Burnham's three big tests - and trouble at Reform UK

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1:33Welcome to this week's episode of The State of It. Today we're going to be talking about two things. We are going to be talking about the monster autumn that is to come. There are three particularly big things on the horizon. The early release of thousands of very dangerous prisoners and the issues around that, that's number one. Number two is the budget, which is potentially a tax-raising budget. Big problems around that. And number three, we're going to be talking to you about welfare. And then on top of that, we're going to also talk about Reform UK as various splits are now opening up in the public from within the party.

2:05And look, this week, we've got two very special guests on the state of it. First up. I'm Fraser Nelson. I'm a columnist for The Times. I'm Gabriel Pogrand. I am editor of Insight, the Sunday Times investigations team. Magnificent. So, look, let's let's kick off with the autumn. And if we just start by talking about the early release scheme, They think they've found a solution for it. They are going to stop certain offenders who have committed a type of manslaughter from being released from prison. And why does that matter? It's because for Andy Burnham, his biggest concern at the moment is stopping the release of PC Andrew Harper's killers.

2:41And this would appear to do that. But it's a can of worms because if you provide one exemption, it then creates issues around why there isn't another exemption. So in this case, they're going to stop the release of everyone that's done what's called unlawful act of manslaughter. And that means that you've committed a criminal act that does harm to others, and that covers the PC Harper case. So it's not enough for murder, but it was harming others while committing a criminal act, and in this case, obviously, PC Harper died. So that would do for that, but then we've had lots of people already today get in touch, domestic violence charities and others.

3:16You're going to get a wave of domestic abusers that are released, killers, people that have killed their spouses and their partners. And I guess that is the point of this early release story. It is a Hobson's choice. There is no good choice. Whatever Andy Burnham does, it's going to be really difficult to manage. And come the autumn, he has to come up with a solution in Parliament in September, and then they start getting released from October. And that is an almost impossible line to tread. I think of all the kind of bad legacies that the last Conservative government left to Labour, this is prison is the one that's always going to be most problematic.

3:49I mean, there aren't the spaces you do need to do the early release. Nobody wants to. And it's one of these things where each individual person released is his or her own horror story. They've got the victims, you've got the crimes, you've got what will strike the electorate as a bizarre situation where the prime minister doesn't want it to happen, but still it happens. Now, there are lots of reasons why that is the case, but it just makes the prime minister look impotent. And of course, Andy Burnham, it hasn't got much or very long to say to voters, look, I'm different. I can make things happen.

4:19Now, in my view, the Home Secretary should have the power to veto any specific early release if they want to. But to do that, you need to change a law. The last government didn't change the law. This government hasn't changed that law. I think that law should be done for exactly these reasons. But until it is passed, then there isn't anything the Prime Minister can do. And Burnham was told, you know, when he was given various options, they're all bad in various forms. He chose this particular bad option knowing what it would bring. and this I think will be the first real test of how he handles adversity.

4:50I suspect he won't be able to do it with a TikTok video. Yeah, you know, I think that it's been remarked upon a fair amount that Burnham seems to enjoy the act of being Prime Minister, which nobody could have accused his predecessor of and this is just one of those really kind of big questions of leadership where there is the legal architecture of the Ministry of Justice, the requirement as Fraser outlined to change legislation if you do want to be able to summarily exempt people from this policy. And then there's just a finite period of time and the question of what he can do. And he's not made himself hostage to fortunes.

5:23He's outlined what he wishes to do. He's told his Justice Secretary, you must resolve this. And I think whereas from time to time, Starmer almost looked happy to be imprisoned by questions of law and process, Burnham has here said, no, I'm aware of the process and I'm demanding that we find a way out of it. And his ability to do that, by the way, in relation to early releases will be quite an interesting test of his broader kind of fleet-footedness. Can you, as Prime Minister, use your imagination and relationships with the system to come up with some act of escapology that gets you to where you want to get with the electorate?

6:04I mean, this podcast is called The State of It and you don't get many more failures of the state that are as big as this. And that is a failure that crosses successive governments. And it is falling now on Andy Burnham's watch. And I think his strategy is basically to try to show the public, look, I am on your side. I am trying to stop the release of dangerous people. But exactly as you say, Fraser, the moment that someone is released and goes on to reoffend, goes on to kill or assault someone again, then that story kind of gathers energy and wind again. And it's just a big problem. On the other side of the ledger, you've also got the police.

