I had expected to spend this weekend inside Birmingham’s cavernous NEC covering Reform UK’s annual conference. I had already found a cheap hotel nearby, an even cheaper train, and had perused the online programme for events to attend. (The fringe on whether the UK should leave the World Health Organization caught my eye.)
But I won’t be doing any of that. Reform revoked my press accreditation for this year’s conference, alongside those of other journalists who have written stories critical of Nigel Farage and his party.
So instead of travelling to Birmingham on Thursday, I found myself nodding in agreement with Kemi Badenoch as she condemned Reform’s “authoritarian” instincts.
The Conservatives are not above treating with contempt the journalists they perceive as hostile, but the Tory leader was correct when she criticised “Nigel Farage’s attacks on the press” and “the things that Zia Yusuf says about journalists”. It’s hard to avoid the sense that Reform just doesn’t want scrutiny, and that means keeping critical journalists out.
Reform is now facing more questions about its money after an undercover investigation broadcast on Channel 4 on Thursday appeared to show senior party figures arranging for a US company to pay for opinion polling—allegedly in contravention of British election law. Once again Reform’s outriders have responded by attacking the journalists behind the sting.
My own experience certainly feels indicative. Last year, I attended Reform’s conference, filing a lengthy piece for the London Review of Books that, it’s fair to say, cut against the Panglossian grain of a lot of the coverage of the UK’s “government-in-waiting” at the time.
Since then, I’ve written plenty of stories about Reform including, on Wednesday afternoon, a piece about how Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist and partner of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, had publicly defended Farage’s £5m “gift” from Christopher Harborne but, before the 2024 general election, had privately called the Thailand-based crypto-tycoon “untrustworthy” and raised concerns about his money.
About half an hour after the Oakeshott piece went live, I received an email from Reform telling me that my conference application had been declined. There then followed a curious couple of hours where the party reinstated my pass, then revoked it all over again.
“What cock-up merchants!” as Michael Crick put it. The veteran journalist and Farage biographer had similar treatment meted out to him, as did the Guardian’s City editor Anna Isaac, who broke the story of Harborne’s £5m donation (which is now the subject of a parliamentary standards inquiry).
Reform’s curious defence was that they had granted passes to a thousand journalists—a frankly improbably large number—and that Crick and I were “minor figures”. The party told the Guardian that, “Mr Crick works for a university and Mr Geoghegan is a Substack blogger. Neither qualify for a media pass.”
I pointed out to a Reform press officer that my investigative newsletter Democracy for Sale won this year’s Paul Foot Award, has 57,000 subscribers and that I had a commission from Prospect to cover this particular conference. All to no avail. My rejection stood.
Of course, this isn’t really a story about me, or the backgrounds of the specific journalists who have been excluded. It’s about what happens when political parties treat accountability and scrutiny as an optional extra. Take party conferences. These are big set-piece events. There’s a blizzard of policy announcements and spin, much of which you can follow from the comfort of your own social media feed.
But conferences are also something else. They are one of the few places journalists know they can buttonhole senior politicians. You can’t hide for an entire weekend in a massive conference centre on the edge of town.
Conference is also a space where rank and file members rub shoulders with party apparatchiks and lobbyists. For a journalist like me, they are a vital place to make contacts, get under the skin of what’s happening and, frankly, see and hear things party officials wish you wouldn’t. (At last year’s Labour conference I managed to blag my way into the Mirror’s notorious closing night party where I got more intel from a five-minute chat with a “relaxed” special adviser than I would have got from any number of policy briefings.)
Political parties may not exactly welcome such things, but, by and large, they tolerate them. Not so Reform, which seems to be playing a very different game.
Take Harborne’s £5m donation. When the Guardian’s Anna Isaacs—following standard journalism protocol—sought comment from Farage before publication, the Reform leader played for time and then gave the story to the Telegraph, which put it out in a friendly fashion.
When Farage’s media manipulation failed to kill the story, he abruptly stopped his long, almost weekly, press conferences and instead started posting more on social media. The Reform leader went on the attack, too, accusing Sky News of “harrassing” his daughter. He lodged an official complaint with Ofcom, citing unfair treatment and unwarranted infringement of privacy.
When the Sunday Times reported that convicted fraudster “Posh” George Cottrell had provided undeclared funding to Farage’s 2024 general election campaign, Robert Jenrick, with a straight face, said that the Murdoch title was a “Labour paper”. (The truculent former Tory has emerged as Reform’s go-to media front man in Farage’s absence.)
Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, has toed the same line, repeatedly portraying mainstream media coverage of him as biased, hostile, and driven by a “Tory press” trying to take him down. Yusuf seldom mentions that these media skirmishes are often provoked by his own increasingly intemperate remarks on X and in press interviews.
We should be wary of inventing a sepia-tinged past where politicians treated the press with equanimity. Boris Johnson barred news outlets he didn’t like from Downing Street briefings. Labour has excluded left-wing journalists from party conferences.
Reform’s approach goes beyond that, however. The party routinely refuses to engage with journalists it regards as critical. I’ve spoken to one reporter who has been accredited for the conference in Birmingham but whose requests for invites to party press conferences and details of briefings in the past have been stonewalled.
Even more importantly, Reform has also taken to refusing to even acknowledge questions it doesn’t like. This can make the process of reporting legally fraught if you’re putting forward serious allegations.
Sunday Times Insight team editor Gabriel Pogrund, who has done more than almost anyone to expose Reform’s finances, has spoken of how Tice, and his lawyer, did not respond to emails, texts and some 40 phone calls about the Reform deputy leader’s tax affairs. Pogrund told the Truth Tellers Investigative Journalism Summit in May that Reform seems to not "accept the basic premise of scrutiny.”
Journalists like to think of themselves as defenders of democracy. The public has a rather different view. We’re barely more trusted than politicians. But a free press—and free access to events like party conferences —really matters. Without it politicians really will do whatever they want.
