The grinning figure taking a cigarette break outside the front door of The Irish News, and enjoying some banter with passers-by, did not at that stage look much like a potential future UK prime minister.
However, Nigel Farage has made something of a habit of defying expectations, and a range of serious commentators are talking up the prospect that his deeply contentious political journey will ultimately take him to Downing Street.
The bookmakers agree, with one firm last week making him the clear favourite to be the next premier at the noticeably short price of 11/4, well ahead of the new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch back on 13/2.
He was certainly treated with enormous deference during his appearances in the course of the Washington presidential inauguration, with close associates of Donald Trump firmly predicting that Farage would indeed succeed Keir Starmer.
Farage was developing his dangerous mix of populism and xenophobia long before his friend Trump came to prominence, and the result of the US election has strongly encouraged the notion that, particularly during times of economic uncertainty, a new political order could emerge on both sides of the Atlantic.
None of this seemed likely some 12 years ago, when, during a visit to Belfast, Farage asked to drop in for a chat at The Irish News, still in its previous Donegall Street base, with his then United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) colleagues David McNarry MLA and Councillor Henry Reilly.
McNarry, who organised the engagement, said his party leader was keen to listen to as many points of view as possible, although we agreed in advance that most of our readers would not exactly be well disposed towards UKIP.
Farage turned out to be focussed, witty and well informed about politics in Ireland, north and south, possibly influenced by the fact that his first wife, Irish nurse Gráinne Hayes, successfully treated him in hospital after he almost lost a leg in a road traffic accident.
They married in 1988, had two children and divorced in 1997.
His status had been steadily growing, helped considerably when the sitting Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, caved in to right-wing pressures in his party and said earlier in 2013 that, if given another term of office, he would renegotiate relationships with the EU and allow a referendum to decide whether the UK should remain as a member.
The term Brexit was not widely known when Farage breezed into the boardroom of The Irish News, with a British withdrawal from the EU regarded as fanciful and a widespread sense that a vote would never actually happen in the first place.
I set out the huge benefits which the EU had brought to all parts of Ireland, as well as the key role it had played in the major political progress witnessed before and after the Good Friday Agreement, and he did not disagree, but it was obvious his priorities were elsewhere.
He smiled politely at my scepticism about the wider prospects for his campaign, and circumstances were of course to prove him right, but the exchanges then took an unexpected turn when Henry Reilly mentioned that he had been friendly with my late father, Arthur.
They were from different traditions in Kilkeel, Co Down, but had been involved together on a number of community initiatives, and a slightly bemused Farage was then treated to a detailed debate on the issues and personalities of the Mourne region going back for some decades.
When the conversation eventually returned to the rest of Europe, Farage explained calmly, and without reference to the darkly anti-immigration themes he later developed, why he believed trends were moving in his direction and why he expected that profound change would follow.
He was at the heart of the 2016 Vote Leave earthquake, and all the subsequent upheavals, although he has always been surrounded by contradictions, including his suggestion to The Irish Times in 2023 that, despite being an avowed unionist, he believed that a united Ireland was coming, but was still some distance away.
Farage is today the leader and the legal owner of Reform UK, which is neck-and-neck with Labour in the latest opinion polls, despite the involvement of activists past and present in racist ideology, but this has not dissuaded some Conservatives from proposing that he should instead take control of their party.
I don’t think he will be the next UK premier but I have been wrong about him in the past.
In the event that he does achieve his ambition, he will at least be better briefed about the town of Kilkeel than most of his predecessors.
n.doran@irishnews.com