Asked if women should play football, Farage replied: “Here’s the bigger question. Do we think, chaps, when we’re there in the front line, when the balloon goes up, with fixed bayonets, when the whistle’s about to blow to go over the top, do we actually want to be there with women beside us? Do we? What an extraordinarily bizarre idea! I certainly don’t think so.

He added: “But maybe it’s because I’ve got so many women pregnant over the years that I have a different view. I find it very difficult to think that we could stand up and run over the top together, into the machine guns or whatever. Men and women are different – thank God!”

The interview, conducted with Belgian magazine Up Front in 2010, was uncovered on Wednesday by Political Scrapbook.

Farage was also reported to have agreed with comments made by then Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom about maternity leave. “Godfrey’s comment that ‘no employer with a brain in the right place would employ a young, single, free woman’ has been proved so right,” Farage said. “With this lunacy, that if you have children you get three months paid leave off work, or six months paid leave off work – he absolutely got it spot on.”

Bloom was kicked out of Ukip by Farage last year when he was recorded telling a room full of women that they were “sluts” and then proceeded to hit a reporter over the head with a book before running away in a taxi.

The Ukip leader has made controversial comments about the role of women in the workplace since that interview took place. In January he claimed there was not “any discrimination against women at all” in the City of London.

Farage has admitted that his party does not do as well among women and men, but said women were “slowly but surely” taking over Ukip. “Nobody has done more in Ukip to promote women than I have,” he said in February.”When you get the results from European elections you’ll be astonished to see as many women as men in the top slots in Ukip, things have changed.”