551. Will Farage’s Trumpian Resignation Stunt Backfire?

0:00Nigel Farage, who rarely visits Clacton, thinks that what Clacton needs is a by-election. Beset by questions about where all his money comes from, losing his rag with reporters as he returns from the United States, and apparently with some of his own supporters losing faith in him, he clearly thinks he needs a new narrative. Is this a big bold move to show he's the victim of an establishment stitch-up, as he claims? Is it about trying to stop the investigation into his finances in Parliament? Or is it just Nigel Farage being Nigel Farage and getting us all talking about him? One thing is for sure, just as in recent weeks we're talking all the time about Makerfield, in the coming weeks it's going to be Clacton.

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2:16Welcome to the Restless Party's Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Mehdi, Hustle in Washington, D.C. And the reason Mehdi's here is because Rory, as you know, is on his annual silent retreat. Mehdi and I are not going to be silent as we talk about all sorts of things. Now, Mehdi, while we were recording the main episode, we had one eye on a television in the background because Nigel Farage was speaking. And the reason we're putting out a question time ahead of the main episode is because, as expected, he was announcing that he was stepping down. not stepping down as reform UK leader, not stepping down as the man who thinks he can be the next prime minister, but stepping down and sparking a by-election in his own constituency.

2:59Let's kick off with that. Question from Matthew. What is Nigel Farage up to? You want me to have the first go at that or do you want to have a go at that? I mean, it's very clear what he's up to. This is classic distraction and deflection. Nigel Farage worships at the altar of Donald Trump, where I am in Washington, D.C. Trump has mastered the art of distracting from scandals and controversies by making you look over there, by flooding the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon famously put it a few years ago. And this is the classic response. Nigel Farage is facing the worst media he's ever had, which isn't that high a bar because he's had such soft and good media for the last 15 years.

3:37It's the first time he's really ever faced any serious, sustained scrutiny or criticism of his finances, of his leadership, of his background, of his allies. Instead of addressing it head on. We first saw him hide from media interviewers during the recent elections. And now doing this kind of David Davis-esque gimmick. If you remember the shadow home secretary at the time, David Davis resigned. Was it Holton, Priest and Howden, I think was his by-election? Well done. Well done, Mitty. 2008. I was a British journalist. Yeah, but you've been away a long time. And he quit over some civil liberties issue and it was a ridiculous thing.

4:10And he had to kind of, you know, we did a whole by-election. By-election costs a lot of money. This is what Farage is doing. He's not giving the people what they want, which is goodbye, Nigel Farage, go away. He is actually doing this gimmick whereby, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know what happens to his parliamentary investigation into this£5 million donation. Does that get put on hold while this by-election goes on? Do we stop talking about it? Because that's what he wants us to do. We don't have to. Nobody can tell us what we talk about, and people can talk about it. I don't know about the election, because of course, the minute you do the Chilton hundreds, as they're called, and you're no longer a member of parliament, So if you're no longer of a member of parliament, are you being investigated?

4:49I don't know is the answer to that. But the parliamentary investigation is not going to go away if he becomes an MP at the end, again, at the end of the by-election process. But the issues of Farage and money are not going to go away. And if anything, even though you're right, this is very Trumpian in saying, you know, let's create another drama over here and go over there. That's true. but at the same time it also elevates the scrutiny that people want to give him and i think you're right by the way i've been raging for ages about the extent to which they talk about two-tier care in relation to policing the only two-tier that we really have in our political culture is in the way that the media have covered historically people on the right of politics particularly for us very interesting to me for example one of the reasons he's losing the plot at the moment is because it was the Sunday Times that did this big thing at the weekend about so-called Post George, this guy, George Cottrell, who's a kind of very weird, flamboyant, colourful gambling character.

5:52Even when he got done for fraud in the United States, and I think was even with Farage, who was out there when he was nicked. A bit like Mark Rutter with Donald Trump, he says that Nigel Farage is like a father to him. Farage and he are very, very close. There's a picture, which frankly, again, with a sort of serious grown-up media landscape, this picture would be as well known as any other picture of modern times. It's Farage and Post George. And who's between them in the background? Nathan Gill, currently in jail for essentially being a Russian plant in the European Parliament. So the issue is not going to go away, but we're going to talk, as you say, about something different.

