569. Farage’s Foreign Funding Scandal and Germany’s Far-Right Breakthrough

29:02Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for having me. And it was also great to have you on our podcast. Thank you, Paul. Bye-bye. So, Rory, before we go to the break, I know how you love to do a plug. I'm going to do a plug today. But it's a plug with a difference. As you know, I have a book coming out on October the 22nd, and it is going to be announced to the world on Friday. The title of the book. The title of the book. So you're not going to tell us now. Well, you know, so still pretending. But what we're doing, if people go to the episode description they will see there is a very exciting competition there if you can guess the one word title of my book now the publisher's got this idea we give you a signed copy i'm going to do so much better than that we'll decide when we go but it's time every reply will be time stamped and because of that we'll know when the first one comes in because i'm incredibly generous there'll be more than one get something out of this so one word like might i suggest middle land by Rory Stewart.

30:01Weimar that we talked about recently. Shakuz, does that count as two words? I'm going for two words with that, with the apostrophe over there. But Reds by Paul Mason, new book, which I've just been reading. So one word and it will be out on October 22nd. We're also going to be doing a mini series on it. So we're very excited about that. Well done on getting a book written.

30:21Rory Stewart:I mean, that's one of the things I've noticed with a podcast is it's quite a finding of time to write a book. Yeah, well, I did it over the summer, on the move throughout Europe. But anyway, I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to be good. I think it's really, really interesting. And I think I'm going to get to interview you a bit. Apparently you are. Yeah. We're going to do an interview on the New Series. Looking forward to it very much. Yeah. And think about Alistair. I mean, could this be about football? Could this be about dogs? Could this be about politics? You know, there's a hell of a lot of directions you could go without one word.

30:47Yeah. And by the way, I'm ready for the insults. I got one last night at an event I was doing and somebody came up and said, I've got it. It's liar. But fine. So you can do that. Do whatever you want. Burnley. Burnley. Burnley, could be Blair, could be lots of these, could be trees. Yeah, see? Yeah. So this book, one word, so to enter, go to the link in the episode description. You've got till midnight Thursday to get your guesses in. Thank you very much. Take a break.

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33:17Rory Stewart:I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Uh, sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice. Ugh, I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com.

33:48Rory Stewart:welcome back to the rest of the politics with me alistair campbell and with me rory stewart now alistair firstly thank you very very much for um powell and the afd i want to move us though on to reform in britain and obviously we'll have a chance to talk about whether reform is the afd or not but let's let's start with this scandal i have become as you keep mocking me totally obsessed with this amazing documentary. So a huge shout out. I mean, for anybody listening who wants to be a journalist, this is an unbelievable thing. An undercover reporter spent nearly 12 months pretending to be the son of an American billionaire from Wyoming and going to meetings with more and more senior reform figures in order to see if they would be willing basically to take money, illegal money from an American donor.

34:40Rory Stewart:You're not supposed to take money from American data. It's a hell of a thing. Actually, at some point, I'd love to have more of a chat with him even if we don't do it on the show because the guy had to change his credit card, his social media account, his name. He must have been terrified going into these meetings in Britain that somebody would know him under his real name and come up to him and stop him. Anyway, he pulled it off. Brilliant. But the thing that's frustrating me is that when we did our live show, I asked for a show of hands of how many people that actually watched the documentary the weekend at the festival hall yeah and look our live show audience are like the most motivated i would have thought people to get into politics this kind of thing you'd have thought so and barely 10 of them have watched it and that is a big problem they were aware of it though they were aware of the story they're aware of it but i think one of the problems is that you only see why it's so killing for reform when you watch the full half an hour that if you just pull out as their questions were raised about whether a permissible US donor could finance£33 ,000 of polling.

35:40Rory Stewart:It sounds very minor. The real story is what it shows about reform, and in particular, what it shows about its moral and intellectual centre. Lack of. Yeah. So the moral and intellectual centre, and I think this winds you up less than it does me, because you despair of reform so much, you're not even interested in this problem. No, I'm very interested in it. You're saying I have no morals? No, no, I'm saying that you basically have written them off so much that you can hardly be bothered to even look into them. That's not true. Anyway, the reason I'm so... Just because I haven't watched it. I've watched it twice.

