~9 min read
Play video: Undercover: Inside Reform’s Campaign — the full Channel 4 News and Verbatim documentary (30 minutes). (plays via YouTube) On 3 September, Channel 4 News and the investigative outfit Verbatim broadcast thirty minutes of undercover footage from inside Reform UK. In it, the party’s Head of Policy explains how a foreign donor could disguise the origin of his money. Reform’s leader, filmed over oysters in Clacton, thanks the men he believes are funding him.
Three opinion polls, commissioned by Reform and paid for by an American company, had already run in The Times and The Telegraph. Readers were not told who commissioned them. The payments do not appear in any public record.
Reform UK has now been reported to the Metropolitan Police.
The film confirms everything we always knew to be true about Reform UK: a party stuffed to the gills with morally bankrupt grifters who will stop at nothing to make a quick buck. They cosplay alternately as salt-of-the-earth champions for the “white working class”; or as respectable elder statesmen, a safe pair of hands to preserve British capitalism after the inevitable collapse of the two-party duopoly.
In reality, they are neither - their venality being matched only by their sheer incompetence and hubris. The phrase “absolute clown show” would be doing a major disservice to clowns.
In the film, undercover reporters pose as a wealthy American would-be donor and his British-national son, who is tasked with helping him launder a proposed £500,000 donation to disguise the fact that it originated with a foreign national. The crafty move is proposed by senior Farage aide Dan Jukes, and would be flagrantly illegal under political financing law. Reform’s Head of Policy James Orr spells the logic out on camera: “If it’s your name you’re the donor, your father has got deniability.” And, for the avoidance of any doubt: “I wouldn’t breathe a word of this to anybody.” “Is anybody gonna find out? Am I gonna tell anyone… obviously not, so the reality is we could easily get away with it.” He describes the Electoral Commission as “completely useless” and “so dumb and ineffective.”
Farage is seen acquiescing to this arrangement and thanking the purported donors, noting that he is a “massive Americaphile” as well. Why so coy, Nige? We all know you only love those Americans for their money!
At one point, James Orr suggests to the fake donor, via his fake son, that he pay for some new opinion polling to aid Reform’s campaigning.
But this wasn’t hypothetical. The £500,000 was only ever a proposal, and was never paid - Reform had already run a smaller version of the same play. Jukes introduced the fake donor to colleagues as a “key donor for off the book project”, and that project was three opinion polls, commissioned by Reform from JL Partners, costing £32,500, and paid for by a US company. Foreign companies are not a permissible source of party funding, and that explicitly includes payments for research and polling. The half-million is a headline, but the £32,500 is the crime.
The public was told none of this. The British Polling Council notes: “it is clear there have been breaches of British Polling Council Rule 2.1. According to the programme, this may have been deliberate”. JL Partners’ co-founder James Johnson was himself filmed describing “a little bit of informal rule-bending”, and has since conceded the firm “should have disclosed who the client was”. The firm now admits to “weaknesses in our procedures”. The Market Research Society has referred the matter to its standards board.
Farage can’t resist bragging about the favourable coverage this garnered on the front page of The Times - calling it “amazing”. Quite.
There’s a long and noble British tradition of public figures being tricked into saying ludicrous things on camera. This isn’t that. There was no need to put words in their mouth - they willingly fessed up to their schemes, on candid camera, over long boozy brunches in opulent art deco gentlemen’s clubs. The level of chutzpah is staggering.
Some parts of the film almost beggar belief in terms of the amount of privilege and contempt for the working class that drips off Farage and all his Reform acolytes. In the climactic meeting with Farage in Clacton, the four Good Old Boys at the table decide that oysters are to be the flavour of the day. Undercover reporter: “Should we do four [oysters] each?” Farage: “Pointless! [Everyone laughs…] I’ll have half a dozen, please.” He also speaks candidly of his passion for “black velvet”, a drink consisting of Guinness “with a champagne top” - a drink for a man who wants the pint in the photograph and the champagne on the bill.
