Nigel Farage's anti-immigration chant strikes a chord with US Republicans

Only at a gathering of America’s most dyed-in-the-wool conservatives would the otherwise obscure leader of the UK Independence party attract groupies. But apart from the fact he is clutching a glass of red wine rather than risk the local beer, Nigel Farage is in his element at the Gaylord National Convention Center outside Washington DC.

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Posing for selfies with young Republican activists; poking fun at Europeans and pouring scorn on multiculturalism, this thorn-in-the-side of the British political establishment has been invited to the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to provide a slightly spikier alternative to its traditional Tory representative – and he doesn’t disappoint.

“We have a fifth column living within our communities, a fifth column that hates us and wants to destroy us and if we are going win this great battle – for our liberty, for our democracy, for our civilisation and our culture – we are going to have to start standing up for our Judeo-Christian values,” begins Farage at a drinks reception that picks up where he left off on Fox News the day before, when he claimed the mosques of Britain had been infiltrated by criminal hate preachers.

South Carolina congressman Jeff Duncan is so smitten with the overall mix of unabashed political incorrectness, he tells Farage: “I’m American Ukip.”

For a rightwing US audience appalled that Barack Obama refuses to declare war on radical Islam and consumed by political anger over his immigration reforms, this is the right message at the right time.

“It has been taken now for decades in Britain that if you discussed immigration, it means that you are a bad person, that you harbour dislike or hatred or prejudice of somebody else and actually all I’ve ever said is that Britain is a very small island,” adds Farage, while acknowledging privately that the US is actually quite big and the parallels rather limited.

“I would never have thought 10 years ago that immigration would be a big debate in the USA,” he tells the Guardian. “The supreme irony is that for us getting through JFK, you feel guilty just queuing up – ‘what have I done wrong?’ – and [yet] there is an open door down in Mexico, so there is something very odd about this whole debate.”

Back on stage two hours later, Farage is doling out the cat nip again. “We have got to reassert who we are and what we stand for… I want liberal democracy in the west to succeed and if we want that to succeed we are going to have to stand up and fight for it,” he adds. “We must make it clear that we believe in common law, not Sharia law.”

But Britain’s chief upsetter of political apple carts is not afraid to challenge his audience here either, briefly silencing the Republican crowd by telling them they need to do more to reach out to striving, aspiring voters, rather than just the rich.

“I accept that I am a foreigner. I accept that I am a guest and I don’t want to meddle, but let me say this: if the Republican party is going to win the next presidential election I think the Republican party needs to get the kind of people it had voting for it 30 years ago,” he says. “Do you remember the Reagan Democrats? These were people who worked hard … who aspired and wanted to get on, and I don’t think at the moment the Republican party is attracting those kind of people.”

Farage also aligns himself with still somewhat fringe wing of the party exemplified by Senator Rand Paul when it comes to foreign policy, questioning whether the Anglo-American military alliance has backfired of late.

“I think the time has come for us to assess whether that action has been successful,” he says to rather warmer applause. “Every time we get involved, whether it is Afghanistan, whether it is Iraq, whether it is Libya – which, by the way, we have made very much worse than it was before we bombed the place – every time we do these things we are told by our leaders that it is to make the streets of London or New York safer. I would put it to you 15 years on, that far from doing that we have actually inflamed and stoked the fires of militant Islamism by doing what we have done.“

Reading too much into the applause levels would be misleading – not least because two-thirds of the vast auditorium has left to go to various evening drinks parties – but also because translating Nigel Farage for an American audience is something even Nigel Farage struggles with at times.

“I had a job before getting involved in politics. How about that? That’s pretty unusual these days isn’t it?” he boasts, wrongly expecting the applause that might come from a UK audience used to Westminster’s revolving political class rather than the ageing lawyers and businessmen who make up much of the Republican ranks.

At other times, he takes the opportunity of a new audience to recycle some older jokes perhaps wearing a bit thin back home.

“I am married to a girl from Germany, so nobody needs to tell me of the dangers of living in a German-dominated household,” quips Farage before turning on his full circus barker impersonation when the audience laughs a little awkwardly. “And hey, shouldn’t politics be fun anyway? Of course it should. Of course it should.”

Unlike David Cameron’s last visit to Washington, which was an unabashed pre-election effort to burnish his statesmanship badge, the Ukip leader seems less sure why he has squeezed this whistlestop tour in before his party conference in Bournemouth. “I’m polite; I was invited,” he says when asked.

But he is enjoying it nonetheless, telling his new friends at the Gaylord that he was “poised in 69 days’ time to do very well and possibly even hold the balance of power” and boasting of having “taken the [British] political establishment and rocked them to the backs of their heels”.

“In the past, there’s always been a member of the British Conservative party that has come along to this event, but I think it’s fair to say that the British Conservative party now have actually become social democrats and mostly merged with the others,” he adds with obvious delight.