Moaning Nigel Farage has said he is being “judged guilty every single day” as he whined about the probe into his £5million gift.
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The tetchy right-winger claimed Britain was “a complainants’ society” and that scrutiny of his party was a “wilful attempt” to paint each person connected to Reform as a “crook”.
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He tried to question the integrity of Parliament’s Standards Committee, which is investigating his failure to declare the £5m. Labour accused the Clacton MP of “desperate deflection tactics” and demanded he answer “serious questions” about his and his party’s finances.
Mr Farage was challenged on Reform’s recent woes ahead of the party’s annual conference, which kicks off in Birmingham today(THU). He was sworn in again as an MP on Tuesday after winning the Clacton by-election in August, a contest he triggered by resigning as an MP. The stunt backfired after all the major political parties boycotted the race and he was left to spent the summer fighting against Count Binface.
Asked why he called a by-election in Clacton, he told the BBC: “I’m being judged guilty every single day by the media, by everybody. I’m guilty not just of that, almost everything. And so I said, you know what?
“Whilst Westminster obsesses about money, about security, about whether this was political or personal, and it goes on every day, do you know what we’ll do? We’ll ask the people. I will let the people of Clacton, the voters, be the judge.”
Mr Farage, who was educated at one of Britain’s poshest private schools, Dulwich College, complained that attacks against him were because he was an “outsider” and compared his situation to critics going after Donald Trump in the US.
He suggested he would soon be interviewed by Standards Commissioner Daniel Greenberg about the £5m gift he received from Thai-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election.
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Newly elected MPs must declare any financial benefits they received in the 12 months before they were elected. Mr Farage has insisted it was a personal gift to help pay for his security and that after taking “strong legal advice”, he was told he didn’t need to declare it and so has not broken any rules.
Without giving any specific evidence, he questioned the integrity and “political composition” of the Standards Committee. The group is currently made up of four Labour MPs, two Tory MPs and one Liberal Democrat MP. Crucially, seven members of the public also sit on the committee. The inclusion of lay members is designed to bring an “independent and external perspective to the Committee’s deliberations”, Parliament’s website says.
Mr Farage said he has no questions about the impartiality of Mr Greenberg but added: “I do think to be judged by Members of Parliament of other political parties who you’re fighting against in by-elections or general elections. I think that raises the question… Surely we need to have people who are actually apolitical making those decisions.”
More widely, Mr Farage whined that Reform has been “under assault in the most extraordinary way” since May’s local elections, including scrutiny about Richard Tice’s business finances. Mr Farage continued: “There’s been a wilful attempt, and it’s gone on now for months to say that everything to do with Reform, that every individual involved with Reform is somehow a crook. That’s been the attempt that’s been made.”
He added: “We live in a complainant society. If you complain about me, automatically that triggers an investigation. So we’re under investigation every day for virtually everything we do, because the other political parties are constantly writing to all the authorities.”
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Told that people are asking questions and seeking answers about the party, he continued: “I honestly don’t think so. They’ve questioned who our donors are. They’ve questioned, you know, individuals within the organisation. We have not been found to be in breach of anything. But it’s gone on for week after week after week.”
Labour chair Bridget Phillipson said: “Yet again it’s everyone’s fault apart from his own. Nigel Farage needs to stop the desperate deflection tactics and finally come clean about the sleaze and scandal he and Reform are now drowning in.
“If Farage keeps on digging, the serious questions about his secret £5 million ‘gift’ and Reform’s finances will just keep piling up. Farage would surely have put all the facts on the table by now if he’d done nothing wrong. What else is he hiding from the British public?”