While it’s easy to see how this hurts Reform Plc and Nigel Farage in particular - and with Jukes and Orr both stood down pending the party’s own investigation - we cannot allow the media and political establishment to put up a firewall around Reform and protect themselves from their own culpability. For years now, mainstream media outlets have acted as faithful handmaidens to Farage, lending him platform and legitimacy. BBC Question Time alone has platformed Farage at least 38 times - more than Cameron, more than Clegg, more than Miliband, more than Sturgeon, more than Starmer. More than any party leader of his generation, across years in which his party mostly didn’t have a single MP. That isn’t public demand. That’s a booking policy. Once-respected broadsheets like The Times and The Telegraph now uncritically print Reform-commissioned polls on their front pages. The rot goes right to the heart of the establishment.
And soon-to-be household name James Orr’s story is perhaps just as fascinating as Farage’s. Employed by Cambridge University as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, he spent four years at Christ Church, Oxford as McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in - yes, seriously - Theology, Ethics, and Public Life! The fact that such a specimen could be considered an expert in divinity or ethics makes an absolute mockery of elite institutions’ claim to be custodians of knowledge and truth. This follows hot on the heels of the public hounding to death of Jason Arday, whose main crime was to be Black in academia and whose treatment Cambridge University still has serious questions to answer about.
Already, predictably cynical responses are being wheeled out, including by people ostensibly on the left: “Reform voters won’t care, they’re too brainwashed”! Well, they certainly won’t care if you belittle them and write them off as a lost cause. This kind of cynicism simply primes Reform voters to cling to their worldview and build around the cognitive dissonance. “Big deal, we already knew Reform are massively corrupt!” Sure, but now you have video proof of it while Nige slurps oysters and sips from his champagne-topped Guinness. There’s a world of difference between knowing something and having incontrovertible proof of it. “All politicians are corrupt, Reform are no different!” True, but it’s the scale, the flagrancy of it, the fact it went all the way to the top, and the fact it’s the party whose whole mythology rests on standing against the corrupt establishment.
And Reform’s own line? That the film is “a hoax perpetuated by foreign-funded, climate change activists posing as would-be party donors”. Read that again. Their defence against taking secret foreign money is that the people who caught them took foreign money. They have conceded the entire argument - that foreign cash buying British politics is corrupt - and are simply pointing somewhere else. We agree, Nigel. Let’s start with you.
And what of other bad actors who could benefit? Say, Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain? The man who’s tailored his whole public image around being a wealthy landowner? Bet he knows what a “black velvet” is, and no doubt he enjoys an oyster or two while he’s at it. How about Andy Burnham? He’ll try and make out like the rot stops at Reform, but we know that’s not true. Many soon-to-be-disillusioned Reform voters already know Burnham is continuity Starmer and is full of it. Perhaps the Tories and Badenoch are best placed to benefit, but they hardly have a shining recent track record when it comes to sleaze.
For those on the left, even the soft “eco-populist” left championed by the likes of Zack Polanski, this represents a historic opportunity to lean in hard to the populist angle. Is Polanski truly anti-establishment enough to make hay of this? Or what about Green MP and former plumber Hannah Spencer? Her exposé on Westminster drinking culture ties in nicely with the boozy (and bougie) nature of all the meetings shown in the film.
For those of us with more revolutionary aspirations, the first task is to hold the entire establishment to account for its historic betrayal of the British people, now laid bare for all to see. Farage, Reform, The Times, The Telegraph, Cambridge University - none of them can be let off the hook. But that only scratches the surface. If we keep digging, who knows what we’ll uncover?
The second task is to channel the justified anger and betrayal into class consciousness. The dots are uncovered. We just need to help people connect them up.
For all that, describing the film doesn’t do it justice. It needs to be watched, all the way through, first hand, by as many people as possible (left, right, centre). It’s only 30 minutes long, but out-of-context clips, screenshots, and memes on social media aren’t enough. Filtered through “discourse” (even if it’s very astute and well-reasoned left-wing discourse), it already begins to lose its power. The film is an artifact, and its broadcasting is an event. It should be treated with the respect it deserves. If there was ever a time for The Monoculture to have its last hurrah, now would be it.
Do not let this scandal fade away. Do not let them gaslight you into forgetting it like Trump did with the Epstein files. Do not let the media off the hook. ✊
Stand with us. Help build the mass, working class, socialist party we all still believe is possible.
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