6:38The police have written a letter. 50 chief constables have come together and written to warn of effectively the risk to public safety, that if they get this wrong and they release the wrong people, it's not something the police can easily manage. And we've heard this again and again from Mark Rowley, the head of the Met Police. He is making the case of, look, you're basically giving us dangerous people to manage on the street. And, you know, it's a very clear example of state failure, I think. Well, I think it's something slightly different. I would call it the question of state capacity. And I think this is the problem in Britain and America and right around the Western world, that people vote for leaders to do something, then the leaders don't do it.

7:20But the leaders don't really admit that's because they don't have the power. Now, I think, Gabriel, you're completely right. Keir Starmer almost loved not having the power. He said, look, I can't do it because the ECHR won't let me, this architecture won't let me. He seemed to love the idea of politicians being captive to this higher, almost ecclesiastical authority of human rights and what have you. Now, I think that is what's giving rise to populism because voters do want change and they find out that so much power has been sent away from elected office and towards these various treaties and laws that bind the hands of ministers, that the ministers can't do what they're elected to do.

7:57Now, I always thought that there should be a great legal reform act, that Starmer, because he was a lawyer, was perfectly placed to say, you know, I'm going to change all of this. I'm going to give the power back into people you elect so the prime minister can do what he tells people he will do. If he wants something to be built, then that thing can be built. But of course, Starmer was the golem of the legal underworld here. I mean, he was never going to come after his own warrants. Now, one of the great things about Andy Burnham is he's not a Blair, right? He's not a Starmer, right? He's not from any of these worlds.

8:28He could actually, now that Lord Hermer has gone, say, okay, this is a great example of why government needs to be rewired. I'm the Prime Minister. I want to stop this. I can't stop it because of various laws. So I'm going to now look at this wider problem of state capacity. And I'm going to find out what we need to do, for example, to stop the boats. I mean, the reason that people are coming in small boats isn't because the Coast Guard can't bat them away. It's because the network of laws obliges us to meet them at the border, to receive them, to escort them to the various centres. Until you change the laws, you won't change the small boats.

9:02Starmer was never going to change those laws, even when David Blunkett and Jack Straw were urging him to. Perhaps Andy Burnham will. Perhaps this will be his first taste with the problem of state capacity. So I'd love to think this is a way of vaccinating him from further mistakes. He does move towards the legal weeding that Keir Starmer and Lord Harmer would not do. Right, let's move from one seemingly intractable problem to another one, the budget and the public finances more broadly and the issues around those. So I'm going to kick off by just telling you what Andy Burnham would like this budget to do and to look like.

9:37So they need to find some money, but they're hoping that they won't need massive tax rises. There's a massive asterisk on that with a disclaimer that we will go into shortly because they will need some quite chunky tax rises. But either way, they're hoping it will be a, open quotes, streamlined affair, and the centrepiece of it will be devolution. So they want to announce the kind of fiscal measures for devolution so that local areas can raise and keep more of their own money. That's what they want people to talk about. But given the state of the public finances, given the impact of the Iran war, that question of how you find the money is going to dominate.

10:12And I wonder how much of this is going to be an excuse to get the tax-raising pain over to the local authorities rather than central government. Now, as a Scot, I've heard this before. Let's give power to the regions, et cetera. It always works, doesn't it? If you look at Wales, look at Scotland, and you find out why this kind of... We're not really giving power back to the people. They're just giving it to bureaucrats, usually less effective ones. And the results in Scotland and Wales have not been good. The schools and hospitals in the two devolved countries are not better. It's been really a sort of disappointment and in some cases a calamity.

10:46So that's why I think he might struggle to sell this as empowering people. Now, if you want to empower people, you do what David Miliband used to describe as double devolution. You give them power, not just to the local authority, but to the actual individual. You let them spend more of their own money. You give them choice in education. You give them choice in health. That's how you empower communities. If you're going to empower a town hall, and by the way, empower it to raise lots of taxes that you don't do to do yourself, that's something rather different. I mean, they need money, right? So if we look at the sums, they need 4.7 billion for defence.