6:32There's going to be a race, there's going to be a by-election. And the media reverts to form. You know, Alice of the Media loves a good horse race. So a lot of the political journalists who just recently, finally started asking tough questions of Farage may go back to just talking about, is this a test for Andy Burnham? How will Labour do in the by-election? What about Zach Polanski in the Greens? So it's very useful for Farage in that way. And I can't say this statistic enough times. Nigel Farage has been on Question Time 38 times. The only person who's been on as many or more times than Nigel Farage is Michael Hesseltine, who first appeared on Question time in the late 1970s, right?

7:05In those 38 times he was on question time, how many times was he asked about his finances? When I was complaining, as I have done before, about the question time issue, I think I was told that Shirley Williams might have topped a lot of them. Oh, really? I thought it was Hesseltine versus Freud. Either way, he's in the top two or three. He's definitely right. Having not been an MP until very recently. And my bigger question is, does he ever get asked these questions? Why did it take so long? He was an MEP in 1999 in the European Parliament. He became famous in 2009 when UKIP did really well in those Euro elections.

7:37I remember it vividly. He did Brexit in 2016. He's been on the public scene for 15 years minimum, if not longer. Why has it taken so long to ask these very basic questions about who funds him? Who are his allies? Who does he hang out with? Well, but again, partly Trumpian, they hide in plain sight. The bad boys of Brexit, Aaron Banks. I mean, Aaron Banks was sort of scrutinized, at least to some extent. The Russian connections were being talked about. But I think what's so interesting about the post-George story is that it is the Sunday Times. Because the truth is that that says to me that the Murdoch press maybe is tiring of Nigel Farage.

8:16One hears that Christopher Harbourn, the guy who's central to this story, because he's the guy who gave five million pounds to Farage, that Farage said was just a little gift, nothing to see here. Then it was for security. Then it was a reward for Brexit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you hear, I hear from people, I don't know that many people in Farage's circle, but I know some, that he's getting really fed up, that all this money is going into reform and into Farage. But actually, it's not delivering a greater likelihood of Farage being prime minister because they worry that they peaked.

8:47Because yes, in a polarized, in a broken up political system, you don't need what you used to need to get a majority. But it doesn't look like Farage is going to be there. And then, of course, we'll talk about Andy Burnham later on, but Andy Burnham showing that you can beat reform in their own backyard, which is why Andy Burnham's about to become Labour leader and Prime Minister. That's an added pressure. But I'll tell you, I watched, I'm sure lots of our listeners and viewers saw, Nigel Farage coming back from America, where like every good patriotic British person, he went to America to pay homage.

9:21Him and Rupert Lowe. Him and Rupert Lowe. They went to America to pay homage to the Americans for breaking free from the British King and taking back control rather better than they took back control with Brexit. And he comes back to Britain and he's doorstepped, as anybody in politics who's high profile often is, by a guy with a camera who's asked a very straightforward question, do you regret not declaring blah, blah, blah, blah. And he lost his shit. He completely lost the plot. and he looked I wondered when he announced he was doing this announcement today I wondered whether it was going to be to sort of talk about and I know he talked a little bit about the harassment he comes under and honestly the whinging attached to that I'm going to repeat this I said it last week but for this guy to say he's the most attacked politician in modern British history when two MPs one of them during the referendum have literally been assassinated You can fuck off with that, Farage.

10:20You know where he gets that line from, right? I mean, Donald Trump says the same thing. Absolutely. Trump says exactly the same thing, that I'm the most hated, I'm the most attacked. No one's had it worse than me, even Lincoln, who was assassinated and killed. So it is very Trumpy, and he's not used to being doorstepped, as you say. One thing I would say about a by-election is it will give journalists an opportunity to spend more time with him out and about, because he has to go out and shake hands and kiss babies and knock on doors. So we won't be able to hide from the media in the same way he has.

10:46You say that his announcement was covered wall to wall across all our TV channels. OK, now I've got a vague feeling from my days in government, unless the BBC sort of guidelines have changed. You can't take the live feed from a political party. You know, for example, when you're doing a party conference and quite often before the leader's speech, you'll have a big video pumping up the crowd, whatever. The BBC, and I think Sky as well, they go to something else because you don't cover feeds that are provided by a political party. They took a feed from reform with no media in the room able to ask questions.

