Populism in its purest form
Nigel Farage is rallying his voters to defend his right not to be asked inconvenient questions about his money
He’s off again! I feel like I’ve spent most of my life covering Nigel Farage’s departures from parts of public life, and yet every time I turn around, he’s popped back up, complaining about the unfairness of it all. Tuesday’s resignation from Parliament wasn’t even a real one: he’s leaving to fight a by-election on the great national issue of our time: should Nigel Farage have to explain who’s paying him?
We should be clear that the question isn’t whether the Reform leader should be allowed to accept millions of pounds in gifts, work for a TV channel, promote financial investments or take tens of thousands in speaking fees around the world. All of that is completely allowed. The only question is whether he should have to tell the rest of us about it. For some reason, this wasn’t exactly how he put it.
For a very long time, it wasn’t clear what he was saying at all. The Reform leader had disrupted all our afternoons by telling us he was preparing a statement about his future. Was he getting married? Quitting parliamentary life to spend more time with his money? Launching a cryptocurrency? Even when the statement began, we didn’t know.
The first question with any Farage broadcast these days is the same: where is he? Since the revelations about the completely legitimate sums in his bank account, the Reform leader has taken to delivering rebukes to the public and press from a series of anonymous fields, like a resistance leader on the run. This time, it initially seemed he was in Westminster, but a closer look revealed that he was in a studio somewhere, standing in front of screens. It wasn’t simply that he wasn’t going to take questions afterwards; he wasn’t even going to risk someone shouting a question as he left the studio.
The reason for that was clear to anyone who saw his Monday evening encounter with a Sky journalist who managed to catch him in an airport. A snarling Farage leaned into the camera and accused the press of harassment. It will be interesting to see if he keeps this up for the entire by-election.
“I have done nothing wrong,” Farage said. “I have not broken the law in any way at all.” The second statement, close observers will note, does not mean quite the same thing as the first. Had he broken Parliament’s rules? “The code applies to members in all aspects of their public life. It does not seek to regulate what members do in their purely personal lives.” Perhaps he is going to argue that you can take what you like from someone, so long as they call you “Daddy”.
That, for readers who haven’t been keeping up, is how George Cottrell, known around the Reform office as “Posh George”, refers to Farage. Cottrell is an extremely rich young man who served a jail term for wire fraud after meeting undercover FBI officers pretending to be drug dealers who needed help laundering money. If Cottrell’s name rings a bell, it might be because he has a new book out, the snappily titled How To Launder Money.
It was a report about undeclared gifts from Cottrell that sparked the latest round of questions about who exactly is paying for all the Reform leader’s champagne and houses. “The new attack from the media is that somehow I am a crook,” Farage said, in a clip that was in no way a hostage to fortune. “I am dishonest.” Look, that’s what he said. I just write it down.
We got a series of contradictory explanations for the money fattening his various accounts
The speech showed some of Farage’s strengths: his ability to seize the political agenda, to spring a surprise, to take a gamble. But it also highlighted his weaknesses. No press were present, because he doesn’t want questions. There was the bottomless self-pity: he might have made a fortune in the City if he hadn’t gone into politics, although so might any of us; his phone had been hacked, but we’re not allowed to see the evidence of this; he isn’t a professional politician, although there are MPs who were in nappies when Farage was first elected to the European Parliament.
Over 20 very long minutes, we got a series of contradictory explanations for the money fattening his various accounts. First, he said he’d “worked very hard” for it. Although the big sum, from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, he hadn’t had to work for at all. It had been “the equivalent of a lottery win”. Really? One senses that the odds of Farage being the recipient of this particular piece of good fortune were slightly better than 14 million to one.
“The really big question that I want to pose is, do we want leaders that know how to make money?” Well Nigel, that very much depends on the way in which they do it. That’s his framing of the by-election, but another is that he wants the people of Clacton to endorse the right of every MP to take secret gifts.
Finally, he got to the point: he was quitting parliament. In a magnificent irony, the mechanism for this is to take an “office of profit under the crown”, although Farage may be disappointed to learn that Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, his latest gig, pays rather less well than hosting GB News or flogging gold bullion.
“The people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions,” Farage declared, fighting to make sure they didn’t find out about those actions. “This will be a people versus the establishment by-election,” he went on, without explaining which side he’ll be taking.
“It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the establishment.” After three decades in politics, Farage has finally achieved populism in its purest form: asking people who don’t have much to man the barricades to fight for his right to have a great deal and not tell anyone where it came from. Who would bet against them agreeing to do it?
