The Great British Press has finally woken up to the possibility that there is something fishy about an MP having trousered a £5m “gift” from a foreign-based crypto billionaire shortly before they stood for election.
It took the intervention of a regulator, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, for a number of editors to wake up to the unpleasant whiff coming off this undeclared “donation”. Some of them may even have noticed that Mr Farage promptly changed his story of how he came to secretly pocket the money.
For a couple of weeks, the Reform leader had insisted that the money had been given to him by Thai-based Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit) in order to pay for his security for life.
This week Farage told a different story: “Frankly, it was given to me as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years,” he told the Sun’s Harry Cole, adding, improbably, that he welcomed the investigation.
The Sun’s story was headlined: “I’m NOT a crook!” A more self-aware politician might have avoided parroting the exact words that Richard Nixon used in November 1973 when he told an audience he welcomed an investigation into his behaviour over Watergate.
It turned out Richard Nixon was a crook. But, with Farage, we must of course reserve judgement until Mr Greenberg has completed his report. While he is at it, Mr Greenberg may care to clear up some explosive allegations about Mr Farage and money which his former ally Ben Habib posted on X.
Habib claimed Farage “will not sue me, because what I'm telling you is the truth”. Farage says his lawyers have formally written to Habib. It is time to lay on the popcorn.
Meanwhile, another regulator, Ofcom, briefly stirred from its slumbers this week to announce it would be looking into a GB News interview from last November in which presenter Bev Turner allowed President Trump to mouth off a lot of nonsense without a murmur of challenge.
Turner gushed praise on Trump’s “truth bombs” and later defended her approach: “I know what I believe in and it just so happens that the president believes in the same things.“
Ofcom only employs around 1,500 people, so it is to be congratulated for moving so swiftly—a mere six months!—to see that there might have been a problem with allowing a known fantasist to spout nonsensical falsehoods about a number of subjects without correction or interruption.
Ofcom originally said it was just fine with the interview on the grounds that one or two of Trump’s more egregious lies were later challenged in the middle of the night, UK time, by studio guests who made up for Turner’s fangirl approach. But six months after the transmission, the watchdog has voiced its concern over a rebroadcast of the interview (but not the studio discussion) the following day.
It is dangerous to hold your breath for a long period of time, so the best advice is to continue to go about your daily life in the hope that Ofcom reaches a verdict on this matter within the next few months or, possibly, years.
At the same time as it announced it was limping into action over the Trump interview, Ofcom let it be known that it had found no cause to investigate another controversial GB News programme, Matt Goodwin’s evening show on 23rd January this year.
Goodwin is a recovering academic who now flies the Reform flag and is, some might say, obsessed with immigration and Muslims. He was announced as the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election on 27th January. He was not elected.
His 23rd January show—during which he rubbished Labour and predicted a Reform victory—was rated 0.5 out of 5 for compliance with the Ofcom code by two professional journalists who reviewed it for an exercise I coordinated for the New World newspaper.
One reviewer, asked to rate whether the programme was impartial, wrote: “Not remotely. The entire show (with the exception of a short conversation about Gorton and Denton at the end) was a procession of Goodwin’s anti-immigrant views and great replacement theory. The one opposing viewpoint was barely allowed to speak and was quickly shut down when he did.”
The other reviewer wrote: “The framing of the programme was not impartial. The balance of the programme (issues, discussion, guests, framing) was heavily tilted to the right: there was no real pretence at balance… He did not make his affiliation with Reform known to viewers. This was a serious lapse of professional standards.”
This was, in effect, an hour of Reform propaganda. But Ofcom has decided it was fine and dandy. It will doubtless be mystified why the respected former Sky TV political editor, Adam Boulton, this week said GB News should lose its broadcasting licence.
On the day of the Ofcom announcement, I received a long and curious letter explaining Ofcom’s general stance from Cristina Nicolotti Squires, Ofcom’s group director for broadcasting and media. Ms Nicolotti Squires is a former journalist, and I mean no disrespect to her to suggest that the text may have been drafted for her by an unknown hand deep in the bowels of the regulator’s corporate affairs or legal departments. Journalists try to write prose that is easily understood.
The missive seemed to argue that Ofcom does not assess GB News’s output as a whole, but only on a programme-by-programme basis. It continued: “The central purpose of the due impartiality requirements is clear: that audiences are given a diverse range of perspectives so they can come to an informed view on matters of public interest.”
You have to wonder if she watched the Matt Goodwin programme her colleagues had decided was just fine.
Sometimes you have to cut through the verbiage and legal precedent and ask a common-sense question: what did parliament intend when it passed the 2003 Communications Act, which established Ofcom as the regulator?
Does a single person imagine that MPs intended that a couple of billionaires could one day establish a broadcaster which would, in effect, be a propaganda arm of one political party? That, to remind you, is what the founder of GB News, Andrew Neil, believes GB News has become.
On this view, the GB News losses of around £130m to date appear to be a form of subsidy to Reform. The £700,000 paid to Nigel Farage, a shareholder in GB News, by GB News since he became an MP is another form of subsidy.
Does anyone seriously believe this is how MPs believed the media regulator would behave when they established it in 2003?
Didn’t they imagine something closer to the way LBC operates? Nick Ferrari and James O’Brien in the morning—one right-wing, one left-wing. Andrew Marr and Iain Dale in the evening: a similarly balanced ticket of presenters and issues.
Can you imagine the outcry if LBC decided that it would have non-stop Reform or Green party propaganda? So why has GB News, uniquely, been given a free pass? Or why should other public service broadcasters bend over backwards to be impartial when they see Ofcom turning a blind eye in one direction?
So far, the mainstream parties (with the honourable exception of the Lib Dems and Ed Davey) seem frozen in the headlights, even as Farage—with his billionaire backers—walks all over them. Not a cheep from the Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
MPs do have a chance to say something when the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee questions the nominee to take over from Michael Grade as chair of Ofcom.
He is called Sir Ian Cheshire, a businessman who had a shorter-than-usual stint as chair of Channel 4, but who did help save it from privatisation. “He’s no Thomas Dewey,” says someone who knows him. Dewey was, of course, a gutsy former New York governor with a successful record in racket-busting.
If true, that’s a shame. We could do with a bit of bravery from a regulator which seems to have got entirely lost in its own weeds.