11:29So you say that a by-election will expose into more media. It might well not. It might well not. Yeah, that's a good point. Because what you do, this is Trumpian, you create yourself as the centre of the story so much that the media is desperate just to get anything from you. Yes. No, it's a very fair point. And when Donald Trump announced his war in Iran on February 28th, Alistair, most presidents, I think all presidents, taking American forces to war have done live address from the Oval Office. They've done a press conference. He did a pre-taped announcement from Mar-a-Lago in a baseball cap.

12:01So there is, again, yeah, hiding from the media when tough questions need to be asked. But I'm saying if he is out and about and reporters are in the vicinity, Will they continue to ask about these donations or will they let it go? That is the fundamental question right now. My big critique of journalists on both sides of Atlantic is when there's a big story, when there's a big scandal, you must focus on it. You must ask follow-up questions. You must persist. You must not allow yourself to be deflected, diverted, distracted. You must keep going. And I think that's my number one criticism of interviewers right now.

12:31Yeah. Just to remind people of what happened in the Clacton election. so farage was elected with 46.2 percent of the vote not a majority not a majority well not he didn't he won the election and quite substantially he got 21 ,225 votes giles wattling the tory got 12 ,000 nearly 13 ,000 labor came third seven seven thousand five hundred and then so it went on and i wonder whether there is a kind of a sort of public interest service to be done saying listen mate you've caused this by-election we're not going to waste loads of money on it maybe maybe Maybe put up one candidate to take him on. Or maybe we asked Christopher Harbourn to pay for the by-election, not the British taxpayers, because it costs a lot to run a by-election.

13:13Well, in a way, he's caused it, hasn't he? I just Googled it while you were talking. David Davis in 2008, when he quit to run for this by-election, this ridiculous egomaniacal by-election, the culture secretary at the time said he should pay for it himself. And the culture secretary at the time was Andy Burnham, just randomly. Ooh! Oh, 80 ,000 pounds, 80 ,000 pounds. It costs to run that. That was 2008. I have no idea how much it costs to run a by-election in 2026. Yeah. And you're talking, they're not the parties. You're talking about the public purse. Yeah. I'm talking about, yeah, the public cost of a by-election.

13:44Yeah. Yeah. So there we are. I think the point I was making about the doorstep with Sky is he really looked on the edge. He really, really did look on the edge. For the first time. Yeah. And so, and I wonder whether what's sort of driving him there is these thinking, well, if you've got the Murdoch lot lining up against him, he knows the Tories are against him, he knows Labour against him, etc. I agree with you. I think Farage has had one of the easiest rides of any major political figure in modern times. He doesn't get asked difficult questions. He basically gets treated by the media more as a commentator than as a politician.

14:20Yes. Sorry to keep banging the DC Trump drum, but it's exactly the same here. The interviews with Trump, the press conferences, he's treated like a pundit. He's asked his opinion. I always say to American journalists, stop asking Trump opinion questions. Stop asking, Mr. President, do you agree with this or that? What's your take on what just happened? Ask him actual accountability questions. Did you do X? Why did you do X? There's evidence you did X. And I think that is a fundamental problem with the White House press corps, the Downing Street press corps, Sunday morning show hosts in the US, whatever it is, BBC hosts there.

14:53Obviously, you guys still do better interviews than the US. The US interview scene is horrifically bad. But with Farage, for some reason, as you say, this kind of affable, I'm the bloke down the pub, it's treating him as a question time panelist who gives his take on the stories of the day. And the defense always was, well, he's not a member of parliament. Well, he's now, he has been for a while, and he's now triggered this major by-election. He's seen as the next prime minister, according to some polls. Ask him the hard questions. Be embarrassed that it took so long to ask about where his money is coming from.

