What was claimed
Videos show Nigel Farage saying “London is fast becoming the wild west and an absolute s***show” criticising the Mayor for “taking the piss out of each and every one of us”.
Our verdict
This video is a deepfake, created using fake audio and an old clip of Nigel Farage talking about something else. He makes no mention of London or Sadiq Khan in the original.
Videos shared thousands of times on social media appear to show Nigel Farage criticising London’s leadership.
The Reform UK leader appears to say “London is fast becoming the wild west and an absolute s***show” and calls on people to “get rid of this ridiculous mayor” claiming “he is taking the piss out of each and every one of us”.
It’s true that Mr Farage has frequently criticised the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan, calling him “ghastly” and describing London as being in “a state of collapse” and “lawless”. But the audio in this particular clip is fake and an old video has been used to make a deepfake of Mr Farage.
We traced the visual elements of this clip to a video posted by Mr Farage in December 2025 in which he criticises Labour about the Budget as well as the Conservative party’s response, and its own financial record. He makes no mention of London or Sir Sadiq in this clip.
Mr Farage’s hand gestures and the movement of his head at the beginning of the video when he says “well, the aftermath of the budget, it is a complete and utter shambles” matches the beginning of the fake version circulating online.
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The original video is also higher resolution than the fake posted on social media, particularly around the mouth. Haziness around the lips and mouth area is a tell tale sign a video has been poorly lip-synced, showing how Nigel Farage was deepfaked to make it seem as if he is saying something different.
What about the rest of the video?
The deepfake video cuts to a real clip of the leader of the City Hall Conservatives, Susan Hall, questioning the deputy mayor for policing and crime, Kaya Comer-Schwartz, for her views on what would make London safer. Ms Hall claims “the mayor is reducing the amount of police officers” and asked why Ms Comer-Schwartz is “watching the Metropolitan Police reduce in numbers”.
It’s true that Met Police officer numbers are falling. We recently wrote in more detail about crime levels in London under Sir Sadiq here.
We’ve fact checked multiple fake lip-sync videos in the past, including another similar video showing President Donald Trump criticising Sadiq Khan spliced with real footage from the Greater London Authority.
Before sharing content like this which you may see online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a genuine and trustworthy source. Our Full Fact toolkit and guides on how to spot AI-generated audio, images and deepfake videos can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because the audio of Nigel Farage in these clips is fake.
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