Twenty minutes before Nigel Farage was saying he hadn’t done anything wrong, he must have felt, really, like there was little wrong he could ever do. The whole crowd was up. Farage had just signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with Marine Le Pen’s ally Jordan Bardella to stop the boats. The two parties would ‘end the invasion of Britain and France together 🤝’, so the tweet went. A lone roar came from somewhere near the front of the Reform conference hall, and then the whole hall made a noise more like a last-minute winner than a bilateral agreement. ‘It’s quite heavy!’, Farage said as Bardella held up the placard. For a few seconds, this morning didn’t matter. Nigel Farage was having a good time.
And then the good time became a bad time. He got off stage, and headed to a press conference with Bardella afterwards. The BBC’s Chris Mason asked about boats – very politely – but then it was time for the story. There was a lot of bleeping going on in those undercover reports, Mason said. Does that mean there are other names? Other donors? Is more going to come out? Am I going to have to keep asking you about this?
Farage then looked down at a piece of paper. He’d prepared a statement. ‘You will have noticed that we are experiencing a little local difficulty today’, he said, before the face turned dark. Reform, he said, had been attacked by a ‘foreign-funded group of far-left activists with a long history’. He repeated his earlier statement, that this was ‘an exercise in entrapment.’
‘Let me be clear: the party has done nothing wrong, taken no illegal money – in fact, no money was taken at all,’ he said. ‘The polls in question were not commissioned by Reform’, so there was literally no issue.
But what to say about the image, the thing that will stick in voters’ minds? The grainy videos of Reform aides, purring in Mayfair clubs, that Nigel ‘won’t know, doesn’t know, won’t… he would rather not know’. Well, he knows now, and he chastised (although did not name) James Orr and Dan Jukes’s words as ‘loose pub talk’ (the ‘pub’ Orr was in requires membership worth £1,250 a year). The two men, he said, made a couple of boasts that were ‘simply not true’.
Farage denied the premise of Mason’s question, that more could come out. ‘The reason Channel Four haven’t broadcast the names of X and Y is that it isn’t true.’ Yet the comments made by two of his closest allies, one of them almost a son to him, were ‘injudicious at best’. He dismissed them this morning as mere ‘contractors’, and that will be their status ‘pending an investigation’.
He finished on the attack: ‘Reform has broken no law, and we take compliance around donations very, very seriously’. And then the smile returned, and he let himself chuckle. ‘And we know that our donations will be looked at with more scrutiny than anybody else’s.’ They certainly will.
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