It’s only when Farage starts to manufacture innocent explanations that the affair descends into farce, stops making any sense, and suddenly you can’t get your head around it.
His versions usually defy everything already known as well as basic human experience on planet Earth; they need constant back-filling to smooth out multiple inconsistencies, facts have to be bent like pretzels, people do things well outside the limits of believability, nothing makes logical sense, and every answer raises more questions which demand increasingly outlandish answers.
But, accept that Farage and his close associates are thoroughly bad actors secretly doing what you have always assumed they do anyway, and suddenly the known facts all slot smoothly and plausibly into place. Doesn't this apply to most cover-ups?
Last Thursday’s Channel 4 story involving the ‘sting’ carried out on Reform UK by Verbatim, a group of very resourceful investigative journalists, drew the curtains aside on the sort of activities we have all suspected for years about Farage. We should be grateful to them. Money is his main motivation. I don’t doubt other parties may have been guilty of similar things in the past, albeit not on the same scale or with the same reckless insouciance.
If this doesn’t make the case for banning all private funding of political parties, nothing will. America has shown what happens when billionaires provide most of the money, and this isn’t a model we should allow to develop over here.
I would be surprised if there are no criminal charges in spite of Farage repeatedly claiming the party did nothing wrong. There is actual video evidence of wrongdoing. If nobody is prosecuted, the entire political system in this country will be tarred with the same brush and the Electoral Commission may as well be disbanded. Both Labour and the Lib Dems have reported the matter to the Metropolitan Police. I’m not sure if the Tories have, but if not, I’d suggest they do so asap; otherwise it looks like an admission of guilt on their part. Sometimes you need to scramble aboard a bandwagon very quickly.
The programme was deliberately timed to coincide with the first day of Reform’s party conference in Birmingham. It certainly spiked whatever headlines Farage expected to get this weekend. All the papers are full of the jaw-dropping revelations.
I want to concentrate on a few of the most significant points.
First, Farage looks like an idiot by having his own party open an investigation into what was discussed at a meeting that he attended. His defence appears to be that he didn’t know what was going on in front of his very own nose. For a man harbouring ambitions to lead the nation, it looks pathetic.
Secondly, James Orr, Reform’s Head of Policy (and a Cambridge associate professor no less) revealed to the undercover journalist (one he had only just met), that Reform regrettably couldn’t get any British-based donors. That didn't seem to raise any issues for Orr.
Next, he openly admitted that he knew funding three opinion polls amounted to a donation in kind and should be declared, but said he wouldn’t tell anyone and the party could “easily get away with it.”
Daniel Jukes, Farage’s right-hand man and his future Downing Street chief of staff (so he claimed), was even more loose-tongued. Not only did he admit Reform had taken money from several overseas (and therefore impermissible) donors illegally routed through UK-based family members, he actually named the donors! Verbatim cut the names so we don’t know who they are, but the authorities soon will. What that does to the donors involved, or to future donors who might want to keep the arrangement secret for obvious reasons, I really don’t know. But it can’t be good, can it?
Farage has dismissed this as “loose pub talk.” But if it wasn’t true, that’s even worse. Jukes has defamed some well-known (the donor's names were spoken as if they would be instantly recognised) people by suggesting they were engaged in something illegal.
What also struck me was the casualness of it all. There was such a relaxed, untroubled air, as if what we were witnessing was an everyday occurrence inside the upper reaches of Reform UK. Nobody appeared to question any of it.
Farage says the party has never taken any illegal donations, but they certainly accept money in the form of untraceable crypto for a start, and the other parties have raised this on numerous occasions. Plus, there hasn’t yet been an official investigation to clear him, so he can’t be sure.
As for the putative £500,000 donation, Farage’s basic defence seems to be that he attended a meeting where the offer was discussed, but he didn’t know they were discussing it, and therefore the party has launched an internal investigation so he can find out what it was that he was discussing! Really?
His excuse is that he "wasn't listening"- but every interjection from him was perfectly in context. Quite a feat, eh?
He claims he was told it was all legal and he unquestioningly accepted that. I think this helps explain why he is constantly surprised by all the dodgy financial goings-on around him, some being conducted by a convicted fraudster. Farage is remarkably incurious for a potential PM.
He told ITV’s Robert Peston that the scandals would “keep on coming” as if he was the victim of a vast plot to discredit him involving thousands of independent journalists and others. This is victimhood writ large.
Farage was interviewed on Friday morning by Nick Ferrari on LBC, where he doubled down and again denied the party had done “anything wrong.” The BBC were told that the party has launched an internal investigation, but Farage seems to have predetermined the outcome. The party said the investigation should be "allowed to proceed independently and without prejudice" and it would make no further comment for now. Presumably, excluding the leader on umpteen national TV channels?
