Nigel Farage has qualified his admiration of Donald Trump, saying he could not support his comments about groping women, banning Muslims from the US or derogatory remarks about Mexicans.
The Ukip leader was pressed about his links to Trump in a new documentary presented by Jeremy Paxman on the US presidential race to be shown on the BBC on Monday.
Farage, who has appeared at a rally with Trump and praised him in the spin room after one of the presidential debates, came under fire from some of his Ukip MEPs this week for defending the controversial Republican nominee.
Asked about the recent controversy over the “Trump tapes” about groping women, Farage told the programme that it had badly hurt the politician’s chance of becoming US president.
“I just saw this whole thing as sort of, an extreme form of alpha-male boasting … as the kind of boasting that some men do – it doesn’t mean that they actually do it,” said Farage.
While Farage has not explicitly endorsed Trump, he has appeared alongside him during the campaign and said he could never vote for the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Pressed again about his alliance with Trump, Farage told Paxman: “Well, look, it’s not just that is it? I mean, there were the comments about Mexicans, equally there was the idea that you could have a total ban on anybody coming into America from one particular religion.
“You know, there are lots of things in this campaign that I couldn’t support in any way at all and nor do I … But I spoke to people who were, Trump voters – [they were] going to vote Trump in this election, and do you know what? – they couldn’t care less. They couldn’t give a damn what Trump says, who he offends because they see him as their weapon against the establishment and they see Hillary as being the epitome of that establishment.”
Farage, who has returned temporarily as Ukip leader after the shortlived tenure of Diane James, said people were voting for Trump because of the “little people saying: ‘We have had enough ... and we want a change and we don’t care if that change causes a rupture’”.
His remarks do not represent a complete disavowal of Trump, but acknowledge he is not entirely easy with some of the Republican candidate’s positions. His cooling toward the former Apprentice host came amid a flurry of new accusations from women who claim Trump sexually assaulted them.
A former contestant on the reality business show, Summer Zervos, on Friday accused Trump of groping or aggressively kissing her on two separate occasions in 2007, when she met him privately for what she thought were going to be discussions about job opportunities.
Zervos said Trump greeted her and said goodbye to her at a meeting in his New York office with a kiss on the lips. Brushing it off as his form of greeting, she said, she agreed to meet Trump for dinner later that year when he travelled to Los Angeles.
She claimed that in the later meeting Trump greeted her with an open-mouthed, aggressive kiss while grabbing her shoulder and put his hand on her breast. Several times, she claimed, she pushed him away and indicated he should stop.
Trump has fiercely denied all such accusations, which also followed a presidential debate last Sunday in which he said he had never done the things he boasted of in the Access Hollywood tape, remarks he said were merely “locker-room talk”.
In his statement, Trump said: “I vaguely remember Ms Zervos as one of the many contestants on The Apprentice over the years. To be clear, I never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life. In fact, Ms Zervos continued to contact me for help, emailing my office on 14 April of this year asking that I visit her restaurant in California.”
Earlier this week, two Ukip MEPs publicly condemned Farage for appearing to play down the Trump tapes, with one saying he was trying to “defend the indefensible”.
Jane Collins, who represents Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, said she had previously been a strong supporter of Farage, but “to make this kind of criminal behaviour seem normative makes me seriously question his judgment”.
She said: “Trump’s sexist and derogatory comments have unequivocally proven he is totally unfit to be president of the United States, and Nigel Farage should think very carefully about defending him.”
In a separate statement, William Dartmouth, Ukip MEP for South West England, said he wished to “strongly disassociate” himself from Farage’s defence of Trump’s remarks, adding that many of his fellow MEPs shared his view.
Farage explains his opinion of Trump in the documentary Paxman on Trump Vs Clinton: Divided America for a special hour-long Panorama programme on BBC1 at 9pm on Monday.
The documentary is an independent commission for the BBC, like a previous one about the EU referendum, and marks Paxman’s return to the channel since he left as the presenter of Newsnight in 2014 after 25 years.
It coincides with the publication of Paxman’s memoir, A Life in Questions, which has already shown his readiness to criticise his paymasters as well as his political interviewees.