11:19That was one of Keir Starmer's legacies. They need, I think I've counted about 2 billion of the 4 billion of pledges that Burnham has made alone so far look unfunded to me. So that money's got to come from somewhere. And that's with no sign of the Strait of Hormuz opening, continuing conflict in the Middle East. The problems and the financial pressures are piling up, Gabriel. There is an extent to which successive governments have all alighted on this sweet spot, which is that people feel they want control restored to their lives they want control over their finances and people want control within their communities and burnham's basically saying to people you know this time i've actually got the secret sauce to give you a greater actual autonomy over your postcode talks about good growth in every postcode and also greater perceived ownership as well um and has just a really straightforward question which is will the fact and the policy reality be commensurate with the rhetoric because the rhetoric is pretty soaring at the moment and also i i mean this is the essential question it's so um i feel like an under remarked upon under examined question what exactly is it about this that will be distinct from the misadventures in devolution that have defined the welsh and scottish experiments over the last 30 years i wouldn't say that he's been as forthcoming about that we expect him to talk today about public control.

12:42One of the big messages, they've taken public control of a relatively small local bus company. But Andy Burnham's bigger point is public control over the kind of everyday essentials, as he calls it. The big one on the horizon is Thames Water. And I think it is more complicated when you get to things like that, because, OK, let's take Thames Water. It's a badly run company. It's too big. It doesn't serve people's interests. Well, that's fine. But once you get it into special administration, how do you get it back out But again, the taxpayer subsidies to keep it operating would be huge. And then on top of that, you'd still have to keep paying all these executives quite chunky sums of money and bonuses to keep them on board.

13:21So it's not straightforward. And then who would the private buyer for a distressed asset be at the end of it? So that's one of the challenges here, that actually it's the gap between the ideas and the complexity of the reality, which I think we'll see in the autumn. But I suppose Andy Burnham is a man who needs to give a narrative right now. And he's the mayor who believes in giving power to local authorities. So, you know, whether it works or not, it kind of sounds coherent. So if you're fed up with a Labour government, if you're fed up with the way things are going, you want to believe somebody's coming along who's going to make a big change.

13:53And if he's saying, look, I'm going to completely redo the way government has done, I'm going to give power to the regions, it may or may not work, but at least it sounds like a change. So politically, I think it meets a lot of the tests he's got for himself. Whether it'll work in practice, well, ask anybody in Wales and Scotland. Look, voters will need to see evidence of the change. And that brings us to the third topic in an absolutely terrible segue, but I'm taking it, welfare. And Fraser, you have written the book on this. You spend an inordinate amount of your time buried deep in the welfare statistics on the government websites and elsewhere.

14:27But just very briefly, just to tee it up, we've got two big reviews which are coming at the same time. The Alan Milburn review into welfare, and he's looking at NEAT, So young people that are not in education, training or employment. And then on top of that, you've got a Stephen Timms review into PIP, which is the main disability benefit. So those are the two reviews. And at the end of it, Andy Burnham has talked a good game. He said he wants to cut the welfare bill. He said we shouldn't be squeamish about it. But what he said he's opposed to is crude cuts. Alan Milburn's interim report said that for every£25 spent on benefits,£1 is spent on employment support.

15:03And that is obviously an insane disparity. But to address that disparity, you can't just chuck money at employment to level up to 25-25. There are going to be winners and losers. And that is the difficult bit for Labour. That's the difficult bit for Burnham. Does he have the political will to address potential losers in the system? I'm quite optimistic about his chances of getting this right. And I'll tell you why. The first is that he saw what failure looks like. He saw Keir Starmer thinking, look, I'm a huge majority here. I can reform welfare. It was a debacle because he didn't have narrative.

15:36You need to be able to say to people, look, this is tough love for a purpose. I'm going to take away this, it's going to hurt, but you and your community are going to be better off because of X, Y, and Z. I think that Andy Burnham has looked at this and he's realised, no, we need to start with the bigger picture, the bigger story. Now that, of course, to Starmer's credit, is why he commissioned Alan Milburn, why Pat McFadgen's there and still in office, why Stephen Simms is there, so they can come up with the normal political narrative. First of all, to explain the nature of the crisis. I think welfare is the biggest crisis in Britain today.