36:10Rory Stewart:You've watched it eight times. The reason I'm so wound up is this guy, James Orr. He was somebody who represented people who want to say that the far right is not a kind of dangerous populist movement, but instead it's morally serious, it's Christian, it's rejecting these corrupt elites. And there are lots of particularly young men getting behind that story. You'll see them at Cambridge University. You'll see them, unfortunately, in churches around the country. They're people who think that they're not just unpleasant, racist people, that they're people who are standing up for Christianity, morality, virtue, seriousness.

36:53Rory Stewart:And here is this guy, James Orr, who is a Cambridge professor who got this extraordinary profile in the Financial Times with a glamorous picture of him on the front cover, who is able to talk about Hegel, who reaches out to J.D. Vance. And it's a reminder that when these parties come, and this has been true for right-wing parties throughout history, they often have these figures at the fringes who give a sense of real kind of intellectual seriousness and respectability that this man is meant to be austere, concerned with kind of truth, justice in the British way. Professor of ethics and divinity.

37:33Rory Stewart:Yeah. And that's why when you see him sitting in his fancy suit with his hair swished back, hitting the cocktails, talking about how he doesn't care about the Electoral Commission, he's going to get around the law, he's going to go on signals so people can't see his things against transparency, against truth, against being honest with the British public or even his own boss deliberately circumventing the law in order to lie to the British people and promoters party, look at that and see the moral quality of this man and see the moral quality of all these people. You cannot allow Danny Kruger, James or J.D.

38:09Rory Stewart:Vance to present themselves as great moral exemplars. They are revolting human beings who are using their ability to talk about Hegel to endorse very dangerous, destructive, anti-democratic politics, which is corrupt. Your point about people not knowing unless they really immerse themselves in it. And I think you're right about that. Because what happens is it, you know, the documentary explodes, you've got lots and lots of coverage. Then within 24 hours, it was Nigel Farage has denied any wrongdoing. You know, focus on the alleged wrongdoing, not what he's saying about it. And then of course, there was their conference going on, what have you.

38:44But last night, Rory, we're going to talk about Ukraine in Q &A this week. Last night, I was doing this event with Luke Harding, who's just written this book about Ukraine. And it's called Betrayal. It's the betrayal of Trump and Putin, but also he's got a very big section on Nathan Gill and on the fact that the Russians essentially turned Nathan Gill into an agent and he's now serving 10 years in jail. Former colleague of Nigel Farage. Former colleague of Nigel Farage in the European Parliament. Very leading figure, leader of the party in Wales. We had about 350 people in the king's place. I asked for a show of hands of these people who'd paid money to come and hear somebody talk about a book about Russia and Ukraine.

39:23Who had heard of Nathan Gill? It was about a third of the hands. Who has not heard of Nathan Gill? It was two thirds. And I said, who has heard of Profumo? Every single hand went up. Nathan Gill is serving a jail sentence as an elected British politician for helping Russia in the war against Ukraine and taking money. That's down to the media. They covered it as a one-day wonder.

39:51Rory Stewart:There's been such a degradation of our politics that we've normalised bad behaviour so, so much and we've become so polarised. I was talking to a relative who was sympathetic towards reform, whose response was, guess what the defence was when I forced them to watch this documentary? They all do it. Yeah, exactly. All the politicians do it. The great one was, and of course they go after reform much more than they would after a mainstream... Which is bullshit. I mean, what damage did Keir Starman get for just taking a pair of glasses? Exactly. Five million quid. We don't even talk about five million quid anymore.

40:25Rory Stewart:You've totally got it. They're all up to it. So what is it that we see in this documentary? What we see is that it shows something deep about the values of this man, James Hall, and I think actually the values of Danny Kruger too, who incidentally, while posing as the great Christian moral figure, refused to condemn his colleagues when they lied about Kemi Baden-Ock during the elections. He just wouldn't come out and say that the whole story that she had been - White lives don't matter. Yeah, thought white lives don't matter. He totally refused to clarify, condemn or do anything. In this case, what's wrong with what happened?

