Nigel Farage is making great play of his plans to bring a private prosecution against two men accused of attacking police officers in an incident at Manchester Airport. Yet it seems that the Reform leader has no problem with surrounding himself with convicted criminals.
On Sunday, December 15, Farage will not be in his Clacton constituency, but in Manhattan, where he is speaking to the 112th Annual Gala of the New York Young Republican Club, a hard right group of Donald Trump-supporting radicals. The remaining tickets cost a minimum of £560 – the ideal gift for any Clactonian who wants the rare chance to ask their MP a question.
Farage isn’t the guest of honour, though. That goes to Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Trump and, until October 29 this year, jailbird. The invitation, to be fair, acknowledges this, saying Bannon was “confined in Federal Correctional Institution Danbury as a political prisoner of the Biden-Harris Regime for four months”, although, if you prefer actual facts, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on two criminal charges of contempt of Congress after refusing to give evidence to a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Other speakers include Corey Lewandowski, a former senior advisor to Trump’s 2024 election campaign. Lewandowski is also no stranger to the law, cutting a deal with Las Vegas prosecutors in 2022 after he was charged with misdemeanour battery, stemming from allegations of unwanted sexual advances toward a woman during a charity dinner. While admitting no wrongdoing, he agreed to undergo eight hours of impulse control counseling and 50 hours of community service.
Meanwhile, Farage’s fellow Reform MP James McMurdock served a short term in a young offenders’ institution for attacking his ex-girlfriend outside a nightclub (her mother called him a “monster”, adding “there is no way he should be an MP in the House of Commons representing people”). And Farage’s Westminster register of interests reveals that last April he accepted £9,253.60 worth of free travel and accommodation from convicted fraudster and Leave campaigner George Cotterell, who spent eight months in a US jail between 2016-17.
The Sunday Express has devoted several front pages recently to the plight of pensioners – including recent hits like “Winter Fuel Storm Is Labour’s Poll Tax”, “Blame Keir For Winter Fuel Deaths” and last weekend’s “OAPs Will Die As Big Freeze Hits”. Yet it has so far failed to report the sad tale of one soon-to-be-OAP cruelly thrown on the scrapheap, the paper’s silver-haired editor David Wooding.
The veteran journalist, who began his career on the Daily Mail in the late 1970s before working at the Press Association, the Sun and the now-defunct News Of The World and Today, has been told he is surplus to requirements, with the Express’s Sunday team being folded into its normal operation. It is part of an ongoing cull of high earners by parent company Reach.
In just over two years at the Sunday Express helm, Wooding continued to assure readers that leaving the European Union was working out just fine. So it was no surprise on Sunday to see the paper’s treatment of reports on how post-Brexit costs and checks are threatening the great British Christmas.
There was no mention of the B-word at all, and instead Alastair Grant told readers: “A Christmas tree shortage and higher prices are looming, thanks to EU red tape and new inspection rules.”
Over on the Express’ website, meanwhile, so obsessed are they in their hatred of Gary Lineker, they’re now even implicating him in entirely unrelated stories…
Reform’s chair, Zia Yusuf, was outraged last week at news that the annual Guy Fawkes Night bonfire in Lewes, Sussex, included an eye-catching effigy of his leader, Nigel Farage.
“The left burn an effigy of a right wing MP and get a statement of thanks from the police,” he fumed on social media hellsite Twitter/X. “If the effigy had been of Sadiq Khan, Diane Abbott or David Lammy the arrests would have been immediate with long prison sentences handed down in record time.”
Fun fact: last year the town of Edenbridge in Kent included an effigy of Sadiq Khan in its annual Guy Fawkes Night bonfire. There were no arrests.
Blink and you may have missed the brief rehabilitation of public school thespian turned far right activist Laurence Fox.
Only a few days ago, the former Lewis star confessed on Twitter, “Sometimes I feel down that I am not welcome in show business anymore. I love acting. I felt it was my calling.” But then things suddenly seemed to be on the up – Fox celebrated his engagement to podcaster Betty Barker, and even returned to the mainstream when videos of him rescuing Rocky, his pet Jack Russell, from a fox’s hole went viral. They racked up 1.5million views on social media and attracted the attention of the Daily Mail.
How has Fox reacted to this upturn in his fortunes? By quietly withdrawing from the crazy stuff and enjoying his new life in the countryside? Alas not. By last weekend he was advising his followers to “Buy yourself an axe, and greet the pigs at the door with it if they come knocking. The police are your enemy.” Now he has been reported to police by broadcaster Sangita Myska after telling her on Twitter/X: “You are not welcome in my country.”
Meanwhile, anyone to whom Fox still owes money after losing a High Court libel case earlier this year will be interested in recent social media posts in which he claims to have received a £20,000 residual payment from his acting career, and that his cryptocurrency investments are booming since Donald Trump won the US election.
On The Rest is Entertainment, the podcast she co-hosts with Richard Osman, co-host Marina Hyde has been mulling over how Donald Trump’s election shows how the traditional media “are either dead or they are totally ineffective in their current form, and they have to accept that”.
“First of all, I do think that newspapers endorsing candidates is one of the saddest and most tragic and pathetic things in, like, modern media discourse at all,” she said. “You know, everyone has a long editorial meeting and they decide… I mean, wake up. It’s so ridiculous. It’s like seeing the light from a long-dead star. And you’re like, oh, that looks pretty – actually, that thing died, like, 300 years ago.”
Perhaps she should have a word with bosses at the Guardian where Hyde is a star columnist. On October 23 this year, the paper ran a 1,142-word editorial on why ‘We’re backing Kamala Harris’. Alas, it appears not to have impacted on the crucial swing states the vice-president needed.
Finally, GB News is continuing its crusade for the word ‘woke’ to mean literally anything.
“Premier Inn sparks furious row after imposing woke measure on hotel bar,” was a headline on the channel’s website at the weekend.
And what precisely was this “woke” measure? More expensive drinks for middle-aged white men? Enforced taking of the knee for customers? Er… the introduction of a queueing system at the chain’s Gatwick Airport hotel bar, its busiest.
And the “furious row” it had apparently sparked? Hack Oliver Trapnell, formerly of the Daily Express, managed to uncover two mildly indignant comments from anonymous accounts on Twitter/X and one from comedian Al Murray in his Pub Landlord persona – a character who, Trapnell appears not to know, is a pastiche of exactly the sort of men who watch GB News.
