And there it is: Nigel Farage has resigned as MP for Clacton.
Well, sort of.
Not resigned in the traditional sense of leaving public life, spending more time with his family, or finally being sealed in amber inside a golf club bar. No, Farage has resigned in order to force a by-election, one he intends to contest himself, over the growing scrutiny of all the bits and pieces of funding that so magically appeared in his bank account.
Which is rather convenient for him, really, because a by-election was potentially on the cards anyway.
After weeks of near silence since the explosive reporting on the £5m bung he received for, variously, services to Brexit, personal security, and “it’s none of your damned business, stop asking me, you horrible people”, we finally had a press conference.
And my God, what a performance. The dominant tone today was definitely not confidence, but rather anger. Another round of “pure cold rage.”
More than that though, there was a distinct note of panic. Sweating through your suit, the walls are closing in, dry throated panic.
And across the whole show – and yes, it was a show – one refrain screamed through:
DARVO.
Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender – and Farage went at it like a drunk uncle trying to reverse a bakkie through a bottle store.
The central question of how we got here today is simple.
Nigel Farage received £5m from a crypto-billionaire who lives in Thailand. He did not declare it at the time. He is now under investigation. There are obvious public-interest questions about what the money was for, why it was given, whether it should have been declared, and whether the public has been given a consistent account of it.
That is the issue – but it is not the issue Farage has been keen to discuss.
Instead, he started his loud moan of grievance press conference by reminding us that, without him, “there would have been no referendum. There would have been no Brexit.”
Classic Farage.
Before we even get to the money, we are already in the cathedral of historical grievance. Nigel Farage is not a politician answering questions about a donor. No, no – he is the father of Brexit. The man who changed history. The lone hero who delivered the people from Brussels and now, tragically, must explain why someone gave him five million quid.
He then moved swiftly to the personal mythology.
“I came out at the end of that with very little money indeed1,” he said, before explaining that over the last decade he had been “writing”, “lecturing”, “broadcasting”, “investing”, and promoting “one or two financial products”.
Apparently, we are meant to understand that Farage has simply been a busy, successful man of the world. A grafter. A businessman. A content creator. A man of commerce.
But nobody is saying making money is a crime.
That is the first reversal. The question is not whether Nigel Farage is allowed to be rich. Of course he is. Knock yourself out, buddy.
Buy a yacht. Buy a vineyard. Buy a godsdamned golden microphone shaped like Winston Churchill’s left bollock.
The question is whether a politician should disclose a massive gift from a major donor. Then came this gem.
“Yes, I had the equivalent of a lottery win, a large, personal gift.”
A lottery win.
That phrase deserves to be pinned to the fucking wall.
Lottery wins are random. They are impersonal. They are not usually handed to you by politically connected billionaires who also happen to be significant donors. Framing £5m as “the equivalent of a lottery win” is so disingenuous it’s making my head spin.
And Harborne is, of course, not the only figure in this story.
There is also George Cottrell, better known as “Posh George”, Farage’s long-standing ally and sometime right-hand man. Reporting by the Sunday Times over the weekend alleges that Cottrell provided support including security, social media staff and accommodation.
He is also not some anonymous bloke who once lent Nigel a tenner outside a Wetherspoons, he’s an aristocrat, a crypto investor and a convicted fraudster in the United States.
Which makes Farage’s anti-establishment shtick feel even more brazen.
This is the man of the people, apparently, backed by crypto wealth, personal gifts, aristocratic fixers, and donors so wealthy they sound like Bond villains.
Farage then asked, “Do we want leaders that don’t want money?”
Again, not the question. Nor is it in any way relevant to the conversation that’s happening.
Absolutely no one is demanding that the United Kingdom be governed exclusively by people who live in yurts and pay for lentils with buttons. The issue is not whether politicians may have money. The issue is whether money may have politicians.
Then came the line that showed the whites of the eyes.
“Standards are now being used as a political tool.”
A parliamentary standards investigation into a politician receiving an enormous undeclared gift is not, in itself, proof of persecution. If you think about it really hard, that’s exactly what standards systems are for.
If Farage believes the rules were followed, he can provide the evidence. If he believes the reporting is inaccurate, he can correct it. If the gift was truly unconditional, he can explain why that matters in relation to disclosure.
Instead of that, he desperately wants us to believe the very existence of scrutiny on him is the scandal.
That is DARVO in its purest form. Deny wrongdoing. Attack the process. Reverse the roles, so that the politician under investigation becomes the victim, and the people asking questions become the offenders.
We then moved on to the massive emotional escalation:
“For over 20 years now, I have been subject to constant demonisation by the press,” Farage said.
He listed milkshakes, placards, mobs writing off a car he was in, attacks on his home, online threats, and security costs. Some of this is serious. Threats against politicians are serious. Violence is serious. Harassment of families is serious. No one should be assaulted, stalked or intimidated because they are in public life.
Serious things, however, can still be used cynically.
Farage has taken genuine concerns about political safety and deployed them as a smoke grenade around an extremely pertinent financial question. He said the gift was unconditional, then immediately explained why he “needed” the money for lifelong security.
So which is it, Nigel? Was it an unconditional personal gift that he can spend however he likes? Or was it effectively money given because he needed private security as a political figure?
Those are not the same story. Ja, you can try to shove them in the same box, but the lid simply will not close.
And that, really, is the point.
Farage’s resignation today is in no way because he wants accountability – he’s resigning because he wants theatre. He’s desperate to drag this whole affair out into the public square, right out of the realm of evidence, declarations, registers, standards and questions around donor relationships.
A by-election has the effect of allowing Farage to say “the people have spoken” before even more questions start coming up that make him feel uncomfortable. Critics say he is trying to avoid questions like who paid for what, what was declared, what was not declared and why the story keeps changing every time someone shines a torch into a different corner.
Which is also exactly why this is the right time to keep digging. Harder, deeper and faster than ever before.
The DARVO is not working for Nigel anymore. The victimhood routine is now stale. The “they all hate me because I speak for you” line is starting to look less like a political outsider speaking for the common man and more like a man sweating through his suit because the walls are closing in.
The money questions remain. The donor questions remain. The Posh George questions remain. The security explanation remains as slippery as a greased-up ferret in a bath. And no amount of flag-waving, establishment-bashing or theatrical cold rage changes the fact that Farage still has not given the public a straight answer.
Because underneath all of this, the same cynical dickhead we all know and love is still standing there, pointing furiously at everyone else while hoping nobody looks too closely at him. The fog machine is on. The martyr’s crown has been polished. The enemies have been named. But the question remains exactly where it was before he started shouting.
What was the money for?
And if there is truly nothing to hide, why is Nigel Farage working so hard to make everyone look somewhere else?
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
- I’m sure everyone is bringing out their tiniest violins for that line. ↩︎
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