Farage under pressure over gifts from convicted fraudster – The Latest

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0:45Cottrell is a minor aristocrat who sometimes claims to have come from significant wealth. He's got that very baby-faced look. He's been around Farage for a long time. He was in his entourage, even during the Brexit referendum. It's just an old friend of his. Are you friends with many criminals, have interests? Well, people do make mistakes in life. Farage's idea of being a man of the people has always been slightly fictional, you know, given we know he's a public school educated former metals trader. And the problem for Reform UK is that Farage is the party. From the Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hull.

1:24Nigel Farage has for some weeks now been keeping a relative low profile as he faces questions and now an investigation into a gift of£5 million given to him by his friend, the crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourn. Peter Walker, our senior political correspondent, there are now fresh allegations about his finances from another close ally. What have we learned over the weekend? What we've learned is that it seems that Nigel Farage also received more money in the one year period before he became an MP, which under the rules and is anything relevant should be declared once the person is actually elected to the Commons.

2:06Farage didn't do that with the five million pounds. He said that was just a gift, so we didn't need to. The Standards Commission is now looking at that. And there's been calls for the Standard Commissioner to look at money and services that Farage received from a close aide called George Cottrell, which including staffing, security, use of a very, very lavish five-storey Georgian townhouse near a Buckingham Palace. So essentially, the complaints are similar, but it's from a different person. The figure of George Cottrell is fascinating in and of itself, isn't it? He might be familiar to any long time Farage watchers as posh George.

2:43He's often seen at Farage's side. Tell me a bit more about him and what makes him so interesting. Well, he's still relatively young. He's 32. He looks younger. He's got that very baby-faced look. He's been around Farage for a long time. He was in his entourage even during the Brexit referendum year, so when he was very young. Cottrell is a minor aristocrat who sometimes claims to have come from significant wealth. How much wealth he actually comes from is a debatable subject. He's made quite a lot of money through gambling. He lived in Montenegro for a period where he kind of gambled a lot there.

3:20He's got a conviction in the US for wire fraud, which he admitted to. He served a small jail sentence there. And he's one of these slightly shadowy figures, but he's not very well known. People might spot him in the background of a lot of pictures of Nigel Farage over the years, but they're extraordinarily close. There is a story, no one's ever confirmed this to me firsthand, that he calls Farage daddy, which is slightly unusual. It gave me the creeps this morning. I was like, this is out of my way and I have to say. But he's very much part of the inner circle, but he's got this unofficial role.

3:54The Times this morning printed a photograph of a Reform UK business card that Cotterford uses, but the party says he's an unpaid aide. He's kind of like, he was always known as a bit of a kind of bag carrier as much as anything else, but now it seems he's also been giving quite a lot to Nigel Farage in a direct way, whether in terms of money, but also in terms of these like services, like somewhere to stay in security and all that stuff. So he's quite a central figure. Yeah. So we had Robert Jenrick, obviously former Tory minister, who's now defected to reform, who was given the gift of doing the Sunday broadcast rounds yesterday morning.

4:31Farage issued a statement later, but there's two sort of similar in the way that they've tried to bat off the Christopher Harbourn allegations, aren't they? Saying that these are friends of Farage. Tell me more about how they've tried to come out fighting against this. They've basically said there is nothing to see here. An investigation is completely pointless. Their argument is that the rules only specify you have to declare relevant gifts. And because these were just purely mates, there's nothing to it. It remains to be seen what the Standards Commission, Daniel Greenberg, has to say. My suspicion is he'll take a slightly dim view of it because anyone being given£5 million would be seen as having an obligation towards a person, particularly a crypto billionaire, where Nigel Farage is a proponent of policies that would liberalise crypto a lot in the UK and potentially make Harbourn even more rich than he is now.

5:23I mean, that's up for the standards commissioner to look into. But the response has been gradually kind of going upwards, ratcheting upwards. With the 5 million, it was first of all, you know, there's nothing to see, it's all fine. But Robert Jenrick on the broadcast rounds yesterday was quite pushy. He was basically saying this is a stitch up by a Labour-supporting paper he's calling the Sunday Times very pro-Labour, which is news to me and probably to them. And he's basically saying, look, the establishment doesn't want change. They're trying to stomp on Nigel Farage in any way they can. And all this is quite Trump-like.