Note that Orr and Jukes, previously senior people who were quite explicit about their close proximity to Farage and the power they held, were suddenly downgraded to mere “contractors” as if they were somehow totally separate from the party and therefore prime candidates for being thrown under buses.
Ferrari, by the way, was a terrible interviewer and obviously didn’t know much about the sting. He seemed to be taking instructions through his headphones from someone better informed outside the studio.
Farage claimed the opinion polls in question, apparently paid for by an overseas donor, were commissioned by an “independent corporate entity” and not by Reform UK. This doesn’t seem right, and it would be interesting to find out who he thinks this third party was. At least one poll was actually published by The Telegraph (who erroneously claimed they had commissioned it) before the ‘donor’ was even asked to pay for it.
The pollster, James Johnson, has already acknowledged on camera that Dan Jukes had commissioned the work and even asked for it to be customised for him. Jukes, Farage’s chief of staff, remember, also got the quotation. It’s not clear who authorised him to commission the poll. If it wasn’t Farage, who was it? Or was Jukes doing it off his own bat?
There is zero doubt that Reform knew about the polls before they were published and in one case, before any survey work at all had been done. I don’t think this defence is going to work.
Perhaps the most disturbing comment from Farage came at towards the end of the Ferrari interview (at about 9 mins, 40 secs in) when he talked about the “fundamental change” Reform would bring about once in government and that he wouldn’t let “anything get in our way”, which he explicitly said meant “the House of Lords, the judiciary, the civil service.” He would not be “obstructed” even if Parliament had to sit “24 hours a day” to get legislation through.
When politicians talk about the judiciary being an obstruction, it's time to start worrying.
Later, in his conference speech in Birmingham, Farage clarified his thinking about judges being an “obstacle” saying he would remove their ability to rely on conventions like the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which critics blame for hindering some deportations. He’s already committed to withdrawing equality, employment rights laws, and more.
"We don't want the courts striking down, do we, the will of the people," he said. It’s the old ‘will of the people’ argument, as interpreted, of course, by a populist demagogue.
"Parliament makes the law, judges interpret the law. We will do whatever it takes, and perhaps have to consider how judicial appointments work in the future,” he said, presumably meaning the political appointment of judges who agree with him, as happens in America. Look where that has got them. He said he would declare a "national emergency."
The irony is that he is only just behind Labour in the polls, while his shadow chancellor, Jenrick, is talking of cutting government spending by £100 billion in the first 100 days, and the burden of these cuts will fall disproportionately on his supporters and his constituents in Clacton. If he ever gets into No 10, there would very soon follow the sort of deep regret that has followed another of Farage’s failed solutions to Britain’s problems, Brexit.
But, you have now been warned. The rule of law won’t mean anything under a Farage government.
Farage and 1930s Germany
Listening to Farage, I get an echo of the speeches Hitler made in the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany. The nation needs fundamental change. In Hitler’s case (and if some claims about the young Farage are to be believed, in his case too), the Jews were the problem - and the press.
These are extracts from a speech made by Hitler on 28 July 1922 in Munich:
It began by claiming Germany’s problems were the result of granting citizenship rights to Jews, who he said were “definitely a race apart from all others, that has always formed and will form a State within the State”.
Against the media or the “bandits of the press”, he said:
“It is not the peoples which agitate against us, it is the secret power of the organised press which ceaselessly pours new poison into the hearts of these peoples.”
The existing political parties in post-war Germany wouldn’t solve the problem, they were too namby-pamby:
"Only look at these parties and their leaders, Stresemann [then Chancellor] and the rest of them. They are indeed not dangerous. They never go to the roots of the evil: they all still think that with forbearance, with humanity, with accommodation they can fight a battle which has not its equal in this world. Through gentleness they think that they must demonstrate to the enemy of the Left that they are ready for appeasement so as to stay the deadly cancerous ulcer through a policy of moderation."
His own Nazi party, he complained, was a victim that had been the subject of constant attacks:
"We National Socialists who for three years have done nothing but preach - abused and insulted by all, by some mocked and scorned, by others traduced and slandered - we cannot retreat! For us there is only one path which leads straight ahead. We know that the fight which now is blazing will be a hard struggle. It will not be fought out in the court of the Reich at Leipzig, it will not be fought out in a cabinet at Berlin, it will be fought out through those factors which in their hard reality have ever up to the present time made world history."
There is a whole collection of these early Hitler speeches from 1922 to 1945 HERE.
Farage makes exactly the same sort of arguments. The nation is broken, the establishment that caused it is weak and must be destroyed and replaced by the only party which really understands what hard actions need to be taken and has the ‘blood and iron’ ready to do it.
Farage is a dangerous man. Let’s hope that in a few years we don’t all regret a missed opportunity to prosecute before he gets the chance of power.
