British media have broken journalistic ethics codes by “hounding” Nigel Farage’s daughter at home, the Brexit pioneer said, as President Donald Trump nodded at the attempt to run the “2024 Anti-Trump Playbook” against the British politician.
An early general election seems more likely than ever in the United Kingdom as Labour’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, slowly makes his way out in the face of a palace coup by media favourite Andy Burnham. This has seemingly triggered an early barrage of would-be hit jobs against Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage ahead of a potential vote in which he would seek to take the Prime Minister’s job himself.
Mr Farage outright accused broadcaster Sky News and Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper The Times of serious ethical breaches after the outlets “published where my family live” and “hounded my daughter at home”. Sky News asserted they had not contacted Farage’s family, prompting the Brexit pioneer to retort, “This is an outright lie from [Sky News]… Despicable behaviour from the media.”
Dismissed by an ally as “a very old story which has been dredged up by the left-wing press to try and do Nigel down”, a Parliamentary standards watchdog is presently investigating donations made to Mr Farage given before he was elected to Parliament. Reform figures have stated that because the money and services were given while Farage was out of frontline politics and before he was elected to Parliament, and were given by personal friends, they did not need to be declared under Parliament’s own rules.
U.S. President Donald Trump signalled his backing and perhaps sympathy for his longstanding friend Nigel Farage, taking to his Truth Social to repost an article stating “They’re Running the 2024 Anti-Trump Playbook on Nigel Farage”. Article author and Farage-ally Raheem Kassam observed of this attempt to get Farage with the same techniques deployed to jail former President Jair Bolsonaro, attempt to jail Trump, and ban Marine Le Pen from office that “the establishment’s answer to the popularity of right-wing figures isn’t (and can never be), ‘Let’s beat them at the ballot box, fair and square!’ They know they can’t win like that.”
Meanwhile, what could have been a brief investigation has been dragged out for months and may not conclude until the end of the summer, extending the window during which allegations can be bandied about. Farage has called the process an “establishment hit job” and said, “I have done no wrongdoing, followed the rules, and I am now considering legal action against The Sunday Times. It’s now clear the establishment will stop at nothing to hurt Reform – we want to smash their cosy consensus.”
Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s treasury spokesman said of this attempt to scalp Farage: “[journalists] do have an agenda, and it is often to drag Nigel down because they don’t want change… we should all expect more and more attacks like this, in the months and years to come, until we get that general election because the political establishment — Tories and Labour — and the press who have backed for donkeys’ years will fight tooth and nail to stop him”.
Asserting that Farage’s values are solid and longstanding, with years of campaigning on national sovereignty and border control under his belt, Jenrick continued: “Are you really saying that any of this would influence Nigel’s principles and values? I think we could agree that Nigel has been the most consistent man in British politics in my lifetime”.
That this moment was on the horizon has long been obvious. As noted in 2024, Britain’s mainstream media has a love-hate relationship with Farage in which they acknowledge his usefulness as a cudgel to attack their own political enemies, but one which they believe they can ultimately control, and rein in once that damage is done, but before he then threatens their preferred candidates. As stated:
They see Mr Farage, with whom they profoundly disagree on absolutely everything, as a hot water faucet that can be turned up and down as desired to damage the legacy right.
At the beginning of this election cycle, Mr Farage faced what may have been the friendliest media environment of his life. The metaphorical faucet of allowing him media exposure was turned up high, pouring down scalding water on the heads of the Conservatives with weeks of barely critical reportage and endless –absolutely endless – polls showing his Reform UK on the up…
… The question is whether he can break the media domination now the faucet is being aggressively, urgently shut off… the British left is having an ‘oh shit’ moment as they desperately try to put Farage back in the box they’re making for him… Make no mistake, to the British legacy media, Farage has now served his purpose.
That a massive dirty tricks campaign was on the horizon to make sure Farage wasn’t able to achieve escape velocity and become Prime Minister was prognosticated earlier this year by the scourge of the Westminster deep state, Dominic Cummings. A veteran of the Vote Leave campaign, it is clear that Cummings and Farage don’t exactly see eye to eye, but the one-time Boris Johnson special fixer nevertheless issued his warning in January.
Acknowledging with his own brand of faint praise that Farage at least “less delusional” about the state of the country and what needs to be done to fix it than most people in Westminster, Cummings articulated that there was a risk Farage “just gets smashed up before the election ever happens” by an establishment that feels it can’t risk giving him a fair shake. He told The Spectator in January:
If you think about what the old system will do to stop him from getting in, it’s not going to be politics as usual, and Starmer has already signalled this in the last couple of weeks when he says ‘I can live with the Tories winning but I can’t live with Farage winning’.
The people around Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Trump, they’re looking across Europe, and they’re saying to themselves: ‘the lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in. We should never have let Vote Leave win the referendum on Brexit, that was the beginning of the disaster for us, we can’t make this mistake again, let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage and make sure that he doesn’t win by fair means and foul’.
They’ll leak medical records, they’ll leak tax records, they’ll bug his phone and leak that. They’ll do anything they need to, and by the way that’s going to be happening all across Europe in parallel and they’ll all be telling themselves ‘we’re fighting fascism together’.
At the highest levels, Cummings said, there was an openly-professed willingness to use “Colour Revolutions” at the highest levels to prevent unacceptable political outcomes.