40:59Rory Stewart:What's wrong with what happened is this. Reform commissioned a poll, a guy called Dan Jukes commissioned a poll. The point of the poll for them is to put it on the front page, the Telegraph and other newspapers showing that people are supporting reform at a critical moment before elections. So it's really important part of their PR strategy. They then arrange for the poll to be paid for by this American donor from an American company. In order to do so, we have them admitting that this isn't legal. We have them going on to signal because they want to conceal any chance of anybody seeing him. We have him saying that the Electoral Commission is useless and they're never going to catch them.

41:44Rory Stewart:So what does this represent? It represents complete lack of transparency, not being honest with the British people, deceiving the British people, deceiving the Electoral Commission, breaking the law. And then this incredible kind of Henry II Beckett defense, which is, oh, Nigel doesn't want to know about it. And the undercover journalist keeps saying, does Nigel know about if I meet him, if my dad meets him? Well, I don't know about the details. But of course, you know, he knows. And they start inviting the guy to donor conferences. And then he says, this is the kill-outs. He says it's explicitly because we cannot get donations from UK domiciled donors.

42:20But also, there is a meet. One of the key moments in the film is where he does meet Nigel Farage during the Clacton by-election. So there's an election that's being called because of this 5 million donation from a Thailand crypto billionaire. He's only having that election, allegedly, to allow the Clacton people to be his jury rather than a court where it should be. And Nigel Farage is clearly aware because he says, boom, it worked for a pretty small investment. OK. And then goes on television, our television, and says, I wasn't really listening. Two questions about judgment.

42:56Rory Stewart:Imagine if any other politician had done that. Well, apart from the wrongdoing, simply a question of political judgment. This is a by-election which was dominated by the news or the allegation that posh George Cottrell had illegally siphoned money through his mother to pay for us, which they were denying. And in the middle of that very by-election, while that story's breaking, the journalist from this amazing production company, Verbatim, must have been thinking, well, we're never going to be able to get our meeting now, given that they're already murdered in Scamble. he's prepared to sit down with someone who says, let me just clarify, this is my dad's American money, siphoned through me, his relative, to give to you.

43:31Is that okay with you? And by the way, they've since then, so when reform now say there'll be an investigation, so Dan Jukes and James Orr get suspended pending a full inquiry, investigation, blah, blah, blah. As far as I understand it, listening to all the blather they've come out with as they keep change in their line. The investigation is going effectively to be into the TV program, and they're talking about it being entrapment. Now, the first thing is, it is legitimate under the code of Ofcom and everybody else to expose wrongdoing using subterfuge. You should give up if you don't find it, but clearly from the word go, given that they're saying in interviews with him being secretly recorded through his buttonhole, they're admitting that they want to try to sort of circumnavigate, circumvent the law.

44:19Because they can't get UK domicile people. And then the second thing that I think is really important, you know, James Johnson, whose polling we used, we used his poll before the last election, their big line now is that this poll was not, quote, commissioned by them. Well, who did commission it? Because James Johnson, he's also on camera, essentially saying that they're using this device to pay him. So the poll is done, commissioned. We're going to get this guy to pay you for it. Now, that is, I've spoken to somebody who knows electoral law inside out, who says that if it is the case that Orr and Dukes have organized for this poll, without the treasurer of the party knowing where that money is coming from, they are potentially in breach of the law.

45:07Let me just tell you about the criminal offences that the police might have to consider. The main one is entering into or furthering an arrangement which facilitates or is likely to facilitate the making of donations by an impermissible donor. Now, you've seen the film 27 ,000 times, Rory. Do you think that might fall into that category? I would certainly say as a legal expert that it certainly gives that impression. Okay. So the second Section 61 offense of the PPERA, which is the act that we're talking about, is a person deceiving their treasurer about a donation. So the treasurer will have to be called to give evidence out of thought, which can include an official not telling the treasurer about a donation with intent to deceive.

45:57So that means unless we discover that James Orr, Dan Dukes, and Nigel Farage have told the treasurer about this impermissible donation, they have committed a criminal effect.

