Farage And His Muppet Show

‘I frankly wasn’t even listening.’ 

As political get-out-of-jail-free cards go, it’s not one for the history books. But delivered with a flash of Nigel Farage’s mock incredulity, it’s now part and parcel of the peculiar politics of Reform UK.  

Last week, on the eve of the Reform party conference, Channel 4 and investigative group Verbatim released an undercover exposé. Two reporters posed as a Reform supporter and his wealthy American father (the latter an impermissible political donor), offering to fund £30,000 of polling commissioned by Reform. The footage sent heads rolling. It showed senior party aides James Orr and Dan Jukes discussing routes around electoral laws governing political donations. The film culminated in a final discussion over a boozy lunch and a purred ‘thank you’ from Farage. 

Reform denies the allegations, but on Wednesday 9th September, the Metropolitan Police announced it will be launching a criminal investigation into allegations that Reform broke the law in relation to foreign funding. The claims will now fold into an ongoing police inquiry into other donations to the party. 

When confronted with the tapes, Farage opted for a well-trodden crisis protocol: sacrifice two senior aides, insist he wasn’t paying attention, and change the subject. 

The party denies the allegations. But its response is revealing in its own right. Faced once again with serious questions over internal conduct, Reform has made fresh attempts to make the seriousness of the matter feel like an overreaction.  

It’s worth asking what happens when seriousness is made unfashionable in British politics.   

Schrödinger’s Leader 

Dressed for BBC One’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ in a garish turquoise suit, it was time for Farage to face the music.  

‘My job wasn’t to do compliance. My job wasn’t to do background checks.’ Farage pointed out. ‘My job is to turn up to lunch, have a glass of wine, and shake someone’s hand.”’

In Farage’s retelling, a sharp line is drawn around his responsibilities. Compliance and due diligence sit firmly outside of his remit. What remains on his side, it seems, is champagne and oysters. 

Farage has laboured at making himself synonymous with Reform UK, tying his personal judgement closely to the success of the party as a whole. Yet, when that judgement is called into question, Farage appears to retreat from the machinery surrounding him – sufficiently in control of his own success but detached enough to create distance from any internal mishaps. A Schrödinger’s Leader situation: in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, a hypothetical cat inside a box is imagined to be both alive and dead while it is unobserved. Farage’s position as leader operates on a similar principle; both the man firmly at the helm and never quite responsible for what happens aboard his ship. 

This creates an organisational problem for a party whose authority rests so heavily on the judgement of one man. The purge of Jukes, Farage’s long-term aide, and Orr, formerly senior advisor, may have shored up Farage’s position, but it leaves us asking what happens to a political party when responsibility is absorbed by everyone but its leader.  

Control the Narrative

The deflection of responsibility is no longer a Farageism; it has become part of Reform’s dialect. 

Appearing on Times Radio, Reform’s economic spokesperson Robert Jenrick reiterated Farage’s line, insisting that his ‘sole involvement’ was to ‘have lunch.’ In a masterful act of rhetorical reduction, Jenrick suggested the media ‘can’t criticise a leader for saying thank you over lunch to someone … being polite is not a crime these days.’ 

It’s a remarkably efficient defence. Jenrick makes the allegation sound absurd without having to address the seriousness of what the footage reveals. Once Jenrick reduces the encounter at hand to Farage simply having a glass of wine with pals and, of course, saying thank you, the questions surrounding compliance and misconduct look almost indecently serious.  

On Sky News, Jenrick pushed the party line even further: ‘You have to judge Nigel on how he responded to this. That’s ultimately the test of leadership, isn’t it?’  

One is forced to wonder what response Jenrick is praising here. The dismissal of yet more party figures? The insistence from Farage that he wasn’t listening?  Responsibility for what happened is neglected in the name of mythologising Farage’s status as leader. At once Jenrick appraises him and distracts us from the responsibility he bears.  

Before the party line had been finalised, several members resorted to what can only be described as noise generation. 

Appearing on Newsnight, London mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham took the levels of diversion to new heights. Confronted by journalist Matt Chorley on the matter or Farage’s role, Cunningham bounced back with a zinger, calling the sting a ‘hoax conducted by climate activists’, and insisting that Reform hadn’t commissioned the polls. At last, she averted her gaze and revealed: ‘I haven’t had time to watch the whole documentary […] Perhaps it was edited.’