5:57Yeah, it's something that we've been really seeing from Farage, haven't we? This sort of hostile approach to what he describes as the media establishment in this very Trumpian inspired model and why he's been dodging questions because we know that the£5 million gift from Christopher Harbourn is something that has been coming up repeatedly and did so at the Makerfield by-election. We know that the Standards Committee has been carrying out its investigation into the Harbourn gift that is expected to report back soon. It seems likely, we don't know yet, that there'll be a similar investigation into these new George Cottrell allegations.

6:34But the Harbour investigation could carry some really serious consequences for Farage, couldn't it? Well, there's a series of things going on. There's the investigation into the 5 million, which should be quite soon. Opposition parties have called for an investigation into the George Cottrell money. Separately, a Labour MP has called for an investigation again by the Standards Commission into whether Farage breached lobbying rules by talking to the Bank of England about crypto regulations when he received this£5 million. And there's separately a fourth possible investigation into whether he's declared the number of properties that he owns, which seems to be an ever-expanding number.

7:13It's possibly about five now. And there's two risks to him. The first of all is reputational. As you say, it comes up in the doorstep. Farage's idea of being a man of the people has always been slightly fictional, you know, given we know he's a public school educated former metals trader. Yeah. But I think the five million pounds is, as some people understand, it's the sort of stuff they could never accrue most people in their lifetime. And the idea of being giving it as a no strings attached gift just smells a bit odd. in the more kind of everyday sense, if the standards commissioner looks into this and then the standards committee decides to approve the punishment, if the punishment is a suspension of more than 10 days, then he faces this process where if at least 10 % of his Clacton constituents sign a petition, then it could be a by-election.

8:04I mean, I think the chances are he'd probably win, but this would be the sort of fuss he really doesn't need. So there was a brilliant piece in The Guardian over the weekend written by our colleagues Verena Mason and Ben Quinn, to which you contributed about the real questions that are now swirling around Farage's political future. He's always felt a bit like Trump, like this sort of Teflon figure, that things like this don't stick to him. I think back to the start of Keir Starmer's premiership, those allegations of gifts that he really struggled to bat off, you know, the dresses, the glasses, the concert tickets.

8:36But there are real questions about whether this is really going to stick to Farage in the longer term. I think whilst he would probably win a by-election just because the opposition vote would be split, I think the reputational damage is shown by the fact that he used to do press conferences on a more or less weekly basis. And apart from a very hastily arranged one in Makerfield, he's not done one for about 50 days. His lieutenants like Generic gets sent out. Nigel Farage did a brief broadcast round about a week ago, which went incredibly badly wrong. He just got very grumpy with everyone, was asked about the five million pounds.

9:10He came across very badly. So I think they realise it's starting to cut across. And the problem for Reform UK is that Farage is the party. When they were being run by Richard Tice, when Tice was the leader, they were hobbling along in about six percent in the polls. I mean, as they keep on pointing out, they've now led for more than 300 consecutive polls. They're doing something right. But it could easily drop away again. And I think, you know, I get the sense there's people in reform who are very, very worried about this. Yeah, yeah. Or perhaps we've seen peak reform, which is an interesting thing to countenance.

9:42Peter, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. That's it for today. My huge thanks again to Peter Walker, The Guardian's senior political correspondent. You can keep up with his reporting and that of our Westminster team over at theguardian.com. And if you didn't manage to stay up all night to watch the England versus Mexico game, we have a full rundown on the extraordinary World Cup match on this morning's episode of World Cup Daily with our colleagues from our sister podcast, Football Weekly. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest. Today in Focus will be back in your feeds as usual tomorrow morning.

10:15The Latest will be back tomorrow night. This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff. It was produced by Annie Lovespa and Bryony Moore. The senior producer was Ryan Ramgobin.

10:34This is The Guardian.

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