16:09It's behind low economic growth, it's behind poverty, and it needs to be fixed from a progressive point of view. I also think that Milburn has done something quite incredible. He's managed to bring all parties with him. So when his interim review came out, it wasn't the kind of, this is a Labour review to say how evil the Tories are. It was, look, we've all as a country, we have got this needs problem, we can all agree it needs to be fixed. So I think we are heading towards a very rare historical moment where we could be able to get cross-party belief in welfare reform. It's needed because of course it's difficult for one person to make reforms while being accused of being cruel by the other person.

16:45They need to almost do disarmament, as it were. And I do think that Andy Burnham, if you look at what he's done in Manchester, he was very good at working out the need for vocational education, of trying to integrate what he called the Manchester Baccalaureate, trying to get people in work experience. He was also coming up against Bridget Phillips and wanting to centralise those things. So I think he gets it. And I think the Conservatives realise that they need to support this too. And surprisingly, reform have been first out of the gates with their quite dramatic proposals for cutting disability allowances.

17:20So we could be heading for a moment here where there is a solution that it could work. It will be painful. I don't think it will save masses of money. But I think we've been crying out for it for many, many years. And I'm hopeful we'll get it before Christmas. It's a tough sell with Labour MPs, though, Gabriel. They are a tough crowd on this, right? Well, this is sort of one of the existential questions. Is it in the marrow of every soft left Labour MP that it is intrinsically bad and wicked to reduce the benefit settlement and welfare settlement? or really was the film we just watched the inevitable by-product of the lack of narrative to which Fraser refers, the lack of leadership.

18:02I think if you look at the sort of mood music, his whole leadership pitch was designed to bring back that kind of kingmaker coalition of the dispossessed, disgruntled, soft lefties. Burnham now has the fascinating task of saying to him, well, having given you a lot of love now, you need to come with me and accept that for us to survive and thrive I need to make decisions that are are difficult they're going to be difficult for you in your constituency surgeries and the essential question is can Andy Burnham find a language that allows these people to rebut those claims as well because what it really felt like last time was because there was so little argumentation and forethought that went into say the winter fuel or benefits reform I mean the The PLP felt they weren't equipped with the language, they weren't brought into the process.

18:50So how does that differ in this instance? And do they feel they actually have the vocabulary, the metaphors and the intellectual case to make to rebut what will be inevitable difficulty? And the essay question is, what is the Labour Party for? What does it mean to be progressive? The clue is in the name. Let's go back to Keir Hardie. Let's look at the whole purpose of working. if this party believes that work should be a way out of poverty, it needs to repair the economy, so it is. So I think it's actually, in some ways, it's a difficult argument to make because of difficult reforms. In other ways, it ought to be easy.

19:24This should be in the soul of every single progressive MP. And by the way, they can blame the Tories as much as they like. But if you've got a situation right now where we've got the highest number of needs of any European country apart from Romania, Australia, if you've got a situation where we're breeding now a new form of poverty, a new inequality, and you can see it in the drugs deaths, alcohol deaths, you can see it in these kind of welfare ghettos that we're kind of creating unintentionally. This is not a progressive outcome. Now, this will be to me the biggest test of Andy Burnham, but I also believe he can do it.

19:58He's a good storyteller, we know that. But I think this is wrongly diminished storytelling. I've always thought about politics as ultimately is making and winning arguments. And if he can do that with his own party, he could be an historic change-making prime minister. And perhaps this is something you could even fight an election on. It'd be difficult, but this is the challenge. We're going to head to the interval. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about Nigel Farage and Reform UK and some of the infighting that we've seen in the wake of the Clarkson by-election. Summer's supposed to be the easy season.

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21:12Visit growtherapy.com slash ACAST today to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. We want to talk to you about Reform UK. Now, we have not seen Nigel Farage now since I think 3am on Friday when he was on Farage Fest and he took to the stage and he kind of said this victory in the Clacta by-election sticks two fingers up at the establishment. And since then, he's gone quiet. We've seen a kind of extraordinary internal row in the party over Zia Yusuf, the party's home affairs spokesman, which seems to have culminated in Tim Montgomery, who's a broadcaster, a former Tory and a supporter of Raj and Reform.