46:08Rory Stewart:Just to go back to the basics and what the barrister explains very well in this documentary that I'm endlessly promoting is what's the point of all this? And let's just step away from the law back to the purpose of this. The whole point of our electoral laws is to prevent foreign citizens from funding British parties. And this entire arrangement is in a way to get an American billionaire from Wyoming purportedly to support reform because reform can't get money out of UK domiciled donors. So that's all we have to remember, that the whole law was written for that purpose. We believe that British politics should be funded by UK domiciled donors for a good reason, because we don't want Russians giving money, Chinese giving money, or even far-right donors from Wyoming supporting our parties.

46:54Rory Stewart:And that would be normal in any country, right? Britain's not unusual. You can't do it in the States. Imagine the outrage in the States if it turned out that some British woke left-wing donor was funding the Democratic Party in the United States. It's completely illegal. People would go to jail. Look, I'm not a legal expert, but I have studied this particular bit of them all, And it's very difficult to believe, watching that documentary, that these people have not broken certainly the spirit of the law. And if people have broken the law, then people should, in my opinion, go to jail. Let's then move on to two other things which get coverage, but which aren't made part of the story.

47:30Rory Stewart:So in the Reform Conference, an activist stood up and started asking questions about corruption and for us. And climate. And climate. it. She was grabbed by the hair, half pulled on the ground, appears to have been hit with a stick and dragged out of the thing. What are the responses you get? Lee Anderson says, we'll have a whip around for a new stick. Robert Jenrick says, what is it to see here, basically? There is a coarsening here. This is why I want to go to the point of the moral sensibility, and maybe this is a transition back to the AFD. What we're trying to say about these parties is something that's quite difficult to notice, which is they are getting rid of norms that we took for granted.

48:22Rory Stewart:Assaulting a woman in a conference in that way would have been, five years ago, unbelievably outrageous. And I think every party leader would have come out and condemned it. This sort of incredible corruption, there would have been an immediate series of resignations. This is what I think the new world is that we've seen just since the podcast started. I mean, we just did this live show and we talked about the fact we've only been going for four years. The transition from the world that we came into, which was the world of Santa Marin, of Jacinta Ardern, Justin Trudeau, Macron's second election into this world is a world where, above all with Trump, but actually it's the story of the AFD and it's the story of Le Pen and it's the story of Reform 2, is a story about the fact that things we took for granted, norms, values, democratic behavior, are all going out the window and our politics is becoming more violent, less honest, more polarized, coarser and more brutal all the time.

49:32Well, Trump is a big driver of that. And as Paul said in the first half, you know, Trump posted. I mean, it's like him sort of deciding to post about the West Midlands metro mayor authority elections. You know, he's posted about that. Why? Because the far right has won. It's part of their national security strategy to support parties of the far right. They actually think reform are not far right enough now, which is why Musk is backing Rupert Lowe. But my sense is I'm not a lawyer, but I know people who are. By trying to get round a law which bans these foreign donations, impermissible donors, that in itself is breaking the law.

50:14And that I think is where this will go to.

50:16Rory Stewart:Final one for me. The thing that worried me most of all is the reform chair saying that the potential Labour candidate to replace Keir Star, who's now announced that he's stepping down, is going to be a by-election. Zia Youssef. Yeah. The questions should be raised because she wasn't born in Britain. She is a British citizen. She's also a brilliant council leader, let me tell you. Regardless of how brilliant she is. What are they saying? What are they saying? That a British citizen isn't a British citizen because they weren't born in Britain. I wasn't born in Britain. No, Boris Johnson wasn't born in Britain.

50:49Rory Stewart:Right? I was born in Hong Kong. So this is the beginning of something that is unbelievable. And this connects the AFD where they're talking about throwing out German citizens who've broken the law or remigration or all this sort of stuff. If we no longer have an idea of equal citizenship, and presumably Zia Yusuf has less of a problem with the fact that I wasn't born in Britain than he has with the fact that a Somali wasn't a British director. Yeah, exactly. So that maybe is a more fundamental norm, because in that is citizenship, equality, justice, and everything that we stand for as a society.

51:25Rory Stewart:You get to choose who is and isn't British, not based on whether or not they have a British passport, but based presumably in this case on their skin color. I think the selection is happening in the next 48 hours, so this may be out of date. But just to say something about Seagal Abduwali, who's the council leader, I've known her and her family for 30 years. She is absolutely brilliant. Following Georgia Gould as council leader was a very, very tough act to follow, but she's really, really good and would be a terrific MP. But I think you're absolutely right. What he did was he posted a picture.

