The old adage “follow the money” is haunting Nigel Farage with particular vengeance these days.
The feisty Reform leader’s dealings with George Cottrell, a maverick society figure and benefactor to Reform UK before the last election, is the latest expensive embarrassment for a party which aims to break the mould of British politics. Instead, Farage stands accused of flouting funding and transparency rules – and that is becoming a habit, rather than a happenstance.
Farage has been referred to Parliament’s standards watchdog for the second time this year, over new reports that he failed to declare financial support from a convicted criminal. He allegedly took payments and benefits in kind from Cottrell – aka “Posh George,” a society figure with a chequered history.
Even putting Cottrell’s credentials politely, his record as a “crypto-gambling entrepreneur” might raise a few red flags for the “turquoise army” of Reform as it boasts its credentials to form a future government.
Reform is certainly not the only party to have skirted close to the rule on the difference between gifts and donations. Nor the only party to have taken a skimpy view of requirements to reveal funding sources from acolytes helping them run for office. But a second controversy, so soon after Farage was referred to a standards inquiry over his £5m donation from British-Thai crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne, is now creating anxieties on his own team about how to persuade a charismatic, impervious leader that this is a problem he needs to deal with, rather than a series of huffy deflections. At stake is Reform’s well-honed brand as a cleansing force bent on replacing the political establishment.
Cottrell has been a longstanding ally of Farage: a character who seems to hail from the Evelyn Waugh world of wayward aristocracy. His mother, a fellow Reform donor, once dated Prince Charles, and he grew up between Mustique and Malvern College, where he was expelled for his gambling habit. A career in high-stakes gambling has since looked like an important source of revenue, with a spectacularly unsuccessful sortie into a business on the dark web. A conviction for wire fraud in the US followed – Cottrell admitted to explaining to contacts, who were in fact undercover law enforcement agents, how criminal proceeds could be laundered.
That topic has also raised questions over Reform’s pro-crypto stance, and why Reform stands out so strongly from others in its openness to digital currency donations, despite the regulator’s concerns over opacity or potential for manipulation by hostile powers.
For his part, Farage has insisted that the donations are purely private gifts – including the use of a London townhouse rented by Cottrell and used by Farage in the months running up to the last election, according to the Sunday Times’s reporting.
One question here is whether these gifts in kind should have been reported – common sense would say that in the run-up to an election they should be. But the rules are vaguer in terms of the timeline and what counts as a private, as opposed to campaigning, support. The House of Commons Code of Conduct says that MPs must register any benefit received in the 12 months before their election if it relates to their political activities, within one month of taking their seat. But purely personal gifts from friends or family are exempt.
In essence, Farage has argued that there is a clear distinction between public role as a politician and his private activities as a businessman, including as a shareholder in the British Bitcoin company Stack (he appeared in a promotional video to mark its latest investment).
Let’s see how far the parliamentary standards authorities go.
What is telling is the impact of Farage’s “none of your business” response – as he told a BBC interviewer last week in response to the Harborne story. That mood of truculence is beginning to grate.
Robert Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesman and a floor-crosser from the Tories, wants to position the party as fiscally responsible and oversee a deregulatory “Big Bang” to boost UK growth. Instead, he finds himself having to give the kind of partial answers to embarrassing revelations that tell us “no rules have been broken” and that the Cottrell revelations are just an “old story”. But Jenrick, a seasoned infighter and ambitious figure in Reform, knows full well that in politics brush-off answers are not the same as dealing with a corrosive story.
That is the bigger headache. It is one which leads some key figures in the Farage army to wonder how their man, who has been such a whirlwind force in breaking up the party-political landscape, intends to proceed as Labour enters an emergency reset with Andy Burnham, the Tories eye a bounceback ,and some shine comes off Reform’s polling amid patchy by-election performances.
Tim Montgomerie, the former Conservative loyalist commentator who switched to Reform last year, has warned that Farage “has to find better answers” to questions about the Harborne donation. Another senior figure tells me that Farage’s responses are perplexing colleagues. “He knows what he needs to do to get fully focused – attend all the meetings, get rid of the barnacles, focus on the road to No 10. But does he actually want to do it? That’s less certain.”
The clash of being a “one-man band” inspired by the Maga movement, and the need for the kind of party discipline that turns popularity into victory, is glaring.
It means that others likely to harbour leadership ambitions – such as Jenrick and his internal rival Zia Yusuf – may envisage a future in which Farage is the man who helped position his “movement”, but is not a man prepared to accept the limitations on his personal freedoms and income streams that a traditional party leader does.
As Keir Starmer found out when accepting much smaller amounts from donors, arguing about what was “within the rules” is not really the salient issue. Perception and impact on reputation matter a lot more. Right now, Farage is looking like a leader who needs to clean up Reform’s act when it comes to friends who are bizarre, bountiful – and secretive. It’s another question entirely whether he has the faintest intention of doing so.
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