Nigel Farage isn’t contemptuous of the Establishment as he claims, he’s beholden to it - David Behrens
The dictionary says a hypocrite is someone who claims to hold certain beliefs but behaves in a way that directly contradicts them. You don’t need to be Susie Dent to see that a man who hates ‘the Establishment’ but quaffs champagne and oysters while toasting an illegal foreign donation would fit that bill.
Champagne and oysters are what the Establishment runs on. You don’t see those vigilantes at Portsmouth docks poking oysters through the holes in their balaclavas, do you?
I’ll tell you what, though: class is pretty much the only thing that separates them from Nigel Farage.
It has been an education to watch him plumb new depths of hypocrisy by distancing himself from the Portsmouth mob but not so much as to deny him their votes. They are two sides of the same coin: you buy the guy in the Barbour jacket and flat cap, you get the ones in the tracksuits and balaclavas.
All the same, there didn’t seem to be much love lost among the masked malcontents who claimed Nigel had written them off as “knuckle draggers”. A rare moment of self-awareness on their part.
And they were overshadowed by a party conference which at times looked more like a punch-up outside Wetherspoons. No sooner had Farage whipped up anger by weaponising the murder of his supporter Ann Widdecombe than he was openly mocking a heckler in the audience who looked as if she was about to suffer the same fate.
“Boring, boring, boring,” he sneered as the defenceless woman was hit on the head and pushed to the ground by supporters, security men and someone who didn’t look as if he needed a mobility crutch but was wielding one anyway.
The Tory reject Robert Jenrick, styling himself as Farage’s mini-me, was even less sympathetic. “Oh, boo hoo” was his verbatim response to the poor woman’s public beating.
So the message from the two of them was essentially that they welcome violence against their opponents but not against themselves. It’s not just hypocrisy; it’s abject moral cowardice. Those three words should be their party slogan.
They could have brought in a real fighter to defend themselves against the heckler types armed with their fearsome verbs and prepositions, but the professional boxer in their ranks was forced to spend the conference dodging persistent rumours that he was about to take a dive and defect to Labour.
Luke Campbell, the bantamweight amateur turned lightweight pro turned paperweight Mayor of East Yorkshire, made the headlines for almost the first time since he took office when it was reported that Andy Burnham was making overtures to him. Campbell’s denials demonstrated how green he still is; a role in government, where he might actually be able to achieve something, would be a promotion for him.
But he is a small fish and it’s those molluscs that are Farage’s bigger problem right now. That footage of the oysters and champagne betrayed his guiltiest secret of all: he’s not contemptuous of the Establishment as he claims, he’s beholden to it.
Membership of that stratum of society is what he prizes most. He has spent his life within it. He’s no more an outsider than the Duke of Kent.
That’s how he has been able to facilitate those rule-bending donations from grifters even more egregious than he. It’s the Biblical Matthew Effect: To them that have shall be given. Money goes where money is.
In Nigel’s case it came as a £5m ‘personal gift’ from the Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne in what seemed like an inducement to stand in the 2024 election.
Separately, the mother of one of Farage’s aides, a convicted US fraudster named George Cottrell, donated £1m to a euphemistic think tank run by Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, half of which was in turn donated to the party. Investigations into that are ongoing, and police are also now looking at the latest, most audacious piece of panhandling – the one we saw for ourselves.
Channel 4’s undercover footage of Reform officials apparently plotting to illegally funnel foreign donations to its coffers, and of Farage himself meeting his supposed benefactors over oysters, was the smoking gun moment. His risible defence that he “frankly wasn’t listening” made him sound like a naughty child caught with his fingers in the biscuit tin.
He then whined about entrapment – which maybe it was, but it doesn’t make him any less guilty.
What it does do is expose the biggest of all the hypocrisies in this tinpot Trumpian universe of his: the perverse belief that arriving illegally from overseas is contemptible but taking money via the same route is somehow not.