51:57She wears a headscarf. She is a Muslim and basically said she's not born in Britain and therefore she shouldn't be replacing Keir Starmer. It's straightforward racism, which he probably thinks he gets away with more than maybe Farage or Kruger or Orr. Which he gets away with because he's a Sri Lanka Muslim. Correct. Yeah. Correct. The other thing, it just shows you, we talk about normalization. The other thing that's been big on the news this week, of course, is these thugs. People who say that women shouldn't be allowed to wear a burqa, dressing up in balaclavas, dressed in black, trying to shut down two ports.

52:32These would be the same people who would celebrate the fact that Just Stop Oil people who did similar things are now serving jail sentences. And again, the media are very, very happy to say the AFD are hard right. They call these people protesters. They are hard right, most of them with criminal convictions, a lot of domestic violence, a lot of them, and take their balaclavas off, let's see all their faces, and let's see how many of them already got convictions. And we talk about them as anti-migration protesters. I suspect that a lot of them would be pretty experienced football thugs who just want to bundle, and who just want sort of play into this Tommy Robinson sort of fascist stuff.

53:12And you talk about joining the dots, that is what we have to be much more open about. They are not protesters. They are far-right thugs who are trying to stop any sort of debate around this other than the one they want, which is all immigrants are bad.

53:29Rory Stewart:Let's finish you on Germany, which we started on and which you think about a lot. The AfD won the election. So that represents a far-right party with fascist associations getting well into the 40 % in this election. We've got a very, very weak chancellor now in Germany, who the person with the journalists we were interviewing was saying maybe on their way out. We've got a whole conversation about Ukraine and the future of the European Union and the middle powers. How do we put that all together? Are you worried about Germany? Am I overdoing it in saying that this is something we need to worry about, not just ideologically or for Germany, but actually for the whole of Europe?

54:09Look, if you now have, as Powell was saying, not long ago, people were saying, well, listen, don't worry about the AFD. Yeah, they're a bit of an irritant, they're a bit of a nightmare, but they're never going to get power. And look, Sachsen-Yen-Halt is the oldest. It's probably the most right-wing already of all the 16 lender. So I think maybe a better, when we see the one in Mecklenburg, Fort Pomerang, But I suspect what will happen is that, you know, they will get momentum out of this. And the other thing we should worry about, if you remember the Le Pen trying to become president of France, she's been beaten most times because in the second round, people have come out to stop her.

54:49This election in Saxony-Anhalt had the highest turnout there has been in a regional election for a very long time. It was almost 80%. And the people who were coming out to vote for the first time, including a lot of young people, massive numbers of blue collar workers were coming out and saying, I've never voted before, I'm voting with the AFD. And it's the point that Paul made. It's not that they necessarily know or much care what they stand for. They just are fed up with the other two parties. And of course, one of the reasons they're fed up with the other two parties, because this is the electoral system they've got, is that they had to build a coalition.

55:23One of the reasons Merz can't get the reforms through that he promised is because he's got the social democrats saying, no, we don't want that. They're having to do deals all the time. So, look, I think it is deeply worrying. I think it's deeply worrying that the polls suggest, I still think Le Pen and Bardell are beatable, but the polls suggest they are in a very, very strong position because we don't yet know who they would face, who replaces Macron for the centre, who stands on the left. We don't know yet. We know some of the ones who will definitely stand, but we don't know the whole picture.

55:51If you have a France that goes to the hard right, we've already got Maloney who, okay, Maloney's trimmed. quite a lot but would the french trim in the same way not so sure and as and as powell said the afd are even further to the right of le pen and the other big worry i have because i remain convinced that even despite all this in fact partly because of this hard right populism in europe we need to get britain back uh and of course that argument becomes a lot harder if you've got le pen and you've got vital sort of you know taking power there so i think we should be worried um and one of the terrifying things in paul's documentary was the extent to which people just they just ran this line the whole time this is not our war this is not our war well you might not think it is but it could quite easily become yours and that's why we have to understand what ukraine are doing is standing up for all of us and that's what we'll talk about in question time

56:53you