Spot the lies in Farage’s tale of his Trump trips

There is a common frustration aired at journalists by readers: why won’t we call out politicians when they tell what seem to be obvious lies? Instead, euphemisms abound: we say the politician “untruthfully”, “misleadingly”, “baselessly” or “without evidence”.

The reason for this is that lying is a deliberate act. The liar must know what they’re saying isn’t true, and deliberately choose to say it anyway. Given the impossibility of knowing what’s going on in any given person’s head – and the strictness of UK libel laws – calling someone a liar is a very high bar to meet indeed.

So let’s put it this way: in his recent interviews, Nigel Farage is either suffering from a catastrophic failure of memory meriting urgent medical collection, or else he has become the laziest liar in British politics.

Ever the opportunist, Farage is seeking to exploit a concocted scandal around the long-running practice of the Labour Party giving its staff unpaid leave to volunteer for the Democratic Party in the US. Those volunteers go over, usually at a very junior level (knocking on doors, helping with get out the vote operations) and stay with Democratic volunteers.

This is routine, it is legal, and Conservatives do similar for the Republicans. It’s essentially a mini-gap year for UK politicos still addicted to the West Wing, decades after it aired.

Part of how you can tell it is all of these things is that a Labour staffer coordinating this effort posted openly about it on LinkedIn, in a post that with hindsight she must wish she phrased more carefully.

A Twitter user named Max Temper last week posted the screenshot with the claim the US trips were “funded by the Labour Party”, which was picked up by @politiclsUK (sic) with the toned-down claim that the Labour was “offering to ‘sort your housing’”. It quickly went viral, and so the Telegraph and then other media followed it up – leading to Elon Musk tweeting indignantly, and eventually to the Trump campaign putting in an astonishingly badly drafted legal complaint to the FEC over the practice.

Notably, though, the claim Labour was “funding” the trips – the one thing that would have made the practice immoral or illegal – disappeared after the very first post, because there is no evidence whatsoever it was true. In fact, as soon as Labour was approached for comment by a journalist doing the bare minimum of their job, it was clarified that the offer of free accommodation in the post was being made by US volunteers, and Labour was just putting people in touch with one another. Without that “funding” element, any substance to this scandal vanishes.

Of course, that has not stopped Nigel Farage pretending to be outraged that Labour – a political party – would sanction some of its political staff campaigning for their sister party, claiming it is not just unethical but also bad for Britain.

This is particularly rich because Farage was so keen to continue his own pro-Donald Trump US tour that he initially ruled out standing for parliament in the UK – but subsequently, he has not let being an elected representative stop himself campaigning.

Shortly after being elected to parliament, Farage flew to the US “to support a friend who was almost killed” – Trump – but told Times Radio this morning that he had paid his own airfare, and always does so when campaigning with Trump. This is flat-out untrue and stupidly easy to check: Farage had already declared the flights and accommodation for the trip, worth more than £32,000, on the MPs’ gifts and hospitality register.

Farage was similarly sloppy and hypocritical on the BBC the day before, claiming that when he spoke at a Trump rally in 2016 he had said he wouldn’t tell Americans who to vote for but instead spoke in “general terms” about Brexit.

Sadly for Farage, he was on video, and the full sentence looks quite specific: “As a foreigner, I wouldn’t dream of telling you who to vote for,” he did indeed say – before continuing. “But I’ll say this: If I were an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me.”

Nigel Farage isn’t flying solo on his disingenuous media – he has an equally vacuous and/or dishonest copilot in former prime minister Liz Truss, who similarly claimed it was outrageous for Labour to be intervening in US politics while it was the party of government.

Inevitably, Truss herself attended the Republican National Convention (shortly after she was kicked out as an MP by voters), but also attended the even more extreme CPAC convention earlier in the year while she was a serving MP of the party in government. At both events she attacked Democrats, and used one to call Joe Biden “weak”. Confronted with this obvious hypocrisy, CNN reports that Truss had waved it away with the definitive answer that it was different “because the Labour Party are wrong”.

Farage, Truss and the Conservative politicians venal or idiotic enough to pretend this is a real scandal – despite the fact it has barely been reported in the US, where they have bigger fish to fry – are trying to create a new political double standard.

They are creating a world in which because Donald Trump is a political toddler, and just as prone to tantrums, it is allowable to campaign for him, but never against him. Labour has made the idiotic and panicked decision to suspend its cooperation with the Democrats – a terrible comms move that gives the impression it did something wrong after all, compounding that attack line.

It should and must be rejected: if Farage can take tens of thousands of pounds in hospitality to bang the drum on stage for Trump, anonymous Labour staffers should be able to take unpaid leave to sleep in someone’s spare room and drive pensioners to the polling stations.

Farage and Truss have proven they are either too stupid or too venal to uphold basic political norms. The rest of us shouldn’t feel obliged to sink to their level.

James Ball is political editor of the New European