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“It worked, boom!” So said Nigel Farage after a man he thought was an American political donor explained how he had “picked up the tab” for three influential opinion polls that Reform had organised.
The problem, of course, for Farage, and for Britain’s radical right, is he wasn’t talking to a plainspoken, MAGA-supporting millionaire from Wyoming. Instead he was drinking white wine and eating oysters in his Clacton constituency with a pair of undercover journalists. On the eve of Reform’s annual conference, a scheme that appeared to be designed to bypass the ban on foreign donations in British politics was aired in an explosive film on Channel 4 News.
British politics is no stranger to scandal – or to undercover stings. In more than a decade investigating British political funding, I’ve exposed Covid-19 contracts for political donors, dark money in the Brexit referendum and, for just £5,000, got a former Conservative MP to introduce my fictitious Chinese healthcare investor to more than a dozen Labour MPs. But even a cynical hack like me was shocked by what the undercover investigation exposed about the extraordinary insouciance with which senior figures appeared to talk about arrangements that would breach electoral law.
So now Reform will face the consequences, right? Maybe. But that would depend on something that we seldom see in British politics: rigorous enforcement of election law.
