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00:00Hello, welcome to In The Rim, where we are recording an emergency pod, as you can see from
00:05our slightly Situation Rim style meeting room here. We're not on our usual location. We are
00:12at Independent Towers, where we've just watched Nigel Farage's press statement.
00:17Today, I will resign as a Member of Parliament for Clacton-on-Sea, thereby forcing a by-election,
00:26which should happen, I hope, in short order. Now, I've decided that the people of Clacton
00:31should be the judges of my actions. This will be a people versus the establishment by-election.
00:40On Friday, we did an episode asking whether reform were in trouble. I don't know whether
00:45they listened to us themselves, but it seems that they've decided to respond to the media
00:51establishment, i.e. Helen and I, with a scathing but arguably very well-executed speech this afternoon.
00:59Am I angry? Well, I've never been angrier in my life.
01:04So what did he say? 2pm, he went to the top of Milbank Tower, which is very near the Palace
01:09of Westminster. And really, he was responding to some very, very tense scrutiny of his finances
01:17recently. So on Friday, we talked about the £5 million he's been given by the Thailand-based
01:22crypto billionaire Christopher Harbin and some of the properties that he owns. And over the weekend,
01:30the Sunday Times had a scoop about his links to George Cottrell and the payments in kind that he
01:36was receiving from his friend, who's been with him since his UKIP days, but has also spent time
01:41in an American prison for fraud. Wire fraud. Wire fraud. Sorry.
01:50One of my favourite crimes. A different fraud altogether. So anyway, reform put out a statement
01:56this afternoon saying Nigel Farage is going to make a public speech on his future in public life. And
02:02everyone got very overexcited. Was he throwing in the towel again? Because he has a habit of doing
02:08this. I said on Friday that he's like a snake and he sort of sheds his various skins. And so
02:13we were wondering whether we'd be putting out a podcast episode saying that Nigel Farage has
02:18stepped down from reform, but that means we're only a year away from his announcement of a new party.
02:23But he didn't do that. He has stepped down as the MP for Clacton-on-Sea and is calling a
02:30by-election
02:30so that he can fight what he's describing as a people versus the establishment campaign.
02:37It's a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where
02:44to go. And that is why I will be putting my name forward to stand in this by-election. I
02:51will fight
02:52to win. I will fight to continue the political revolution that reform has started.
02:58We should say his line was very clear. So it's an extraordinary speech that we'll dissect in a bit
03:02because there's all sorts of interesting things within it that are kind of wider notes for what
03:07is going on in our politics and some extremely bad news for Andy Burnham because Nigel Farage has
03:13effectively taken his lunch. So instead of the next hundred days when Andy Burnham becomes prime
03:17minister, being a narrative that's controlled by Andy Burnham, it will instead be something that is
03:23owned by Nigel Farage, which is not what they were planning for, obviously.
03:28What Nigel Farage said in that speech today, his line was very clear. He denied any wrongdoing at all.
03:34He said he'd broken no law. He said as far as he was concerned, he'd broken no parliamentary rules
03:39and that he'd had advice about the difference between public life and private life and that
03:44this was just basically a massive establishment stitch up. So he was going to take the fight to
03:49the establishment in this by-election. And it was very clear it was a kind of klaxon call for
03:54the people to vote with him stick two fingers up and almost double down on his being an MP.
03:59He's not going to be elected just once, but he's going to be elected twice.
04:03It follows days, as you were saying, Clio, of scrutiny about his personal finances.
04:07There are these conduct investigations going on already in Parliament that he's subject to.
04:12Nigel Farage is managing to thread together all of these things to make a very credible
04:16and believable sounding thing that there is an establishment stitch up. He's added this up and
04:21that's what it sounds like. I think when you get under the skin, there's actually rather a lot more
04:25going on there. The parliamentary standards investigation will carry on regardless. It's
04:31an investigation into what he has done while he is an MP. So we're going to have that going on
04:36in
04:36the background at the same time as potentially a by-election campaign, at the same time as
04:40potentially a new parliamentary standards inquiry. So the previous one is about this £5 million
04:45which was given to Nigel Farage by Christopher Harburn in the press conference he described as
04:51a lottery win. But there is probably now another standards investigation about to commence
04:57into these payments in kind from George Cottrell.