22:05He's been suspended for being possibly too much of a critical friend. Is that fair, Fraser? It seems to be, suspended as a party member. Now, it's one thing to sack a minister or a frontbencher for being critical of a leader. It's another thing to kick somebody out of your party, because they went on television as a supporter, saying, I'm not quite sure that Vinay Jafaraj did the right thing in not giving a victory speech after Clacton. So it seems a relatively small offence and a very strange president, but this is an unusual party. When Tim Montgomery was signed as a member of reform, that was enough for a sort of Farage press conference.

22:43It was a big deal. Sir Montgomery's been an intellectual force behind conservatism, there's no doubt about that. The founder of Conservative Home. And when he moved across, it was a prelude to Robert Jenrick moving across. He had a big hand in taking Jenrick across as well. So it seemed to be a kind of a shift in the right. Now, by the same token, his expulsion or suspension from the party is also quite a big event. And it seems to have come over Zia Yusuf. Now, Zia Yusuf, we know, basically loathes Robert Jenrick and vice versa. Zia was calling Jared a traitor before he joined reform. But when Tim Montgomery went public in saying, look, Zia Yusuf is becoming too divisive.

23:23And what Zia is doing in calling people traitors is galvanizing the anti-reform tactical vote. Now, it used to be said in politics, for it doesn't matter how much those who vote for you don't like you. In other words, let them hate us as much as they like. But that's not true. If anti-reform becomes the number one force in a constituency. If you get Tories voting for Labour and vice versa, because their number one priority is that reform stays out. Now, Tim Montgomery, and many people like him, thought Vizier Yusuf was doing exactly that. That he was coming up with this sort of vicious authoritarian language.

23:59I'm going to open a detention centre and the constituencies of people who don't vote for reform. I'm going to track down and boot out up to 2 million undocumented people in Britain. I'm a lot of people thought this is just too much. It may galvanise the base, but it's going to make other people vote tactically against it. Tim Montgomery voiced the concerns that many in reform have got, and for that he seems to have lost his privileges as a reform member. It's also just these inherent tension within reform. I mean, one of the points that Zia Yusuf made before Robert Jenrick's defection, he didn't want any more Tories.

24:36He wanted them to be their own thing. So you've since obviously had Robert Jenrick, Xuela Bravman, lots of different Tories joining. And so unsurprisingly, they're not particularly happy bedfellows. That's right. I mean, I think what's so interesting about this is we don't yet know exactly why this has happened. So let's be clear that party leaders routinely use the machinery of their party bureaucracy to display their own political direction. Alistair Campbell was suspended under Corbyn's Labour. Corbyn was suspended under Starmer's. kemi badenog at the moment has drawn some criticism for forestalling the parliamentary selection of some former tory cabinet members so it is normal for party leaders to exercise their discretion to and use the party rule book to do certain things and promote or demote certain individuals but the question here is what is actually going on is this merely a kind of tactical response to Montgomery's open, well, it's not that he's been insubordinate per se, he's just been really candid.

25:38He's tweeted and now spoken on The Spectator with a degree of honesty about what he perceives to be the problem with the party and in particular Zia's pronouncements. Or in time, will it emerge that Farage is using this to convey that he's in the same intellectual position is here that he doesn't want to unite the right that he objects to this notion that in some way or another informally or otherwise the constituent parts of the british right will need to unite in order to prevent progressive domination at the next election i mean that's kind of the massive electoral question the kind of tectonic plate on which this latest soap opera sits and i would say as well there's just a massive question as to what zia what zia's long game over here because it if you're if you woke up every day wanting to succeed nigel farage you would probably say things and act in a way that is consistent with zia yusuf of late i mean everything he says is catnip to uh the kind of die-hard reform base but it is not necessarily the path you would chart if your objective was as you say fraser firstly making reform a more benign and palatable proposition for people who are swing voters or who you might say we just rather they were quiescent come the next election as long as they're not going out to vote against us that would be good also it's not as straightforward as just the tory defectors are arraying themselves against zia yusuf there are a lot of people who have known for us for a long time who have long had an issue with his own conduct and performance i know on very good authority um a man who's now I know, stranger to our readers, George Cottrell, kind of one of the few Farage whisperers who's been there throughout the last decade, has major issues with Youssef and for a long time felt that he was detracting from Farage's operation.

