Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard of this platform, and I hadn’t either. As a result I listened to their pitch with the same amount of scepticism I might reserve for an email addressed to me as ‘Dear Beloved’, revealing that a distant relative had left me a share in a Nigerian diamond mine, and that if only I sent a quick cash deposit the diamonds would start flowing in my direction.
I was informed that Cameo was a platform where I could make ‘easy money’. Being part-Scottish, I do not believe that there is any such thing. In fact I find the whole idea of easy money a contradiction in terms. All money is hard to come by and once gained – if gained – it should be swiftly hidden in a pillowcase or mattress.
I was pretty sure that if anyone asked for a personalised video from me, it would turn out to be Rod Liddle
Anyway, the point with Cameo is that it turned out to be a platform through which celebrities (and this is where I also became suspicious) are paid to record tailor-made video messages for members of the public for around a hundred quid a pop. ‘Happy birthday Marjorie, from your favourite columnist’ type stuff. I was promised that if I agreed to the arrangement I could knock off a few such videos every morning without even leaving the house, then kick up my feet for the rest of the day, drinking daiquiris in bed or the like.
Absolutely nothing in this was appealing and so I declined. First of all, because I didn’t believe that anyone would want a personalised video from me, however badly their life might be going. Secondly, because something about the enterprise made me feel a bit icky. And thirdly because I felt sure that the whole thing would prove to be a hostage to fortune. I was pretty sure that if anyone did ask for a personalised video from me for their birthday, wedding night or bar mitzvah, then it would turn out to be Rod Liddle or another colleague, operating under a pseudonym, only in order to rip into me for the rest of time for being such a cheap tart.
I suppose that folded into this last concern was the possibility I would end up sending a birthday greeting to someone who would turn out to be a serial killer or well-known sex offender. Not that this is who I imagine my average reader to be, you understand, but because you just never know. Any benefits seemed to me to be outweighed by the considerable potential negatives.
In general, Nigel Farage seems to me to be a man of pretty sound judgment. But he obviously does not share my intensely suspicious, not to say gloomy, Celtic nature. And so it seems that when he was out of the front line of British politics, Farage did indeed sign up to do personalised videos for Cameo. He appears to have been rather good at it, as I would have expected him to be. And in fact I can imagine a certain type of person who would have been thrilled to get a personalised video of Nigel raising a pint for their friend’s birthday or something.
But now the Guardian newspaper has tried to use this interregnum in Farage’s career to do a number on him of the type I had feared for myself. Some fearless – and presumably bored – Guardian journalists have trawled through a remarkable 4,366 clips that the Reform UK leader has made for Cameo since joining the platform in 2021. The short videos he has sent fans and supporters have included personalised messages wishing people a happy birthday, happy Christmas or even (and I do think this a bit odd) a happy Valentine’s Day.
Of course, the Guardian being the Guardian, they trawled through all of these innocuous greetings in the hope that at least some of them would be videos celebrating Hitler’s birthday, mourning the German defeat at Stalingrad, or sending Valentine’s Day good wishes to David Irving.
Unfortunately for the journalists, they found no such thing. It has long been my belief that if Nigel Farage were some kind of closeted Hitler-ite, we really would have known about it by now. But that doesn’t mean that the Guardian types will ever stop trying to find something that is not there.
And so they have managed to find one video in which Farage makes a very slight and inoffensive reference to a woman’s breasts, another which turned out to have been used by a group in Canada whose activities Farage was clearly not aware of, and a third in which he makes a video for a man called ‘Ben’, whose family described their relative as a longtime Reform member. Ben turns out to have been among those people thrown in prison after the summer riots in 2024. The Guardian appears keen to suggest that by sending a message to ‘Ben’, Farage was somehow endorsing illegal rioting.
What were the incriminating words that Farage used in speaking to Ben? They included these: ‘All I can say is keep your head up, keep believing in the right things, keep acting in the right way.’ It’s not quite the Beer Hall Putsch is it? In other videos, Farage has made what academic consultants to the Guardian assure us are beyond-the-pale ‘far-right’ memes, such as statements that illegal migrants should not be allowed to stay in the UK. Because I am sure we can all agree that the only acceptable thing to say on the question of illegal migrants is that everybody should be allowed to stay.
Finally, there is also a clip where Farage appears to have become irritated with the technology he is using and swears. Or, as the article puts it, it shows ‘a side to him that contrasts with his amiable public persona’. I am sure that Guardian journalists only ever say sweet things when they have a problem with their iPhone.
In any case, it is all rather desperate stuff. Farage has done nothing wrong in any of these videos. Yet his critics will keep on digging. In the meantime I feel vindicated in my own intensely suspicious attitudes towards Cameo – and, indeed, towards strangers in general.
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