05:03So Cleo, what did you, we sat there together at one of our lovely watch parties and watched
05:07something live as it was unfolding. What did you make of his speech?
05:11It was a bit awkward actually because we watched it on Sky News and he had a pretty good go
05:14at Sky
05:15News and they nearly dropped out but they stuck with him. It was well done. So it was a well
05:22put
05:22together 15 minute statement. There were no questions at the end just like Andy Burnham's had
05:26recently. He was able in a slightly Trumpian way I suppose to pull together little factoids that
05:36kind of built his case, built a narrative. He was angry. I mean he was really kind of furiously angry
05:43and he used all the speculation of the last few days to put together what felt quite compelling
05:51argument actually. And you can bet your bottom dollar that reform will be cutting bits of that
05:56speech together and putting them out over the airwaves for the foreseeable weeks. It's a really
06:03interesting phenomenon now in politics to have such a controlled setting for these kinds of public
06:08statements. And, you know, previously that's always been in the government's gift that you could put
06:13election up in number 10 with a couple of flags behind you when you go out into the street
06:17and you can summon all the nation's journalists there. But reform were able to do that just by
06:24saying look at our YouTube channel at 2pm. We won't be taking any questions thanks. We're not going to
06:30invite you into the room but we're going to tantalise you with the idea that you might be
06:34stepping down as an MP altogether. All Labour's problems are solved. And then actually I'm going to
06:40use you to pump out the exact version of events that I want ending with a kind of mic drop
06:47and
06:48there's going to be a by-election and it's going to be fought on the terms I want. I'm framing
06:52this
06:52exactly the way I want to, which is forget Makerfield, forget Aberdeen South, come to Clacton,
06:59fight me man to man.
07:01Isn't it extraordinary though? Because effectively that's what we're going to end up with is these
07:07two people in Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage who have like gone to, taken the fight to these
07:13particular constituencies and then are extrapolating out of the victory in one constituency into
07:19therefore he calls I carry the will of the people with me. And it's an extraordinary thing to have
07:24pulled off to both be kind of standing down but back for the fight and fighting on to win.
07:29He's, if you were Nigel Farage's political opponents, that speech would not have been
07:33comfortable watching because it was really good actually.
07:37Well not only that but we talked on Friday about being very careful about being drawn onto
07:44battleground who you don't want to fight on. And what has happened here is Labour and the
07:52Conservatives and in fact basically the rest of the political class have got very excited about this
07:56ethics and standard inquiries. And you know it is right to scrutinise him and we'll get into
08:01some of the bits we think he's on slightly shakier ground on in his arguments in his statement. But
08:08essentially by trying to play the man and not the ball they have stumbled into a by-election.
08:14Actually none of them want to fight. None of them want to fight him in a by-election.
08:18But by sort of forcing this pressure on him and thinking yes, yes, yes, we're going to go after him.
08:23We're going to write to the Standards Commissioner and insist that they open more investigations.
08:28And you know, he should be scrutinised. That's absolutely true. He's managed to dodge a by-election
08:34being forced on him by just announcing one and saying, and this is how I want to frame it,
08:38it's the people versus the establishment. Where do you stand? It's really well done. And it's just,
08:45it's so frustrating from a kind of campaigning point of view to watch the establishment stumble
08:51straight into this trap. Because that's what it is. And you're exactly right. He's managed now to
08:56suck all the oxygen out of Andy Burnham's first hundred days in office, because not only do they
09:00have this Manchester mayoral election, they are going to have to go and fight Nigel Farage on his
09:06home ground in Clacton. You know, incidentally, the reform grid for the summer, we talked on Friday
09:12about what might they do this summer. The last two summers, they've capitalised on what's going on in the
09:17public mood, and where there have been any kind of tensions over specific incidents, where they've
09:23made hay, and where they use, particularly August, to do their own press conferences, and they led the
09:28agenda, and they made sure the news was theirs. Well, they've done it again, because they've just
09:32guaranteed another summer of reform.
09:35Is there any chance of anybody other than reform winning in this constituency?
09:41She's asking for a friend.
09:42Well, I don't know. I mean, just to give you a couple of stats on this, Farage won 46%
09:47of the
09:48vote in 2024. The Conservatives came second on nearly 28%.