27:29So this man at the moment in his fate, Youssef is once again of the essence, really. It's fascinating. And it's not exactly clear where Farage lies on it either. It comes down to a bandwidth issue, right? Farage wants and reforms surely want to be doing what Robert Jenrick did yesterday. They want to do press conferences where they're talking about stripping foreigners of welfare. They want to be playing to what they see as their strengths on migration, on crime. And instead, there is a story today about internal fighting, the soap opera, as you call it, Gabriel, the kind of soap opera that ultimately derailed the Tories.

28:01And that's what they've got to watch here, that there is going to be a need to assert some kind of discipline. Because if they don't and the fighting continues, then that becomes the story. and that's, we haven't even got to and we'll talk about this in a minute but Insights work on reforms finances and all the distraction from their core message that presents but that's the issue here isn't it, it's probably not the ground they want to be talking on. And also it was never clear of Zee Yusuf, it's controllable as it were, he's got his own people, he's got his own team, he will launch a policy in the morning and then pick a fight with somebody on Twitter in the afternoon and his sort of side hustle as it were, can create more fuss than the original policy.

28:41He seems to enjoy conflicts quite a lot. And by the way, he's also defied Nigel Farage. Farage was saying time and time again, no, we cannot have mass deportation. It's impractical. We can't kick out every single legal immigrant, man, woman and child. It's just not politically workable. And Ndiy Yusuf seems to have won the argument saying, no, that's exactly what we are going to do. It was never clear to me how they were reconciled. But when he resigned, I mean, Ndiy Yusuf is quite a flouncer outer. He resigned as party chairman. He's resigned as head of the Doge unit. The first time he resigned, Nigel Farage did everything he could to bring him back.

29:17He really saying, look, we need you as a party, come back. I think he recognises that his strengths is he is a very good media performer. But this is also a question as to how they handle Restore. Restore is the great phantom at the reform feast right now, because it's got exactly the same playbook. look, we want to be the baddest guys in town. We're going to appeal to you. We're going to be an even bigger vote of protest than reform is. And Zia Yusuf has been saying, look, we can't allow them that advantage. So we need to be saying shock and awe things that do not give Rupert Lowe that kind of edge.

29:51Najaf Farage hasn't been so clear about that. So this is another point of differentiation. How do reform respond to restore? Zia Yusuf's answer has been to be right out there of the traps, setting off explosions left, right and centre denying restore oxygen Farage hasn't been so sure about this so now we see a situation where Farage's popularity is falling quite a lot his approval rating is now down there with Zach Polanski where Kemi Badenak is just above water and 0.3 Nandi Burnham was on 0.6 and 7 Farage's minus 23 but this isn't a great place and if you were to go I mean I don't think you will but if you were then Lord Ashcroft polling says Ziusus number one to succeed him, and then maybe Richard Tice number two, and Jedwick number three.

30:36But you wonder how much of Ziusus' activity is directed at the reform base rather than the reform target voters. Can I get just one thing I know you've done, Fraser, because obviously there is a degree to which the version of Zia of himself, Zia, presents on social media is slightly a caricature, the traitor language. It's a hard line, kind of picking fights with people, that kind of thing. You've sat down and debated with him, and that is a very different Zia that I saw during that debate, unless I've misread it. No, absolutely. I found him thoughtful. I was chatting to him after it as well. Quite sociable.

31:08It was a measured debate, wasn't it? You were debating... We were debating, you know, is Britain broken? The kind of classic kind of fault line between the Conservatives and reform right now. And, you know, I agreed with him on a whole bunch of things. But what was interesting was that when I was there in person with him, he was friendly, chatty, saying, yes, I think you might have exaggerated this, but I think we agree on that. You know, the kind of language which you don't do for online. Now, the thing is, Steve, you'll know, all of us know, but there are politicians whose online persona is very different to what they are in person.

31:39And I think Zia is like that. I think he's a man of exceptional ability, exceptional energy. And I think he's right in a whole bunch of things that he says. But he's also probably thinking that nowadays you need to create a reaction. You need to be creating a fire, left, right and centre, if you want to keep the kind of narrative behind you. And Gabriel, look, we just want to talk about Insight and the work you've done on the Farage and Cottrell and the donations issue, basically, because this issue isn't going away. Standards investigation is going to continue and it's going to continue to be a distraction, I think.

