CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Demagogue Stunt: Nigel Farage’s By-Election Gambit

Photograph Source: Laurie Noble – CC BY 3.0

Nigel Farage is not a picture of happiness.  As Britain’s version of Trumpism (only a version, never a facsimile), the leader of Reform UK had been flying high in the polls.  But his themes are starting to tire: the anti-establishment figure who so happens to be profiting from it; the martyr who always falls just short of the sword; the erratic, even cranky bully who aims volcanic fury at media reports he doesn’t like.

A report from The Sunday Times was certainly one such example he did not take a shine to.  According to the paper, George Cottrell, a long-time aristocratic aide and convicted criminal, provided funding to Reform UK covering various expenses, including private security, staffing for social media boosting and plush accommodation.  These were not declared to parliamentary authorities.  Cottrell’s copybook was somewhat blotted by an eight-month stretch in a US prison on wire fraud charges, not that it made much of a difference to Reform operators.  (It could have been worse, given his agreement to launder drug money in an undercover FBI sting operation.)  As Rob Lownie quipped in Unherd, “In a party with little fondness for strictures, Reform UK insiders maintain that there is one rule: ‘Don’t ask what Posh George does.’”

The Cottrell connection says much about Farage as populist manqué, one who heaps bile upon the powers that be only to cavort and revel with........

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