09:54Restore didn't have a candidate, obviously. And Labour didn't do particularly well there.
10:00I mean, there's kind of an argument that why wouldn't you field some candidates? But at the
10:05moment, reform are on track to hold 60% of the vote in Clacton. So he's due to do pretty
10:13well.
10:14It is his to lose, which is also, you know, there are risks and rewards with this kind of thing.
10:19The only thing I would say in the kind of risk register for Farage is that you have to be
10:25quite
10:26careful about calling elections that you don't really need. And a by-election, on average,
10:31just costs about a quarter of a million pounds. He had a bit of a go at Andy Burnham for
10:36taking
10:36part in the Makerfield by-election, because this has triggered a very expensive Manchester
10:40mayoral election. And Labour itself was quite cross about that. And you saw various briefings
10:46about it against Sally Burnham at the time. And I guess my note of caution for Farage is
10:53Theresa May was on track to do very well in the 2017 general election until she actually called it.
10:59So she needed a bigger majority to get her Brexit deal through. And she called the election. And,
11:05you know, taking aside the campaigning tactics of Jeremy Corbyn and momentum and what was a pretty
11:12impressive campaign, there was a sense when you drill down into particularly focus groups, people
11:18would say, this just feels a bit self-indulgent. We don't need this election. I don't feel like you've
11:25made the case to have one properly. In 2019, we also called an early election because we weren't
11:32doing one for another three or four years. But we tried to frame it in the public mind that it
11:38was
11:39quite people versus establishment then. You know, Parliament is not delivering. Parliament is not
11:43delivering Brexit. We've got to get Brexit done. The only way to do that, to break the deadlock,
11:48is to have a general election. Perhaps Farage can do that with his people.
11:51Well, it's a very popular battle cry, people versus establishment, isn't it? And I think the
11:56other thing that's interesting about this, of the many things that are interesting, is that
12:00the worst thing that could happen is the outcome of the Parliamentary Standards
12:04Commission's inquiry is Nigel Farage having to resign or being resigned and losing his seat
12:10and having to be a by-election. So he's basically just cut straight to the end of there's no harm
12:15that this process can do it. Firstly, he's totally changed the framing in the kind of normal
12:19rules of politics and laws of gravity don't apply to me. But I have brought forward the worst
12:24punishment they can give me. And I'm just going to take that on the chin and then go forward
12:28anyway. So he's totally neutralised any of these questions and scrutiny because he's already
12:33taking the punishment and, you know, to all intents and purposes, he's going to win.
12:37Could he have it again? Could he do this by-election and then there could be like another one in
12:41the autumn?
12:42I think it would look really bad in terms of playing into the narrative that, you know,
12:49Westminster systems and elite and everything are out of touch. If actually Nigel Farage stands
12:54down, basically says to the electorate of Clapton, elect me knowing all the facts you know, which
13:00is all of this kind of murkiness around the money and they bring him back regardless. And then the
13:06Parliamentary Standards Commissioner says, well, technically you did break some rules and we're
13:10suspending him. We're going to be another by-election. That will just look absolutely crazy.
13:14This is one of my brow wrinkles of one of the things that Farage said, actually, and I'm
13:18really interested to get your take on this, which is the idea that the Standards Commissioner
13:22is being kind of weaponised against him. He made the point that this does not involve
13:27misuse of public money. This is money that he's been given privately. But I found it slightly
13:33mysterious that he was going after the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, because in my experience,
13:37it's quite a toothless office in some ways.
13:40Well, I mean, I know the guy who is now Daniel Greenberg, who is the Parliamentary Standards
13:45Commissioner. He used to be Parliamentary Counsel, so the person who wrote the laws inside government.
13:50He is a fiercely independent man, as anybody who worked in government and tried to persuade
13:54him to do something that he didn't want to do, even when it was his job. And the notion
13:59this guy is being at all influenced by any of this stuff is that's for the birds. That's
14:03not the case.
14:05Not least because, I mean, he was perfectly happy going after Keir Starmer for his suits
14:08and glasses.
14:09I mean, he's a proper guy, Daniel, and he'll dance to the beat of his own drum or whatever.
