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Farage admits that the undercover report on donations 'looks bad'
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssbergg, Nigel Farage acknowledged that the comments by James Orr and Dan Jukes were “injudicious at best” and admitted that the optics of the undercover filming don’t look good for his party.
“This looks bad, as does the sale of peerages, as does government contracts for donations. We are not the first people to be involved in a row over donations,” he said.
The BBC aired the full interview during its politics show on Sunday, having released an excerpt of it on Saturday.
Key events
Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick also condemned the disruption of the Port of Dover by masked demonstrators – but said he understood the frustration with small boats crossing the Channel. Speaking to Sky News’ Sunday Morning programme, Reform’s economic spokesperson said:
I absolutely do. I’ve always hated people obstructing other people doing their daily life, whether it’s Just Stop Oil or whatever.
And I don’t like people going around in balaclavas, which is obviously very intimidating. In fact, our party’s policy is to ban face coverings like that.
But do I understand why people are extremely frustrated? Yes, absolutely. This needs to end. This farce of the small boats has been going on for far too long.
And in fact you saw at our conference Nigel Farage and (National Rally president) Jordan Bardella, the likely next prime minister of France, signing an agreement which has the prospect of ending this once and for all.
Channel crossings are down about 40% compared to last year, with the number of crossings this summer are at their lowest level since 2019. Home Office data shows people in small boats overwhelmingly come from war and conflict zones.
Nigel Farage has agreed a deal with France’s hard-right National Rally party on returning migrants who try to cross the Channel in small boats if both parties achieve power. A Labour party spokesperson said the proposal “is a meaningless document packed with daft and dangerous ideas, signed by an increasingly disgraced Reform leader and an opposition politician. It is nothing more than pointless posturing.”
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, went on to condemn the hundreds of masked protesters who prevented traffic from coming in and out of the port of Dover yesterday. In the interview with the BBC, he praised the police for effectively dealing with the “intimidatory behaviour” and said he had sympathy for the “people around Dover” and those disrupted by the delays.
A group called Patriot Platform, which styles itself as having “a fierce love for our homeland”, claimed responsibility for the blockade, as my colleagues note in this story.
The far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, reposted videos of the blockade, highlighting a live stream of the protest that directed viewers towards Patriot Platform.
Thousands of workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) will be offered redundancies with job losses reported to be spread over two years. The job cuts will be unwelcome news for Andy Burnham, who has vowed to “safeguard sovereign manufacturing” and reindustrialise Britain.
When asked if the government would be willing to protect the jobs, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said it is not for him to “intervene” as he isn’t responsible for running JLR’s business.
“They need to know what the right footprint for them going forward is. I want to talk to them about the numbers,” Reynolds told the BBC, adding there could be financial support for long-term investment but not for a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Farage claims that he faces a disproportionate level of scrutiny compared to the other parties as part of an establishment stitch up, despite having legitimate questions to answer about his party’s finances. Laura Kuenssbergg gave the Reform leader a series of examples of other investigations faced by other party leaders, Farage responded:
I don’t think the others have been de-banked. I don’t think the others have been kicked out by their pension provider. I don’t think the others have literally had an attempt to wipe them out of society, oh and their families as well.
There is no doubt there is huge political prejudice against Reform right across the corporate world and right across the establishment. And that is a simple fact of life – and why? Because we are the disrupters and that’s the way it works.
Farage told the Daily T podcast last month that he had received about 400 death threats in the last seven weeks, and as a high-profile, extremely divisive politician, it is argued that he needs a high level of security.
His claim that himself and his party are fighting the establishment is undermined by the fact that many of his senior figures, including treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick and MP for Fareham and Waterlooville, Suella Braverman, are former Conservative cabinet ministers who were at the heart of the same political establishment Farage is railing against.
Farage admits that the undercover report on donations 'looks bad'
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssbergg, Nigel Farage acknowledged that the comments by James Orr and Dan Jukes were “injudicious at best” and admitted that the optics of the undercover filming don’t look good for his party.
“This looks bad, as does the sale of peerages, as does government contracts for donations. We are not the first people to be involved in a row over donations,” he said.
The BBC aired the full interview during its politics show on Sunday, having released an excerpt of it on Saturday.
The Guardian’s city editor, Anna Isaacs, is sitting on the panel on Laura Kuenssbergg’s show alongside broadcaster Jeremy Vine and political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
Her revelation that Nigel Farage received a £5m gift from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before announcing he would stand in the 2024 British general election has dogged the Reform leader ever since she broke the story in April.
Farage, who has given different explanations as to why he accepted the gift, has argued he did not need to declare the money because he received it before he was elected as Clacton MP and it “wasn’t political in any sense at all”.
The parliamentary standards commissioner is investigating whether he broke the rules.
Isaac’s report came before a series of other stories raising questions about Reform’s finances, some of which you can read here. Isaacs was among the journalists who have reported critically on Reform who were banned from the party’s annual conference that concluded yesterday.
Nigel Farage to be questioned as he battles to contain growing donations scandal
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics. The Reform UK party leader, Nigel Farage, is scheduled to appear on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday politics programme at 9am, where he will likely be asked more about an undercover investigation broadcast by Channel 4 News which showed two of his senior aides appearing to plot to get around electoral laws on foreign donations.
Accepting donations from a foreign company, including donations in kind such as polling, could constitute a criminal offence and the party has been reported to the police.
Senior aide Dan Jukes and Reform’s head of policy James Orr have both stood down pending the outcome of an internal party investigation.
As my colleagues note in the story, Farage himself remains under pressure over a separate clip in which he was heard saying “it’s all above board” after one of the reporters who was posing as the UK-based son of a wealthy US backer told the Reform leader he had been in discussions with Jukes and Orr for some time.
“I’ll be the registered donor,” the son says. “But then dad will send the money to me, and then as soon as that’s done and all those conversations are had the money is available.”
On Saturday, during the party’s conference in Birmingham, Farage continued to bat away suggestions of impropriety. “I’m not a compliance officer,” he told the BBC. “I frankly wasn’t even listening,” he said in reference to the meeting with the undercover reporters in Clacton.
Farage has framed the investigation, carried out by Verbatim Investigations, which was founded by journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting, as another example of an establishment stitch up, and has denied any wrongdoing, as have Orr and Jukes.
