?A day after President Trump announced the name change of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War (which it had been called from 1789 until 1947), Nigel Farage told Newsmax he may do the same thing to the British Ministry of Defence if he and his Reform Party win the next general election.
Asked by Newsmax if he would rename the Ministry of Defence with the name it had until 1964 — namely the Ministry of War — Reform Leader Farage told us: “We may have to change it.”
Farage was in Washington, D.C. last week to testify before Congress on what he described as a threat to freedom of speech in the United Kingdom that he warned might come to the U.S.
That same day, he met with President Trump at the White House and on Wednesday evening, he appeared before an overflow crowd at Ned’s Club hosted by the new GBNews Network on which Farage appears as a commentator.
A just-completed poll of polls among likely British voters shows the Reform Party would win 31 percent to 20 percent for the ruling Labour Party led by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The same poll showed the Conservative Party at 17 percent, the Liberal Democrats at 14 percent, and the Greens at 9 percent.
Should such results come about in the next general election, Farage would almost certainly become prime minister. But the Starmer government, which was elected in 2024, has until 2029 before an election must be called.
Farage delighted the crowd at the GBNews reception by warning of the incendiary campaign he is likely to face. In his words, “You’ll hear I’m a drinker, that I’m smoker, a gambler, and a womanizer. And it’s all true!”
Before the end of World War II, almost all European countries had ministries of war. But in the years following the war’s end, most of them changed the name to ministry of defense. Italy and France both went from war to defense ministries in 1947 — the same year the U.S. retired the term Department of War renaming it Department of Defense in 1949.
The British kept their Ministry of War until the Labour Government came to power in 1964 and rebranded it the Ministry of Defence. One of the last ministers of war was John Profumo, the central figure in the sex scandal that nearly toppled the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963.
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