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Nigel Farage suggests divine intervention saved him from plane crash in 2010

Nigel Farage receives an honorary doctorate from Liberty University. Photograph: YouTube. - Credit: Archant

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has said he realised he had been given a ‘purpose’ when he survived a plane crash during campaigning in the general election in 2010.

The Brexiteer was speaking after receiving an honorary doctorate from a fundamentalist Christian university that teaches against same-sex relationships.

The British politician had jetted over to Liberty University in Virginia, an institution that requires all students to sign a statement promising not to have gay sex, or sex with a transgender person, and where the president of the university even claims to have found a gay “cure”.

In a presentation on stage before receiving the doctorate the audience were told that they “tried to kill him once”, referencing a plane crash where a UKIP banner got caught up in a two-seater light aircraft.

He was interviewed by the university’s vice-president for a podcast at the university afterwards, with Farage being asked about the incident.

Nigel Farage narrowly escapes death as his plane crashed to the ground at Hinton Airfield, Northamptonshire. He is pictured with UKIP’s PR person Duncan Barkes. Photograph: Archant. – Credit: INS News Agency Ltd

He said: “How on earth I survived I will never know.”

When the interviewer suggested it was “God’s providence and protection” in response, Farage replied: “I’m alive and he (the pilot, who survived the crash, but died in 2013) is not and I did think after I survived that perhaps, just perhaps, I was put here for a purpose.”

Farage claimed that consequently any abuse or criticism he receives did not bother him.

“I climbed out of the wreckage of a light airplane crash, none of this stuff means anything to me.”

He joked that being hit by a milkshake by comparison “is nothing”.

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