32:15It's a broad question, but I was trying to grapple with you the other day. Why is it that reform attracts these kind of stories? It's because it's very unusual the sources of their money, isn't it? It's not something we've seen in British politics before. Yeah, well, I think the most kind of eloquent and I should say prescient commentator on this has been Fraser, who identified some time ago that what we were witnessing with respect to the funding of reform was unprecedented. And I think that the role of crypto in relation to the funding of Farage personally and his party. So I suppose what we've been doing inside the Sunday Times Investigations team for over the last month or so, we've been trying to examine, I suppose, sort of, there've been two horses riding in parallel to one another.

32:57One is the kind of more technical, some people might say, slightly more Westminster question of Farage's adherence to party rules. And in the other is we've been trying to unravel this amazingly opaque world of offshore crypto gambling, payment processing companies, the ways in which individuals are capable of moving money around the world, and in turn, the ways in which that money then has fortified Farage since his return to politics. And I suppose the bits where this story has become troubling for Farage, where those two themes, two threads have come together, I think the best example of that, and I sort of doffed my cap here to The Guardian, who've done very important reporting on this as well, is the question of this police investigation and the donations by Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell's mother.

33:51So she donated a million pounds to a UK company of which Richard Tice was beneficiary, who then donated half to reform around the time of the last election. The whereabouts of the remaining£500 ,000, Tice has never provided clarity on. there. Cottrell's mum, who it later emerged had received money from Cottrell shortly before making the donations, had wired money to ties with the assistance of an Australian payment processing company called Oneify. We then at Insight had a source who approached us and were able to determine that Cottrell himself had taken out an account with this Australian entity 24 hours before his mother used it to make donations.

34:36And we found out that all the people involved in the company had met Cottrell at a party in Montenegro a year or two prior. So this story, I mean, what's kind of fascinating about it, journalistically, is that it is so tightly socially wired. There are essentially about 10 people who encompass the world of politics, crypto, gambling, and they're all intimately involved. And just to kind of lift the veil a little bit into our journalistic process um we had a story on the weekend about the fact that Christopher Harbour and the man behind the five million pounds uh he owns a company which this offshore gambling platform to which Cottrell's connected Tether um used to process gambling payments with respect to UK customers and we were in receipt of two pieces of information one somebody came to us and started giving us information about Harbourn's acquisition of this payments company, IFX, for which Farage's personal lawyer received a£1 million finder's fee.

35:42He brought it to Harbourn's attention a few years ago and seems to have done reasonably well out of it. And Harbourn's since used it. It's a foreign exchange payments company. We were learning all about that entirely separately. Somebody gave us some actual documentary correspondence showing that UK customers were being invited to bet with this offshore gambling company. And we were given some banking information where UK customers were told to send their funds. And it was one of those moments where, you know, journalism, it just all clicked. I said to my colleague, Phoenicia, what do we think, what will happen if we type in the account number and sort code like i just said i just have a weird feeling that ifx payments is going to come up and we typed in on revolut and on a few other electronic payments providers the account information and it was slightly filmic when ifx payments just emerged on screen but i guess the reason i assumed that harbon would be involved in the financial infrastructure behind this gambling syndicate was that there is just a tiny number of people involved in all of this And they're all people to whom Farage is incredibly close.

36:55Farage dined with Harbourn and George Cottrell days before the launch of Tether Dot Bet. So it is really the story of, you know, journalism is sort of at its most intelligible and hopefully most compelling where there are actual people as well as big forces at play. And this is a story of big forces, crypto, gambling, offshore payments, politics, money, but also basically a group of people who you could fit in a room who all know each other very intimately. And I suppose that's what we've been trying to unravel recently. Farage says that Cottrell's support for him is none of anybody's business and has nothing to do with politics.

37:31George Cottrell says he is a customer in Tether.bet and has no further role. Christopher Harbourn said he was not involved in the day-to-day arrangements of IFX. I think that brings this week's episode to a close so thank you everyone for listening Gabriel because you're here so rarely now could you do the honours and thank our amazing producers Yes very nice to be back so thank you so much to Molly, you and Harry for making the episode sing

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