Farage Whinges About a 'Media Pile-On'. The Truth Is, the Media Made Farage
At every stage of his political career, the Reform UK leader has been helped on his way by the media machine he now affects to despise. And he is still manipulating them with ease.
And they call the left snowflakes. Nigel Farage’s declaration that he “will make a statement on my future in public life at 2pm” did not, alas, mean he was resigning from politics. Admittedly, even that would have amounted to little: he quit as leader of UKIP in 2016 and Reform UK in 2021, but this bad political smell is more pungent than ever.
Instead, he subjected the nation to a rambling 20-minute speech, somewhere between pity party and political broadcast, beamed into the country’s homes courtesy of the BBC and Sky News. He was the victim of a “media pile-on”, he declared. He had done nothing wrong. “Making money is not a crime,” he announced, one of many non sequiturs in a speech that recast his career as an act of heroic self-denial. He had, he said, surrendered his “very, very good high-earning career” in the City “at a huge cost” for the sake of public life.
His speech did feature something he doesn’t talk about much these days, and with good reason. Without his sacrifice, he said, “there would have been no Brexit” – a noble mission which, he claimed, left him “with very little money indeed”. There is no question that Farage was instrumental in delivering hard Brexit. But according to the latest polling, only 12% of voters now think it has proved “more of a success”, while 61% say it has been “more of a failure”. Even Leave voters are now more likely to describe Brexit as a failure than a success.
The truth is that Farage has made a packet from a political platform gifted to him by the British media. Having built him up, that same media have finally subjected him to a little long-overdue scrutiny. He failed to declare a £5 million personal gift from a Thai-based crypto-billionaire who has also bankrolled two-thirds of Reform’s budget. We have learned that this self-styled “man of the people” earned £270,000 for advertising gold bullion. And we now know that he failed to declare gifts and benefits in kind from a convicted fraudster, another figure from the world of crypto.