14:13I think that the harder thing is that Nigel Farage was so robust on, I haven't done anything
14:19wrong. He said he'd taken legal advice. He's got this very strong divide in his head between
14:25public and private. So one of the things that he's been arguing is that it's nothing to do
14:29with the public, that I've got this money privately. It's about my private life. How
14:33dare you ask any questions? So again, with a slightly sinking feeling about, you know,
14:38this is some of the advice that we had been given, that it was really odd that Nigel Farage,
14:42who has spent his life kind of operating outside the system, seemed to be being beaten by the
14:46system. And here he is, he's leapt out of it. And he's completely owning the fact that
14:51he personally has been given these really significant sums of money, and has basically
14:56gone, firstly, what of it? And then secondly, made some very punchy and powerful arguments
15:00about why he needs it for his personal security, which he did very effectively today.
15:05Yeah, I wanted to know what you thought of that, actually. He talked about his daughter,
15:10he talked about, he used a line, which was, I am, I'm the most physically assaulted MP,
15:17which, for me, touched a nerve.
15:20Yeah, I mean, that was, that was a, I mean, we've had, unfortunately, two MPs in our parliament
15:25in the last 10 years who've been murdered. So, I mean, that was a, that was a really bad
15:30thing, very crass thing to say. I'm not trying to underestimate how much threat he feels,
15:36but to say that you're the person that's had the most physical assaults when we've had
15:40two MPs murdered is not acceptable. I also think that I would be massively surprised if it
15:46turns out that Nigel Farage has had more abuse than, for example, Diane Abbott has had. There
15:51is an element in what he's talking about today, which is a really important conversation we
15:54ought to be having. The way that our elected officials are treated by everybody, they're
15:59like common, sort of fair game in a way, and they are put under physical threat. They are,
16:05their families are bullied. They are, it's a really, there's some really serious problems
16:09here when they're insufficiently protected. And I hope in and amongst all of this, there's
16:13an opportunity to have serious, serious questions and serious conversations about it. When you
16:17and I worked together, I used to be repeatedly, just totally shocked by what MPs were put up
16:22with, because they do so out of a sense of not wanting to look like they're exploiting the
16:26state or asking for special favours. And they just put up with this extraordinary kind of
16:31abuse in their own constituents, like it's fair game. And I do think we have done something
16:35really bad where we've corroded the nature of public debate to such a degree that these things
16:40are normal. So Nigel Farge was talking about some quite serious stuff about needing to,
16:44feeling threatened. I mean, some of it, you know, to taste whether you would have said
16:48the things that he'd said, but he's got, he has got, again, unfortunately for his opponents,
16:52a legitimate point to make. He also did what, you know, all of us daughters who have dads will
16:58recognize as something which I think will again go down very well for anybody watching is he
17:04absolutely owned how angry he was last week. And he named the newspapers he was angry about because
17:10they said they'd taken a photograph of his, they published a photograph of his daughter,
17:14where his daughter lived and brought his daughter into it. And he was genuinely raging. And you could,
17:19he was using that kind of righteous anger about protecting his daughter in a way that was very
17:24politically useful for him. The reason people were taking pictures of his daughter's house is
17:28because that was one of the houses that has been called into question about where does the money
17:33come from in this big property empire? So it wasn't kind of totally randomly that someone was
17:39trying to go after his daughter. It was that it was part of this whole story that doesn't,
17:43however, undermine the legitimacy of him being righteously and hoppingly mad that somebody who's
17:49nothing to do with his life has been brought into kind of this debate.
17:54Yes. And actually he never has used his family for sorts of political gain. You don't get the sort of
18:00photo shoots of him cosily at home or you use them as kind of shining lights. Here I am. I'm
18:07a family
18:07man or anything. Maybe that just doesn't work for him. There was something else you said that I
18:12wondered whether you also might have agreed with, which was him talking about the Labour government
18:17cancelling elections in the last couple of years.
18:20I thought that was very clever. I thought, again, if you want to study the kind of feet that he
18:26hit
18:26in his speech to create this case, that the establishment, I mean, if only we did have a
18:34coordinated establishment, imagine.
18:36You'd know, Black Lives.
18:37You know, it's definitely more cock-up than conspiracy, I would say. Least organised conspiracy
18:44ever. But the establishment had, he threaded this set of things together to basically demonstrate
18:50that the world was against poor reform, riding high in 350 opinion polls, the largest political
18:56party in our country. He's still trying to very hard present reform as these underdogs that just
19:03need, they just need help because they're these poor victims of circumstance. When, I mean, they are
19:08riding high, they're richer probably, they've got more donors than any other political party.
