The search for Nigel Farage’s elusive wristwatch
We investigate the mystery of Nigel Farage’s wristwatch. Could the so-called man of the people really wear a £40,000 Patek Philippe Calatrava? Andy Blackmore starts digging and finds a surprising answer…
Sometimes the watch we wear tells more about us than we would care to admit, far more than any session with a psychologist. With that in mind, I set out to discover the watch that graced Nigel Farage’s wrist in the hope it might give me an insight into what makes him tick.
A quick internet search revealed that I was not the first person to try. There was even a picture, an image of Farage hugging a man in condolence, taken in the wee small hours on 9 May, the night he stood and lost to Craig Mackinlay in Thanet South in the 2015 general election. Sadly, all we can see of the timepiece is a blurred, out-of-focus dial in the bottom left of the frame. So near yet so far.
What is the dress watch on Nigel Farage’s wrist?
The piece in question is a thin, gold-coloured dress watch with a clean, restrained dial, a narrow bezel, and what appears to be a small seconds sub-dial at six o’clock. It has the visual language of a high-end vintage Swiss timepiece.
Someone called Frank Conway had posted the image on Facebook with the question, “Can anyone tell what watch Nigel Farage is wearing here?” A few people had taken the trouble to reply, but one post in particular set my pulse racing. “According to ChatGPT, it’s a Patek Philippe Calatrava.” If this were a Looney Tunes cartoon, you would have seen the barrels rolling behind my eyes and the word “jackpot” written on my eyeballs.
Patek Philippe is the very definition of a “City” watch. The Square Mile summed up in a timepiece. Long lunches and short hair, pinstripes and bowlers, Bow Church, Black cabs, the Bank of England and City police, all distilled and worn on the wrist. It would be a delicious irony were the pint-swilling, salt-of-the-earth populist and anti-establishment everyman wearing the ultimate establishment watch, the very emblem of institutional power and money.
When Roberto Calvi, an Italian financier and head of Banco Ambrosiano, dubbed by the press as “God’s Banker”, was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge on 18 June 1982, he was wearing not one but two Patek Philippes. A wristwatch and a pocket watch by the iconic Swiss maker. The wristwatch had stopped at 1:52 am, which was used to help establish the time of death based on tide levels and water damage.
To the uninitiated, the Patek Philippe Calatrava is a nice watch. I’d go as far as to say it’s a very nice watch. Given its impeccable pedigree, it’s not cheap. The model Farage appears to be wearing, with a yellow gold case and gold dial, retails new for £38,150. With that, I downloaded a copy of the image, cropped and extrapolated it, and asked our AI overlords for their opinion.
Bingo. They both agreed it was indeed a Patek Philippe Calatrava. And as we all know, AI rarely makes mistakes.
Patek Philippe Caltrave: a nice watch
And it chimed with my suspicions: if I had to wager what watch Mr Farage would wear, it would be a Patek. All I needed to do was find a clear image of him wearing it and write my acceptance speech for the British Press Awards. To be honest, after looking at around 18,000 images of Nigel Farage, I deserve an award.
Whether by judgment, image housekeeping, or plain duff luck, it seemed Mr Farage either no longer wore a watch or kept it firmly hidden behind a shirt sleeve. Was our populist PM in waiting worried about pulling a Sarkozy?
A reminder: in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, as he navigated the dense throng in Place de la Concorde, Nicolas Sarkozy clasped hands with his enthusiastic supporters. But midway through, without breaking stride, he discreetly slipped off his watch and swiftly tucked it into his pocket. His team later claimed someone was trying to steal it but the press tore into him, interpreting the gesture as both a sign of Sarkozy’s distrust of his own people and a tacit admission that such a lavish timepiece was unbefitting of his position. His friend Jacques Séguéla didn’t help: “If you don’t have a Rolex by the time you reach 50,” he said, “then you have clearly failed in your life.”
The watch in question wasn’t actually a Rolex – it was a Patek Philippe 5140G-001 Perpetual Calendar in white gold with an opaline white dial, worth about £50,000. The incident torpedoed his campaign with the precision of a French-made Exocet missile.
Not wanting to repeat the mistake, Emmanuel Macron was spotted removing his watch during a live television debate. After catching a glimpse of bling, his hands disappear under the newsroom table, only to emerge mysteriously devoid of ornamentation. On this occasion, the watch in question was a Bell & Ross BR V1-92, which retails for around £1,900 (Macron would later claim he removed the watch because it was banging on the table, which in fairness it was).
It doesn’t end there: Vladimir Putin had an almost identical episode in 2023. The Russian president is known to have amassed an enviable collection of Swiss watches, including an A Lange & Söhne Tourbograph worth some $500,000, a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar worth $60,000, and a Blancpain Léman Aqua Lung Grande Date.
Ever the shrewd operator, he would switch these watches ahead of public appearances, instead slipping on a more affordable – and more local – watch by the Imperial Peterhof Factory (IPF); a real man of the people. But a couple of years ago he started a broadcast wearing one of his real watches, surreptitiously slipping it off mid-sentence before clasping his arm as if the strap had merely chafed his wrist. (An interesting aside: Putin is said to have banned anyone from wearing wristwatches during one-on-one meetings with him over potential surveillance and assassination threats.)
Yet try as I might, I could find no record of Mr Farage wearing his flashy watch, just the odd blurred timepiece in a few frames, or him looking at a space on his wrist where a watch should be.
In the end, I was forced to conclude that Mr Farage had stopped wearing a watch – at least in public – around ten years ago. Perhaps the one I spotted on 9 May in Thanet South was an aberration.
Finally we find the watch…
And then… bullseye. I came across a shot of Nigel looking forlornly at the ground at the UKIP party conference, taken on 20 September 2013. While the photographer has focused on his face, the watch is on the same plane.
As I open Photoshop, I’m literally shaking. The picture is sharp. I can see a name…. It’s a… It’s a bloody Sekonda. A Sekonda, a brand created in 1966 to export watches produced by the USSR’s state factories. It’s about as far from a Patek Calatrava as a watch can get: a budget brand with Soviet origins, now sold in Argos alongside toasters and air fryers.
I thought I’d better put my findings to the man himself. Is the Sekonda a good watch? And why are there no new photos of him wearing it?
“Not worn one since Covid,” he replied succinctly. So there you go. What a disappointing end to my investigation: Nigel Farage did indeed wear a watch that the average man on the street could afford, that you will almost certainly find on the wrist of at least one punter in your average Wetherspoons. And now he wears no watch at all. Well played, Nigel.