When pressed further on LBC, she abandoned any form of political defence whatsoever, instead cooing over Farage’s sensitivity, ‘there’s a real feminine side to Farage’ and reminding viewers that ‘the greats never sleep’. Whatever that means.  

By muddying the waters with irrelevant non-sequiturs and mythologising, Reform starves the story of its facts. In each case, the conversation is moved onto Farage’s character, his enemies, and his personal sacrifice. Consequently, the space to discuss the comparatively dull business of internal party finance diminishes even further. 

And yet, now that the questions raised by this documentary have acquired a rather more serious audience in the form of a police inquiry, just being ‘polite’ doesn’t seem like such an adequate response. 

The Room Where It Happens 

What’s so striking about the footage released is the disparity between Reform’s public defence and the behaviour of its senior figures shown on screen. 

In public, the serious questions raised by the footage have been dragged into the language of the ordinary: lunch, wine, politeness, simple misunderstanding. If it really is the case that Farage was simply shown having lunch with these undercover reporters, then anyone who treats this encounter as a matter of political seriousness is making something sordid out of something harmless. 

Inside the room where it happened, the register was quite different. 

Former senior advisor James Orr was filmed discussing the mechanics of Reform’s proposed polling arrangements with undercover reporters. In the film, Orr sprawls across a table in Claridge’s and what we witness is a deep awareness of the rules, and critically, of how they might be circumvented. In Orr’s own words the matter is a ‘donation in kind’ but ‘the reality is we could easily get away with it.’ 

The problem of Reform’s defence is that this footage punctures the premise upon which it depends. The people in the room plainly understand that electoral regulation is a legal constraint. The rules surrounding foreign political donations are not merely bureaucratic; they exist to regulate who can influence British political parties and campaigns. To treat such rules as pedantic is a deeply political position, eroding the seriousness with which we hold the principle that political parties should not be guided by foreign influences. So how far can those involved really contest that they didn’t have their finger on the pulse?  

It’s a careful sleight of hand. Farage, Jenrick, Cunningham and others have all attempted to recast these meetings as something else; a matter of politeness; a left-wing hoax. Any suggestion that the matter may warrant serious attention to Farage’s credibility is in turn cast as bureaucratic nonsense. 

Don’t look over there, look over here! Nige wasn’t even listening, and while we’re at it, isn’t his suit wonderful? 

We now start to see the limits of Reform’s methodology.  

Farage has always been spectacularly skilled at presenting political instinct as more authentic than procedural. It’s what makes him such an appealing figure to many in the electorate, and what made Sir Keir Starmer repellent to so many. 

But what if Reform were to extend that same principle to political governance itself? What if it were the case that proper procedure is the pedantry of an establishment that wished to see the demise of Farage and his colleagues, and perhaps even more ominously than that? What if electoral law were presented not as a safeguard but as an obstacle?

There’s an obvious advantage to this strategy. So long as the rules are presented as bureaucratic time-wasting, the leader who mocks them is seen as refreshingly un-encumbered by political convention. We’ve grown all too familiar with this practice. Just ask our friends over the pond. The rhetorical challenge for Farage is to persuade the public that his judgement is sound enough to stand above procedural constraints.  

But this scandal has exposed a weakness that runs through Reform’s project. Authority flows towards Farage, while responsibility bounces back against his colleagues. The result is a bizarre inversion of political accountability. Farage’s judgement supersedes all else, and yet when scandal arises, he seems to always be the person who knew the least.  

In a way, this serves Farage well. Just as Reform insists it exists outside of the establishment, so too can Farage say he operates outside responsibility for internal misconduct. But this distinction cannot hold. As the prospect of a general election approaches, there is only so long Farage can shrug his shoulders at political responsibility. He is positioning himself to take the highest office in the nation. 

Reform will continue to suggest that proper process is boring, that it’s an attack on Farage’s success. Time will tell whether a party that has built so much of its appeal on escaping the machinery of politics can convince the public it has the skill to operate it. 

Other Zoom In Articles written by Cutting Takes Writers: 

Farage Is The Establishment’s Anti-Establishment Man

Our Thoughts: The King of the North

Reform’s Nebulous Identity is Cunningly Constructed

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