Inspector Farage and the case of the worrying whitewash

Reform has investigated and cleared itself. What it found should worry anyone considering handing it power.

Reform is developing quite a routine for dealing with scrutiny. When Nigel Farage faced a parliamentary standards investigation, he called a by-election and invited voters to judge his conduct instead. In its latest financial scandal, the party appears to have decided it can do the police’s job for them.

The scandal will be hard to have missed. Verbatim’s undercover investigation, broadcast by Channel 4 News last month, showed senior Reform figures discussing money with people they believed were a wealthy American donor and his UK-based son. There were payments for £30,000 of polling and discussions about a further £500,000 donation. Regular readers will remember our coverage at the time.

Now Reform has investigated Reform. Its own barrister and general secretary have produced a 27-page report finding no evidence that the party or the two senior figures involved, James Orr and Dan Jukes, broke the law. The actual police, meanwhile, are still investigating.

I’m not sure what I expected from Reform’s internal investigation, but a 27-page exercise in exonerating itself is certainly… something. It reads like a preview of the defence the party would offer if the police investigation led to charges.

In all honesty, I’m less interested in trying to decide what crossed the criminal threshold than in what Reform’s own account reveals about its mindset. The criminal questions belong with the police, prosecutors and, if charges follow, the courts. The questions about standards are already there for the rest of us to consider.

Start with the polling. Reform’s report says Jukes commissioned the polls personally, as a contractor. On that basis, it concludes the payments to the polling firm were not donations to Reform.

That is the legal argument. Politically, it offers remarkably little reassurance.

Orr was recorded suggesting the American businessman could pay for polling to help the party’s campaigns. He said it would “technically be a donation in kind”, but “the reality is we could easily get away with it”.

Those words suggest a clear awareness of the rules, coupled with an interest in how an arrangement might escape scrutiny. The money went directly to the polling company. The report relies on Jukes’s separate contractual status and the circumstances in which the work was commissioned. The polls nevertheless generated coverage helpful to Reform.

Whatever investigators eventually make of those distinctions, why should voters feel reassured by a party whose senior figures were discussing political help in those terms? The report’s explanation of who commissioned what does very little to answer that.

Its language about responsibility is revealing, too. It acknowledges that “people speaking for the party” said things that were wrong, careless and, in one instance, untrue. Yet when it explains the polling arrangements, the emphasis falls on Jukes acting independently as a contractor.

There may be legal distinctions between those situations. That’s for the police to unravel. Reform still has to answer for the conduct of the people it places close to its leader. Their contractual status offers very little comfort to anyone wondering how the party would conduct itself in government.

Then there is the proposed £500,000 donation. It never arrived. Reform says nothing was agreed or accepted, its formal donor checks were never reached, and it found no evidence that anyone knowingly participated in an arrangement to facilitate an impermissible donation.

‘Facilitate’ is doing a lot of work here. To a voter, setting up meetings with someone believed to be an impermissible donor, discussing possible loopholes and providing assurances about how their money could reach the party looks very much like helping to make it happen. A criminal investigator has to establish what was agreed, what people knew and whether the evidence meets the legal test. I’ll leave that assessment to the police and prosecutors.

The absence of a completed payment does nothing to make those conversations reassuring. If the opportunity disappears before the money changes hands, that is hardly an endorsement of everything that came before it. Voters do not need an exchange of bank details before they can recognise a serious problem with the judgement of people who want to govern them.

Jukes was also recorded saying other supporters had donated through their children. The internal investigation says it found no basis for that claim. His explanation, according to the report, is that he invented the circumstances to keep the conversation going.

Apparently, that is supposed to help.

We are being asked to trust the party’s account that a senior aide’s recorded description of how donations were arranged was untrue. Even on that account, someone discussing money with a prospective donor was willing to make things up to keep them interested. That is an extraordinary basis on which to ask the public for confidence.

The police have folded the Channel 4 allegations into a wider investigation into Reform’s finances. That wider scrutiny includes a reported investigation into £500,000 of donations from Fiona Cottrell, the mother of convicted fraudster George Cottrell, who paid for Farage’s security and social media staff. The alleged offences concern the concealment or disguise of donations from an impermissible source.

In that context, accepting a clean bill of health written by the party itself requires rather more public goodwill than Reform seems to realise.

The report describes a “sustained deception” reaching the party’s leader without anyone asking the questions that would have exposed it. It recommends procedural changes, including earlier donor checks and written notification of proposed donations.

I’m not convinced by the defence or the proposed solution. Farage was present on camera at one of the donor meetings. His explanation afterwards was that he had not been listening to the discussion about the donation. We can only hope he pays more attention if new procedures are implemented alerting him to potential donors.

There is also the question of what happens to the people involved. Reform is reportedly waiting for the police investigation to conclude before deciding their futures.

The party already has its own findings about their conduct. It has already accepted that people speaking for it said things that were ‘wrong, careless and untrue’ and that a ‘sustained deception’ took place. Why does it need the police to finish before deciding whether those are acceptable standards for a future role?

An organisation can exercise its own judgement about honesty, competence and trustworthiness. A party declaring that it ‘takes governance and conduct extremely seriously’ should be able to explain what its admitted failures mean for the people responsible.

For all the procedural recommendations, the political message of this report is overwhelmingly that Reform says no crime took place. That is an extremely low bar for elected officials, let alone a party that wants to govern Britain.

The wider problem remains our political finance rules. They need to account for the ways money and influence actually move, with transparency that lets the public see who is helping political parties and enforcement capable of testing their explanations.

Too often, our safeguards resemble a crumbling stone wall, with gaps that invite anyone willing to test them. Until we rebuild those defences, parties will keep searching for a route around them and offering us legal arguments about why we should be satisfied.

I am not satisfied. A democracy should expect rather more from people seeking power than an assurance that, according to their own investigation, they have stayed on the right side of the criminal law.

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