19:12They are not kind of anywhere near their last legs. But he's managed to present quite a convincing
19:18argument about that. And the point he was making about the fact that the Labour government wanted
19:23to cancel elections in May, unfortunately true, that they only happened because of the Reform
19:30Court case, also true. So he has these really rock-solid big truths that he's able to lace together
19:38and then make two and two equal a table.
19:41Yeah, it's a very effective narrative. It's the people versus establishment necklace. I think
19:46there's something very Trumpian about it, actually. This feels straight out of the Trump
19:51playbook. So there's the idea of the mainstream media being against him, although he does have
19:56a show on GB News.
19:57He is literally the mainstream media.
19:59Yeah. And even using his own platform, his own YouTube channel to present this, it's a bit like
20:05Trump having true social. Stuff like the gold and the crypto, that all feels kind of nebulous and weird
20:12and who's got money where sloshing around. The idea that he made lots of money, but then that seems to
20:18have disappeared. Interestingly, as an MEP, which is when you're a member of the European Parliament,
20:23I mean, that is a famous gravy train. So I don't quite understand why his money went there, but it's
20:28a bit
20:28Trumpy in that, which is, I have this amazing business experience. I made loads of money.
20:33And yet on paper, he seems to be in a bit of trouble.
20:36I thought it was fascinating that he was doing a kind of quite unpleasant, nobody else understands
20:42how the world works. And this is just business. And then telling the story about being a commodities
20:47trader and how he made loads of money in the city. And then a great personal sacrifice,
20:51he jumped on the gravy train to become an MEP, which as you say, extremely well paid.
20:57And then he's, he talked about very proudly about how he's made loads of money from being
21:01an influencer. You've ticked a lot of kind of boxes of what he's been doing.
21:05Seven million followers on social media. I mean, you know.
21:07A bit more than us, I'll be honest.
21:08Just a couple more. He's done all of these things. And then he said, and then he got this
21:14lottery win and basically then tried to present this as, and that's just how the world works.
21:18It's like the world doesn't work like that for any other human. None of the rest of us
21:21are trolling around getting lottery wins.
21:24I thought that was interesting. Framing it as a lottery win, like it could happen to anybody.
21:28It could be you.
21:28And this crypto billionaire happened to drop five million quid into my lap. I mean, that's
21:32incidentally my pension plan is to win an Amaze House. But I think the specific Trumpian
21:39bit also is we've done so well. We've come top in the last 350 polls. We have more members
21:48than any other party. We're winning so hard. And yet, because the establishment is working
21:54against us and not playing by the rules and trying to take me down, we're not winning enough.
22:00Yeah. It's both, you know, I'm a massive loser and a victim and a massive winner. He manages
22:05to dance between those two things in a really interesting way.
22:11On Friday, I said, without realising I have this amazing predictive power, that all the
22:19political parties were going to have to have a sort of revival this summer. And I think
22:24it's fair to say that Labour will have theirs because they have a new prime minister coming
22:28in. And this could very much rejuvenate reform one way or another. And I don't think it should
22:34be forgotten that reform do need this. They have not won the last five by-elections. Obviously,
22:40they're now bringing this on to Farage's home turf and they ought to win this. But it is a big
22:45test for him. They are slipping in the polls. Restore UK are making some gains of their own.
22:51The Conservatives are making some gains. I mean, this is in some ways, it's a clever tactic.
22:58And it's a way to suck everybody into the game that you want to play. But it is also
23:04a gamble of someone who's slipping away.
23:09And it's also a massive illusion. So we've talked about kind of all of the elements of
23:13this confidence trick, all of the things that have been brought together to make a certain
23:18presentation. But this is not an underdog. This is a man entirely of the establishment.
23:24This is a privately educated guy who worked as a banker or in the city and then went into politics.
23:31It's like, gosh, what a maverick. And that has so much of the trappings of being somebody of the
23:35establishment. And although he has these kind of weave together these trees, there's a lot of gaps in
23:40the middle where there isn't a truth.
23:41Correct. And there's a lot of spaces where you think, well, actually, you know, is it really that
23:46credible that it's OK to claim it doesn't matter who gives you money, they can just give you money
23:51and you somehow uniquely are going to be the only politician who's therefore not influenced by that.
23:56That's why this stuff matters. It's not because people are super against politicians having money.
24:01I don't think so very much.
24:02Yeah. But they're really against people's influence being bought. And there's no attempt at all in any
24:08of this to deny that there might be some influence or some sense of obligation. Or, you know, if I
24:15gave
24:15you five million pounds, you probably would be grateful, I guess. I don't know. I don't have five
24:19million pounds to give you. I'm really sorry.
24:21But it is true. He has said previously, nobody owns me. But he is for sale. I mean,
24:28I mean, literally on cameo.
24:29Yes, exactly. And he, I mean, even in this statement, he couldn't resist slipping in that,
24:35you know, he has marketed a couple of financial products and everyone's done extremely well for
24:39them.
24:40He actually used, I loved that.
24:42Cheeky.
24:42Part of this was an advert for his own advert.
24:44Yeah.
24:45I think that is really meta.
24:46Yeah. But if you are doing, if these products are doing so well, why do you need to buy money
24:50from anybody else?
24:52Some of this was puzzling. Like I've made so much money that I need more money, but I don't need
24:56any money. And if I did take money, it's none of your business.
24:59Yeah. Well, one of the slight inside baseball things that I did pick up on, and it's only
25:03because we've talked about this on previous episodes, is the idea of the Sunday Times as
25:07a Labour paper, specifically Gabriel Poglund as a journalist who is in some way has been
25:13going after Nigel Farage.
25:14So can I say, I absolutely hate this singling out of journalists. I think of all of the kind
25:19of playbook of proper wrong-uns, like opening the, like basically saying my supporters this
25:25way have a go at this person who is only doing their job. They are doing their job.
25:29And he's doing his job bloody well. I mean, the reason we've talked about Gabriel before
25:33is because there was this, this essentially sting operation against him by a Labour think
25:40tank, Labour Together.
25:42I think you've all forgotten about that now, Claire.
25:44I haven't forgotten because, I mean, the web goes so deep. But Josh Simons, who gave up his
25:49seat for Andy Burnham in Makerfield, used to be head of this organisation. And he essentially
25:55signed off, very naively, he says, on a report into journalists like Gabriel Poglund. Like
26:01the idea that he is some kind of Labour stooge is, for the birds, one of my favourite expressions.
26:08I just think this is a really damaging road to have gone down. And it's not just started
26:12recently, but you have a lot of politicians sort of naming and shaming journalists, refusing
26:17to answer questions from a particular newspaper. Like our democracy is held together by journalistic
26:23accountability. You and I have personally been on the thick end of the unpleasant side of
26:27this, where you do, unfortunately, sometimes it does not work, does not work out well for
26:32you, our tremendous free press. However, I'd like to defend it to a dying death. It's really
26:37important. And the more that you can try and close space for journalistic scrutiny, the more
26:43we have really serious problems, because it's totally legitimate to ask politicians questions.
26:48And it's totally just legitimate to ask them questions about where their money comes
26:52from. I found the other thing troubling when he was talking about money. He said that he
26:57hadn't misspent any public money, and he'd not claimed a single pound of expenses while
27:02he was an MP.
27:03Yes, this is one of your favourite subjects. We've talked about MP salaries before, and
27:07I said, they're already paid a lot. And you made a very valid point.
27:10Oh, thanks.
27:11Well, I'm just that one.
27:13God, my God, I'm coming round to your way of thinking. It's very worrying. I am the establishment
27:17now. But you said by MP salaries not being high enough, they claim expenses will take
27:22money from others. And it's therefore corruption by the back door. And this is it in action.
27:26Yeah, so I'm sure it's true. If he said, I'm sure it's true. He said that he hasn't claimed
27:30a single parliamentary expense. So and that's because presumably, he's been funding his political
27:35activity via these donations, as we can see, or via the party. So standing up and saying I've
27:41not taken any money from anyone. Well, actually, if you're an MP, it's legitimate to claim expenses.
