Nigel Farage's £5m problem just won't die
Farage superfans, who’ve spent the last month or so battling withdrawal symptoms following the mysterious disappearance of their hero, had a bumper day last Tuesday, when normality reasserted itself and suddenly he was completely bloody inescapable again. “Let’s be clear”, he told BBC Breakfast, twice, a sure sign that someone is absolutely definitely going to be clear. The £5m donation he received from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before he changed his mind about running for parliament in 2024 was “an unconditional gift. I can spend it on cars if I want to.”
Such an argument may or may not impress the average voter, but sadly we shall never know because he instantly moved on to a different one. As “the most attacked and endangered politician in Britain for now well over a decade” – two MPs have been literally murdered, but that’s by the by – he required it, he said, for security. So had he actually spent it on security? “It is not your business.” I think it is the public’s business, suggested Sally Nugent, more gently than the point deserved. “No it’s not the public’s business,” Farage snapped. “No, I’m not going to answer that deliberately, wilfully.”
It is at least possible, I will go no further than that, that the self-proclaimed man of the people might come to regret the existence of a video clip in which he suggested that what he did with a sum of free money most of those people can’t even imagine was none of their effing business. When some ministers enjoyed a free wardrobe upgrade or the opportunity to take their kids to see Taylor Swift, the people, you’ll recall, lost their shit. Indeed, if there’s anything that still unites this divided country aside from complaining and fighting about food with Americans, it’s their shared belief that politicians work for them and should enjoy as few comforts as possible. It is far from clear Farage is an exception to this rule.
Reform UK, though, is clearly hoping that he is, because he went on to give essentially the exact same interview multiple times that day – to Ed Balls and Ranvir Singh on ITV’s Good Morning Britain; to Nick Ferrari on LBC; to Julia Hartley-Brewer on , where he got tetchy in a manner that suggested he’d imagined her to be on his side. When Nick Robinson on the Today programme whether, in light of the backlash, he would be giving the money back, Farage replied: “if you give your entire salary to charity then maybe I will.” A salary, let us not forget, is a payment for services rendered. Still, I’m sure this will shut down the awkward questions about what Harborne got for his cash.
What is Farage playing at? Why has he come out of hiding to give the same car crash interview not once, but at least five times? (I am not ruling out having missed more.) The safest bet is that this was a deliberate shit-eating strategy: Reform had realised that, against all previous expectations, people were not going to stop asking difficult questions about that money, so he might as well consolidate it all into one really bad day, and hope that everyone gets bored and moves on. It might work.
Then again, it might not. Robert Jenrick, a man with absolutely no ambitions to lead Reform UK himself, has been giving some interviews of his own, to say that – while of course no one has been asking about it on the doorstep – that “doesn’t mean that it’s not a legitimate question for the media to ask”. Thanks, Robert. Very helpful.
The shit-eating strategy, what’s more, works best when the issue at root is genuinely just the product of media obsession. Farage’s no-strings gift, alas, is under formal investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. You can’t dispose of a topic by boring everyone to death with it when there may yet be an official sanction looming.
I’m sure Reform’s bet that long-standing Farage voters are unmoved by this sort of thing is correct. But I’m equally sure that the vast chunk of the electorate currently tempted to vote Reform is a hell of a lot bigger than that group of true believers. At least some of them may hold other views.
The Teflon coating with which some politicians are gifted can be useful to protect them from scandal – but it can insulate them, too, from understanding what the public actually think. Many voters didn’t care about Boris Johnson’s bad behaviour either – right up until the day when suddenly they did, and he simply couldn’t grasp it.
The odds must be that this is not that moment: the world is not that kind. But I wouldn’t bet five million quid on it.