start Tuesday when someone chucked a milkshake in his face.
The right-wing populist, who announced a day earlier that he’d changed his mind after originally saying he wouldn’t seek a parliamentary seat in the July election, was making his first campaign appearance in the seaside town he’s hoping to represent when he was drenched by the drink. Video footage of the incident appears to show a young woman throwing the beverage at Farage outside a pub before running away.
The woman allegedly behind the attack was identified by The Sun as Victoria Thomas-Bowen, 25, who reportedly runs an OnlyFans account.
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She told the BBC after the incident that she’d lobbed the drink at Farage because she “just felt like it.” “He doesn’t stand for me, he doesn’t represent anything I believe in, or any of the people around here,” the woman, who gave her name only as Victoria, said, according to The Times. “He doesn’t represent us, he’s not from here.”
Clacton, the parliamentary district which Farage will be contesting on July 4, holds particular significance for him. In 2014, it’s where a candidate for the U.K. Independence Party—the Eurosceptic party Farage once led—first won a seat in the House of Commons. At the time, Farage hailed the win by saying he’d “shaken up British politics.”
He left UKIP four years later and founded the Brexit Party, now known as Reform U.K. Farage was campaigning for the party in Newcastle in 2019 when he had a milkshake thrown at him—a Five Guys banana and salted caramel milkshake, to be precise.
The attack was so predictable at the time that police in Scotland had even asked a McDonald’s near to where one of his rallies took place to stop serving milkshakes. According to British press reports, the incident on Tuesday involved a McDonald’s banana milkshake.
The Newcastle assailant later lost their job and was ordered to pay money to Farage—including for his suit to be cleaned—after pleading guilty to common assault over the incident. It’s not clear if anyone was arrested in connection with the Clacton hit.