15:23I just saw, I think, Gary Gibbon's Channel 4 News report the other night, and they had footage from the Reform HQ of... Posh George. Posh George Cottrell wandering around, just taking phone calls. He's there. He was present. Why did it take so long to ask questions about this guy? Why did it require a Sunday Times Insight investigation now? Well, the answer is that most people on the right, they wanted Brexit. The newspapers on the right wanted Brexit, and Farage was a big part of that. They wanted him in Parliament. They wanted to drag the Tory party further to the right. They've done that. They've now dragged it so far, the centre of gravity in the right wing of our politics, so far to the right that now even Nigel Farage is not right wing enough, and Rupert Lowe comes along even further to the right.

16:06So listen, it's so funny. I'm getting so many people messaging me about what they think about this. I've got one person whose judgment I quite respect is saying, think this is a really smart move. Other people saying this is the next step. This is the next nail in his coffin. So this is what he does. He makes us all talk about him, think about him. But I think there's some big questions here for the Tories. The Tories, I don't think, are yet settled on the strategy of whether they try to compete with Farage by being more like Farage or whether they go for Farage. Clearly you're right that people will say that, because right in the middle of this, at some point, Andy Burnham is going to become the Prime Minister, and this will be sort of part of the backdrop of that as well.

16:51So look, it's an interesting move. I think it's a move born of desperation. I think it's a move born of his inability to withstand pretty limited gentle scrutiny by media that up to now has been far too tame with him. But I think he might get away with it in Clacton. We did this, whenever we did this mini-series with Cat Nealon from The Observer about who funds reform, which I recommend to those who haven't listened to it, you do have to become a member to listen to it. But what was interesting when Cat and I did a Q &A about it, which is available to all who listen wherever you get your podcasts, but she'd spent a lot of time in Clacton.

17:28And she was basically saying that people didn't like this stuff about the money, But it wasn't necessarily shifting them. Now, that's the thing that we'll have to see. A bit like in America, I can't believe that Trump making$2.2 billion doesn't make everybody think, why did I vote for this crook? Right? But it doesn't seem to be happening at the pace that you and I might think that it should. You would hope that the UK is not the US still on these issues and that shame still matters and that decency still matters and that anti-corruption still matters. Obviously, Farage doesn't have the Donald Trump, I'm a businessman excuse that Trump and his sons have wheeled out for their crypto fortunes.

18:03Farage is slightly different, right, Alistair? He's not getting his money as a result of investments. He's getting his money as gifts or what he claims are gifts. He's getting money from all sorts of places. I mean, look, as somebody says, you know, if you're willing to do a cameo saying up the rah for 80 quid, what might you do for 5 million? I mean, he's got all sorts of money. You know, he's got this bullion company that he promotes. Alistair, I'm just looking at the numbers. He got 46.2 % of the vote in 2024. If he gets less than that, is that bad? Is that going to be seen as a defeat? If his vote share goes down?

18:39Because you've got the Greens now as a force that they weren't in 2024? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Because in the end, this is the great thing about by-elections. This is why, you know, Makerfield was suddenly being talked about around the world. I mean, I literally was getting vocals from Australian television. Could I come on to talk about what Bakerfield is like? John Oliver did a whole segment on it on HBO here in the US. He did, yeah, exactly. So, and now the people of Clacton will now, their views will matter. So do they want a by-election? I'll tell you the thing that Kat said was really, really interesting.

19:14And this will go to the heart of the by-election. This is where the other parties really should go for. there were a lot of people saying to Kat Nealon that the guy's never here. He spends more time in America than Clacton. That was damaging more than he's in the, you know, he's a puppet of Putin or, you know, he's too close to Trump or whatever. I think the Trump thing is a problem, by the way. I do think that his, and it's interesting, you know, why did he go to America? Why did he go to America with the independence when he's got all this stuff going on around him? Answer, because that's where he feels happier.

19:46Yes. That's the politics that he believes in. Alistair, when he says, you know, he does his interviews, I don't want to be prime minister. I've never plotted it from Oxbridge like Boris Johnson and others. I actually kind of believe him. I don't think he has massive ambitions to be prime minister. Well, in the sense of obviously he wants power, but I think he'd be just as comfortable doing a Fox News primetime show, making a ton of money and hanging out with people who are sycophants as being prime minister. It's like when Donald Trump won the presidency. He didn't really want it in 2016. He was running in 2016 because he wanted to build a TV network.

