Can Farage wriggle his way out of this one?
Damning revelations continue to emerge. And it may just be the tip of the iceberg.
Nigel Farage’s ‘man of the people’ act is crumbling before our eyes. Revelation after shocking revelation portrays the Reform leader not as a grassroots insurgent speaking for the average punter, but as the frontman for an incredibly dodgy network of elite financial interests.
A lot more skeletons in Farage’s closet have come to light since my last update on the Reform crypto saga.
The latest – and perhaps most damaging – skeleton goes by the name of ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. The well-to-do financier and crypto enthusiast has been nestled in Farage’s inner circle for a solid decade – he’s ‘like a son’ to Nigel (in his own words).
Cottrell played a pivotal fundraising role in UKIP, its successor the Brexit Party, and now unsurprisingly in Reform UK. He secretly provided benefits in kind to Farage in 2024, and also seems to have donated to the party via Richard Tice’s think-tank and through his mother Fiona (which police are actively investigating).
Two particularly damaging new allegations have now emerged concerning Cottrell, who was convicted for wire fraud in the US and literally wrote the book on money laundering.
The Financial Times has revealed that a Polymarket account in Cottrell’s name received $9 million from unknown sources in 2024. (Polymarket is a Peter Thiel-backed betting site banned in the UK where you can wager on everything from elections to the apocalypse – exactly the sort of playground a high-rolling risk-taker like Cottrell would frequent).
Posh George appears to have immediately staked these funds on Trump’s election victory, netting a cool £4.5 million in profit. As the FT notes, the timing coincides with the undeclared gifts and benefits Cottrell provided to Nigel Farage.
And if that wasn’t enough, our friends at Byline Times had another explosive scoop on Cottrell this week – the product of an eight-month investigation.
The key revelation was that Cottrell had a fraudulent Swiss passport under the name ‘Oscar Drewitt.’ He was hired under this false identity at a City firm by a man named Mehrtash A’zami. That same A’zami would later go on to manage finances and donation vetting for Reform UK – overseeing the very funds Cottrell is alleged to have provided the party.
I could spend this entire article unpacking every revelation and its implications, but suffice to say that there are new, incredibly urgent lines of (potentially criminal) inquiry opening up around the party’s connections to the murky world of elite crypto-gambling.
Uncharacteristically, Farage and the gang have not managed to spin any of this away. In lieu of the usual bluster and bravado, they’re coming off tetchy, cornered and above all desperate. Their only defensive rebuttal line is the tired old claim that everyone’s out to get them.
The Times revealed on Friday that all Reform councillors have been urgently directed to write off the Cottrell allegations as an "establishment hit-job.” Reform UK is genuinely now trying to suggest that the Murdoch-owned Times is somehow in cahoots with the Labour party in a sinister plot to take them down.
For those of us still inhabiting base reality rather than Reform’s fun-house of permanent self-victimisation, this doesn’t resemble an establishment witch hunt. It resembles the bare minimum of scrutiny for a party that has consistently resisted transparency. It looks like even our archaic and broken political system finally caught up with them.
Genuinely, imagine if the Green Party had been accused of even a tenth of this. We'd be on day 243 of GB News' non-stop special coverage. Every front page would scream "GREEN GRAFT", every minister would demand resignations before breakfast, and Zack Polanski would marched on live television into the Tower of London.
Reform is receiving this level of scrutiny because it routinely ignores the normal conventions of political transparency. Because it masquerades as a democratic popular movement while it’s being exposed as a cynical elite-backed project with a dark financial underbelly. Farage hasn’t secured the benefit of the doubt because he hasn’t done anything to earn anyone’s trust.
Will he slip out of this one? It won’t be easy. Farage’s ludicrous forthcoming race against Count Binface and 32 other candidates in Clacton could see him booted from Parliament. While that’s perhaps unlikely, he could very well face another, more challenging by-election down the road if the Parliamentary Standards probe finds wrongdoing.
The allegations are beginning to look increasingly difficult for Reform to contain, and it's a fair bet we're still only scratching the surface. But perhaps it’s unwise to doubt right-wing populists’ uncanny ability to flip the narrative and dodge consequences.
I have watched this movie before in the States. This load-bearing tweet from 2016 should make us think twice before counting Farage out.
Not sure that comparing Farage/Reform with a majestic iceberg is appropriate - a septic tank, a quagmire or a slurry pit would seem more apt.
Since Burnham has decided to join Trump’s little excursion and the Iranians have decided to blockade American and British oil exports, it looks like Farage may get his chance sooner than later as the No.10 merry go round carries on.