Like Trump and Israel, Farage is allowed to behave with impunity

Martin Shipton

Both Angela Rayner and Nigel Farage have behaved badly, but there has been a huge disparity in the way they have been treated by the bulk of the British media.

Rayner has been hounded mercilessly over her tax affairs for months. Eventually a spate of stories in right-wing tabloids culminating in the discovery of a £40k underspend on stamp duty forced her to refer herself to the UK Government’s ethics adviser. Inevitably, the finding was that she had broken the Ministerial Code by not taking advice from a specialist lawyer, despite having been told she should.

She’s paid a heavy price for her foolishness and is unlikely to regain a prominent position within government in the foreseeable future.

Freelancing

Meanwhile Farage has been freelancing for Britain’s enemies on the other side of the Channel at a time when he should have been representing his Clacton constituents in the House of Commons.

On top of that he has brazenly sought to fend off scrutiny about his own tax arrangements, not to mention the huge sums he is making for doing work that is extraneous to his Parliamentary duties.

Farage however remains a beneficiary of the pulled punch that persistently lets him off the hook when he should be squirming.

It’s absurd that the most telling criticism he received this week came not from a British politician in another party or a journalist legitimately trying to get under his skin, but from a Democratic Congressman in the United States who few people in Britain will have heard of before his savaging of Farage.

The Reform UK leader decided to skip Prime Minister’s Questions to appear as a witness before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington. He had been invited by the Committee’s Republican leadership to talk about what Farage described as the “awful authoritarian” situation for free speech in the UK.

Barnstorming attack

He met his match, though, in the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, who launched a barnstorming attack on Farage, arguing that if he was worried about the implications of the UK’s Online Safety Act, he might have done better to make the case as an MP rather than in the US.

“He should go and advance the positions he’s taking here in Congress today in parliament, which is meeting today, if he’s serious about it,” Raskin said.

“To the people of the UK who think this Putin-loving free speech impostor and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in this country: come on over to America and see what Trump and Maga are doing to destroy our freedom. You might … think twice before you let Mr Farage make Britain great again.”

Farage performed as his hosts wanted him to, launching into a predictable attack on the UK’s supposed crackdown on free speech. One of the individuals whose “free speech” was supposedly curtailed was Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for inciting arson attacks on hotels where asylum seekers were housed. Connolly is now being touted as a future Reform candidate.

Although he tries to deny it, many have interpreted Farage’s attack on the UK as a coded message to Trump that he should threaten to impose further tariffs on us unless Starmer’s government changed its stance on the issue.

Farage got barely any criticism in the British media at all for going to the US when the Commons was sitting in order to bad mouth his own country to a foreign legislature. It’s easy to imagine how our right wing media would have treated a left wing politician if they had done the same.

The Reform leader has also come in for very little criticism over the huge sums he is earning from other sources in addition to the more than £90k salary he is paid as an MP. His entry in the Register of Members’ Interests goes on for page after page.

GB News

Top of the list are a whole raft of payments made by GB News not to him, but to a company of which he is the sole director called Thorn in the Side Ltd. The very first item shows that on September 30 2024 the company received £60,388.80, including VAT, for 20 hours of work presenting his own show.

The next month the company received £35,433.60 for 16 hours work, and in November 2024 it got £42,076.80 for 20 hours work.

The list of payments from GB News goes on. When you finally reach the end, you find yourself reading that Farage gets paid a relatively modest £4,000 per month for articles he writes for the Telegraph.

Then comes some payments for “social media work” he did for Meta Platforms: a mere £1,155.70 for 28 hours work is the first that appears.

He also did some video recordings for Baron App Inc (Cameo), the first of which earned Farage £12,247.71 for 24 hours work in September 2024.

Then there are some speaking engagements, including one for the AZ Liberty Network, for which he was paid £13k for eight hours work in August 2024. I hope that included travelling time; I don’t envy anyone being subjected to an eight-hour monologue from Farage.

There’s more social media work, this time for Google in Dublin, the first payment being £3,019.32 for eight hours work. Was it worth getting out of bed for, one wonders. Evidently yes, for there are a fair few of these.

In September 2024 Farage was paid £40,075.27 for a speaking engagement lasting 10 hours. The client was Nomad Capitalist LLC of Phoenix, Arizona.

Gold bullion

As a brand ambassador for a gold bullion firm called Direct bullion, he got the princely sum of £189,300 for four hours work in December 2024. The same firm paid him a further £91,200 for four hours work in January 2025.

Farage’s final piece of extra-Parliamentary work listed was as a commentator for News PTY in New South Wales for 19 hours work up to February 2025. His fee? £25,368.

Asked about his decision to have his GB News earnings paid via a company rather than directly to him – a manoeuvre that will save him many thousands of pounds – he told Sky News: “I have massive outgoings. I employ contractors. I have a business that does a variety of things – many things. I’m using it legitimately because I run a company that has overheads. I know very few people in the media have ever been in business and therefore I doubt they will understand.”

When it was put to him that he was paying less tax because the GB News payments were going to his company rather than to him directly, he said: “And there’d be fewer people employed if I didn’t have a company. It’s good to employ people – do you understand?”

The most recent accounts for Thorn in the Side Ltd show that it has just one employee. Nigel Farage.

The mad thing about all this is that the very people who see Farage as their hero and saviour would be spitting fire if all this moonlighting and outrageous behaviour was engaged in by an MP from any other party.

Like Trump and Israel, Farage is allowed to behave with impunity.