The Purple Revolution: The Year That Changed Everything

By the time Nigel Farage published The Purple Revolution in the run-up to the 2015 UK general election, he had spent two decades building a party that the British political establishment had spent those same two decades dismissing. In this political memoir, he tells the story of how UKIP went from the fringes to winning the 2014 European Parliament elections, the first time a party other than Labour or the Conservatives had won a national election in Britain in over a century. The book is part campaign diary, part manifesto, and part personal reckoning. Farage frames his political journey through three near-death experiences that shaped his character and his convictions: a serious car accident in 1985, a battle with testicular cancer, and a small-plane crash on election day 2010. Each encounter with mortality sharpened his sense of urgency about what he was fighting for and why. He pulls back the curtain on the mechanics of British political campaigns, recounts his televised debates with Nick Clegg, and details the dramatic defections of Conservative MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless to UKIP. Throughout, his targets are consistent: the European Union, the Westminster establishment, and a mainstream media that he argues has systematically misrepresented both him and the movement he leads.