27:46It's quite important that you do, because then it's transparent where the money is coming
27:50and going from. And this kind of sanctimony about MPs who can stand there with vast sums
27:56of money behind them, saying, well, I haven't taken a penny of public money. It's like, you
28:00might not have done, but that money that's supporting you has come from somewhere. And
28:03it creates real inequality problems. Because if you don't have a kind friend who would like
28:08you to win the lottery, what are you supposed to do?
28:11Yes. And I think this is an interesting sort of campaigning challenge for the parties going
28:16up against reform in Clapton, which is, you know, that is a great strapline, people versus
28:22the establishment. And to, I mean, what can you do? Like, who owns Farage? Trying to make...
28:30That's quite good, actually.
28:31I love a three word slogan.
28:34We know.
28:35Trying to put together an argument for people, which is, yeah, he's not taking any public
28:41money, but he is accepting money from crypto billionaires and gold traders and this kind
28:46of thing and a convicted fraudster. It just requires a little bit of explanation, whereas
28:53he is able to make quite an easy, in quotations, easy argument, which is the establishment are
29:00trying to take me down, you know, stick with me, stick a finger up to them. And the impression
29:06I get from current reform voters is that is already how people feel. They already feel
29:11like the establishment doesn't work for them, that they already have a distrust of the mainstream
29:16media. They already feel that it would be absolutely, it would actually be typical to
29:22try and take Nigel Farage down. I'm going to stick with him.
29:24Of our Nigel. We're going to look after our Nigel.
29:26Our Nigel versus our kid.
29:27Oh, cripes. Cleo, we also noticed that your old friend Dominic Cummings got a shout out
29:33in that speech. So Mr Farage said that Dom Cummings was right.
29:39I know, which I sent Dom a message saying, do you know that you've been name checked in
29:43this speech? And he went, oh God, now what have I done? And I was like, no, no, it's worse
29:48than that. You've been mentioning glowing terms.
29:52So this was what Nigel Farage said was that Dom had said at some point previously that Whitehall
30:00would break the law to bring down reform. And that's effectively, again, the allegation
30:05that Nigel Farage was making about this establishment stitch up or cover up or attempt to bring him
30:10down. The thing I want to come back to on the party donors bit is the other very, you know,
30:15smart thing that Nigel Farage talked about in the kind of, well, I might have taken money
30:20from these people, but party donors have been made peers for the other two main parties.
30:27Look at the expenses that were given to Kirst. There's a whole load of actually, they're all
30:32at it. It's a very unusual thing for a politician to stand up and say, we're all at it. So
30:38therefore,
30:38what I'm doing is fine. But effectively, that's what he did.
30:41Yes. I mean, first off, I don't know what law Whitehall, in quotations, Whitehall has broken
30:47to take down reform. But this is exactly the point I was making on Friday, playing the man,
30:55not the ball. There is already this idea that everyone's at it. So when we talked about these
31:01massive figures, £5 million, £270,000, £80,000 in Cameo, these are massive amounts. They're lottery
31:09win amounts, as he would concede. But there is this perception that everyone's at it. So he doesn't
31:17necessarily stand out. And I just think that whilst our actual problems persist around immigration and
31:25cost of living and a stagnant economy and everything else that we've talked about so many times,
31:32trying to delegitimize him based purely off this standards and ethics stuff, it's important,
31:38scrutiny is important. Can't say that enough times. But you fall right into the battleground
31:44that works for him. He's essentially by, you know, we don't know that the last few days when people
31:50said, oh, he looks very rattled, he looks very ratty. He's kind of been luring everyone into his
31:55trap and then snap, it's shut on them. And now they're in a bloody by-election against Nigel Farage
32:00on his home ground. I mean, guys, you've got to think about your actual problems here. And if
32:06Andy Burnham's team have got a brain cell amongst them, which I'm sure they do.
32:10I think they do.
32:11They need to be thinking, how do we get this onto what we want to talk about now? We've got
32:17100 days,
32:18not even because it's halfway through Parliament already, to make a big impact. And they need to
32:23outfox Farage. And he's a sneaky old bastard. Thank you so much for listening to this emergency
32:31episode. It's very exciting. This week, our executive producer was Rod Adahali and our producer
32:37was Sam Durham. This podcast is part of the Independent Podcast Network and produced in
32:41association with Next Chapter Studios. We'd like to thank our content editor,
32:45Mayra Nushka, and our video editor and videographer, Vali Raza. See you next week.
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