20:16He wanted the attention. He didn't expect to beat Hillary Clinton. Now, obviously, it's a very different situation. Ten years later, he's a professional politician and loves it. But I think these people, as you say, they are very happy in these other scenes, in these other walks of life. Look, I've watched him doing this shtick. You know, I never wanted to be prime minister. I came into politics to make a difference. He's not to be prime minister. Oh, yeah, that's bullshit. Yeah, it's bullshit. It's bullshit. He might not have come into politics to be prime minister. but now that it sort of looks like it could happen i think he's absolutely gagging for it and i think saying that is part of the shtick yes that gets him there and but i said so i think the clackton thing will be interesting i think i think if i don't know how the other parties are going to handle this um i wonder whether it is worth labor just saying look tories came second last time around this is this is basically about the politics the psychodrama and the politics of the right let them all just fight it out i don't know it's gonna be very very interesting this but But I do think this is born of weakness rather than strength, and that is never a good place to start a campaign, but we'll see how it goes.

21:18I mentioned Andy Byrne. We've got loads of questions this week about Keir Starmer. I can't help feeling sorry for Keir Starmer. He put out a video yesterday. He put out a video visiting the motorbike riders who give the prime minister there, and he was there thanking them for looking after him for the last two years. He's now gone to Turkey for what will clearly be his last NATO summit. So that's going on. And Andy Burnham, there's now been so much sort of focus on what Andy Burnham thinks. So let's just get a few questions to this. Izzy, back to the media. How much was Starmer defeated by a media landscape he didn't understand or perform well in?

21:58And can Burnham get his messaging right and keep the press at bay? How much do you think Keir Starmer's downfall was due to media, communication, all this other stuff that we talked about? Before I answer that question, let me agree disagreeably with you. You're disagreeing agreeably? Yeah, that'd be weird if I agreed in a disagreeable way. That'd just be contrary. I totally agree with you, you bastard. I totally agree with you, you bastard. Yes, you're right. I know you're right. On Starmer, you know, there's a lot of these political obits being written. A decent man brought down by media. I want to talk about the media in a moment.

22:28But before then, he did a lot of things that suggest he was not a decent man. October 11th, 2023, a lot of us will not forget that LBC interview where he was asked, does Israel have the right to block power, water, food going into Gaza? He said Israel does have that right. He later walked that back, but not after he didn't spend 24, 48 hours defending the line. He then obviously did support Israel during this genocide. He did crack down on vicars and old ladies, women and children peacefully protesting the genocide, rounded them up en masse. I don't think that was a decent thing to do. He did lie in order to become Labour leader.

23:00I'm sorry, there's been multiple U-turns, things he promised to do and didn't do. So I'm not sure I buy this line that he was just some decent dude who fell afoul of a horrible right-wing media. Having said that, clearly any Labour leader is up against a Murdoch press, a right-wing press. And now these tech giants, let's not forget Elon Musk's role in British politics, a big role. I think any leader, wherever they are on the political spectrum, if they are Labour leader, if they are Prime Minister of the UK right now, and Andy Byrne will feel it very, very quickly if he isn't already, is up against this kind of transnational hard right coalition of tech bosses and activists and media organizations and online pundits.

23:40And even there was that Russian politician who was like, we did this. We brought down Starmer. That's it. Yeah. Mertz is next. We do live in this age where social media and the algorithms are able to foment a lot of division. A lot of people, look, I can state the reasons why I don't like Keir Starmer, but I bet there's a lot of people who can't state those reasons and they don't quite know why they're supposed to hate Starmer. And I think that might be a lot to do with the social media and media diet that they get. And clearly he was his own worst enemy. I don't know how he was director of public prosecutions, how he was a top barrister, because he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen in modern British public life.

24:14Like no charisma, wooden speaking habit, no humor, no ability to engage or persuade. Look, you don't all have to be Tony Blair in your delivery, but you have to be someone who can engage with the public and go over the heads of the media, use the bully pulpit, as they call it, here in the United States. And he didn't do that at all. There's a very, very interesting analysis, but you're slightly provoked by something where you, I think, slightly misunderstood what I was saying. I felt sorry for him that he has to go on this kind of farewell tour to say thank you to all of these people. I did miss that.