Peter Ettedgui and another former classmate of Nigel Farage’s told ITV’s GMB the Reform UK leader racially abused others throughout his teenage years

A former classmate of Nigel Farage has detailed how the Reform UK leader racially “tormented” him and others throughout school.

Peter Ettedgui, who is Jewish, told ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Tuesday that “it was almost like a kind of gut reflex when he saw me”.

“He regularly would come up to me and say ‘Hitler was right’ and he’d also come up to me, and he’d go, ‘g*s them’,” said Mr Ettedgui, whose German Jewish grandparents escaped Nazi Germany in 1937.

“I just learned to throw a kind of protective cloak over myself and ignore him,” he continued.

“But that experience marked me. You know, anti-semitism is often called the oldest hatred. And when I think of the oldest hatred, it’s Nigel Farage’s face that I absolutely see in front of me.”

It comes after The Guardian last month published allegations detailing allegedly racist behaviour from Farage when he was a teenager at Dulwich College.

More than a dozen of his school peers, including Mr Ettedgui, told the newspaper of alleged incidents of deeply offensive behaviour by the Reform UK leader throughout his teenage years.

Farage has denied the allegations and said he has “never directly really tried to go and hurt anybody.”

The attorney general, Richard Hermer, has called for the Reform UK leader to apologise and told The Guardian he “had clearly deeply hurt” many and that his “constantly changing” denials of the allegations had become unconvincing.

Another former classmate, Jean-Pierre Lihou, wasn’t the target of Farage’s comments but said he regularly heard him making offensive comments to Mr Ettedgui and “anybody who wasn’t white”.

Mr Lihou said Farage’s defence that he’s “never directly racially abused anybody” is “just not true, I’ve witnessed it,” he told ITV’s GMB.

“Anybody who wasn’t white would likely have a comment, and that’s for many years – we’re talking 13, 14 all the way up to senior school,” he added.

“He would go up to [them] and go ‘useless’ or ‘send them home’.”

He claims he heard Farage singing “g*s them all” at Jewish classmates, adding: “He used to regularly sing that at school and it’s horrendous.”

In response to Mr Ettedgui and Mr Lihou’s allegations, Farage told GMB: “I can categorically say that the stories being told about me from 50 years ago are not true.”

He claimed they are “politically motivated”.

Mr Ettedgui said he would say deep down there is not a political motivation for speaking out, but a “deeply personal” one: “I do not want to see a school bully become my prime minister.”

He said he wasn’t going to talk about his experiences publicly as he didn’t feel it was “fair” and feared it would be a case of one word against another’s – until others began to speak out about their experiences.

“It was only after Farage began denying it that I thought, ‘well I’ve got to say something’ because there’s no way that he couldn’t remember, or there was no way that I was lying about it or misremembering anything,” he told GMB.

“I was really worried that it would be one person’s word against another. But what has come up, particularly in the more recent reporting, is that there’s a large number of people who not only corroborate my experience but add their own experience.”

In an interview last month, when asked if he ever racially abused fellow pupils, Farage replied, “not with intent”.

He added: “Have I said things 50 years ago that you could interpret as being banter in a playground that you could interpret in the modern light of day in some sort of way? Yes.”

Mr Ettedgui acknowledged that a lot of racially offensive terms were commonplace to hear in the 70s, “but I think Nigel Farage was of a completely different order. The regularity, the intention with which he did this to so many pupils of different races.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer previously said Farage’s response to the allegations in The Guardian was “unconvincing to say the least” and urged the Reform UK leader to apologise to people he may have hurt.

The prime minister claimed Farage “clearly remembers some of what happened” and that he is showing his “true colours”.

Also in Prime Minister’s Questions, Starmer claimed that Reform was “riddled with pro-Putin propaganda”.

Reform UK has also faced scrutiny in recent weeks over the sentencing of the party’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, after he admitted being paid £40,000 to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament.