According to the Guardian, more than two dozen former schoolmates have now come forward about Mr Farage’s behaviour.
Peter Ettedgui, a Bafta and Emmy-winning director who is Jewish, has said that a teenage Mr Farage would sidle up to him and say “Hitler was right” and “gas them”, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas chambers.
Cyrus Oshidar told the paper Mr Farage would call him a “Paki”.
Another student of Asian heritage, who was in the same year as Mr Farage, described him as an open racist who would say “Enoch Powell was right” to him as a form of “racial intimidation”.
The Reform UK leader has said he never racially abused anyone with intent but may have engaged in “banter in a playground”.
He has also hit out at the media for raising the allegations, accusing broadcasters of “double standards and hypocrisy” because of television shows including Are You Being Served? and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.
At a press conference on Thursday he said: “I cannot put up with the double standards of the BBC about what I am alleged to have said 49 years ago and what you were putting out on mainstream content.
“So I want an apology from the BBC for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 80s.”
Asked about the alleged past behaviour, Lord Offord said: “Well, this is 50 years ago. I was not there. I do not know what was said.
“We would all look back in our lives perhaps and say we said things when we were teenagers we might recoil from now. I do not know. That is for Nigel Farage to answer.”
Asked if he had questioned Mr Farage on it, Lord Offord said: “Yes, actually I did. And I do not believe him to be racist at all.
“Actually, he said, and he acknowledged that he had used intemperate language and language that he would not use today that perhaps was used 50 years ago in a different context.
“That does not excuse it necessarily and certainly not today’s context, but I think he has answered that question.”
Asked about the request from Holocaust survivors for an apology, Lord Offord said: “It is a very personal matter. This is about personal remarks that he made. I think that is a personal matter for him.”
Meanwhile, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Baroness Kishwer Falkner said she was confused why Mr Farage cannot “just offer an unreserved apology for any distress caused”.
She told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips programme: “Look, this is a situation I feel actually quite confused and disturbed by.
“You have a situation where, when you read these allegations in terms of what is attributed to him, it looks utterly ghastly on paper.
“And then you try and contextualise it, and you think, ‘this is perhaps 50 years ago, you know, young people say all sorts of things at school. When you are teenagers, you say and do all sorts of things’.”
She added: “But the one thing that slightly confuses me about him, and I hear his contextualisation of it all. Why cannot he just offer an unreserved apology for any distress caused?
“I just do not get it. It seems to me that that would be the most genuine thing to say if he is genuinely not a racist.”
Lord Offord decision to defect left colleagues in the Tory party stunned. The former minister was the party’s Scottish treasurer and the frontbench spokesperson on energy and net zero in the House of Lords.
In his interview, the peer was also pressed on other controversies surrounding the party, including the recent jailing of former Reform Wales leader Nathan Gill for taking pro-Russian bribes. “I do not know these people. I am not interested in what has happened in the past,” he said. “We are in a new world now.”
Lord Offord again criticised the Scottish Conservatives, claiming they had “no message” beyond opposing independence and accusing them of being “content to be in opposition”.
“Those frustrations were made very clear to them and that is why we have ended up where we are,” he said.
Challenged on Reform UK’s stance on immigration, he said the issue was part of a wider debate about work and economic contribution.
“We have always had immigration in our country. It is just it is happening faster than we have ever seen it happen before,” he said.
When it was pointed out that the numbers are coming down, Lord Offord said: “But if you just look at it in terms of the UK in the 20th century, one million people came in the 20th century. So far in 25 years of this century, seven million people have come. So it is a big difference.
“We have always been very accommodating and very welcoming. We have always been very welcoming. But this is happening faster and quicker.
“Now, here is the thing. So long as people who come here want to work, make a net contribution and want to adopt our values, learn our language, speak our language and have our values, then they are welcome. But not at the expense of our own people not working.
“We need to get our own people back to work as well. That is very important. We get our own people back to work.”
Mr Offord also defended Mr Farage’s comments on the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who have English as an additional language, calling the statistic “shocking” but insisting there was “no issue” with the children themselves.
