If public life contains a very high-profile, very vulnerable fantasist with an inexhaustible appetite for money and publicity, what is the duty of care that we all owe them? It’s a question that seems to arise repeatedly in the so-called post-truth era. Of course, anybody’s lies and delusions are, to a substantial extent, their own responsibility. But these situations always exist in a context.
The wheels of Reform’s clown car are sailing serenely past the driver’s-side window
If such delusions are sustained by zealots who put ideological conformity above the truth, by an excitable and partisan media that prefers not to dig too deeply into something that sounds like a good story, and even by so august an institution as Cambridge University, disaster cannot be far away.
Elevated to a prominence for which they are manifestly unqualified. Encouraged in damaging fantasies. Placed in the sort of spotlight that means humiliating exposure and a psychologically devastating unravelling are all but inevitable. I speak, of course, of the Reform Party leadership.
Even as they speechify about what they’re planning to do in their first 100 days of government, the wheels of Reform’s clown car are sailing serenely past the driver’s-side window. Just in the last couple of days, thanks to Channel Four, they’ve lost two senior apparatchiks and look to be heading for yet another formal investigation into their imaginative approach to party funding. The party’s former policy chief James Orr and Nigel Farage’s so-called “right-hand-man” Dan Jukes both stand accused of trying to circumvent electoral law in order to accept a large donation from a foreign donor. They deny the claims, it seems only proper to say.
Nigel Farage, present on the hidden-camera footage but (he claims) too busy with his champagne and oysters to have been paying attention to what was said, now hopes to magic the whole thing away by capering on stage in Union Jack socks and dismissing his long-standing allies as mere “contractors”. Not sure that’s going to cut it. Perhaps he should try saying that all this coverage is negatively impacting his mental health.
It’s not that the conversations that Channel Four broadcast look corrupt – though they do. It is, more damagingly, that they look like amateur-hour; once again from a party that has been struggling to stop making Baldrick-like mistakes such as repeatedly selecting and then having to sack racist idiots from its candidates’ list, or having a Welsh leader who takes Russian bribes.
A big, potentially illegal, donor to the party is introduced to the leader before anyone seems to have vetted him through so much as a cursory Google. Farage’s galaxy-brained sidekicks – one of them a professor at Cambridge – appeared to boast openly of circumventing electoral law and Dan Jukes, what’s more, named other people he claimed used the same dodge. I can’t imagine those other donors will be delighted, or future donors encouraged, by that aspect of the exposé. “Loose pub talk” it may be. But “loose pub talk” isn’t what you look for from the top-level machinery of a party supposedly preparing for government. And it’s a bad look, isn’t it, to insist that nobody has done anything wrong but with the same breath consign the two people who you claim have done nothing wrong to outer darkness. I wonder how they will react.
It’s a fantasy to imagine that you’re prepared for government when (for reasons that we can only speculate about) you have a well-developed policy on cryptocurrency before you have a well-developed policy on the defence of the realm. It’s a fantasy that you can reassure moderate voters that you’re a level-headed and responsible party while you tolerate bigmouths like Zia Yusuf slandering former servicemen as traitors, or the absurd Matt Goodwin collectively insulting Iraqi refugees as “illiterate goat-herders”.
It’s a fantasy to think you can position yourself as a defender of free speech when you’re so touchy and defensive that you expel Tim Montgomerie from the party simply for daring to observe what anyone with eyes can see, which is that you are, er, touchy and defensive.
It’s not that the conversations that Channel Four broadcast look corrupt. It is, more damagingly, that they look like amateur-hour
It’s a fantasy that it’s possible to fund a party of Britain-first patriotism when half your friends and cheerleaders are domiciled offshore for tax purposes; or to run a party of the salt-of-the-earth working man from a succession of Mayfair private members’ clubs and networking meets with international billionaires and crypto tycoons.
It’s a fantasy that it’s possible to sustain a rhetoric of old-fashioned decency and common-sense justice while a non-zero number of your senior people seem to be, if not outright crooked, at least what we might call crook-adjacent: Take Farage’s trip to Florida in 2024 where he met Elon Musk, which was part-funded by the convicted fraudster George Cottrell; and, of course, the party’s ex-leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who is locked up after he was convicted of eight counts of bribery.
And it really is a fantasy to imagine that the wider public will not notice or care about any of the above. A small base of diehard supporters may feel deeply enough about your stop-the-boats rhetoric to overlook everything else. But it’s quite the stretch to imagine that this monomania will be shared by enough floating voters to sweep you to power.
The biggest of all the delusions, and the one that has really cooked them, is upstream from all of this. It flows from Farage’s gauche crush on the guy on the other side of the pond – and it is the fantasy that Donald Trump’s nakedly kleptocratic approach to gaining and exercising political power, and his weird personality cult, will transplant seamlessly to the UK. So far, thank goodness, it does not. Time for a return to reality.
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