Having largely, and uncharacteristically, avoided media attention for much of the past couple of months – a period that has coincided with people asking some searching questions about the £5m given to him by a billionaire Reform backer – Nigel Farage returned to the airwaves on Tuesday.
If he had hoped broadcasters, and their listeners, had forgotten about the issue, he was sorely mistaken.
In tetchy interviews with the BBC, LBC Radio and TalkTV, the Reform leader was repeatedly asked to explain why he had accepted a £5m gift from a crypto billionaire living in Thailand.
Here are some of the exchanges.
If there was one consistent message Farage wanted to get across in all his interviews in which he was asked about his financial dealings, it was this: “It’s none of your business”.
Asked on LBC what had happened to the money, Farage said: “With all due respect, what’s it got to do with you? It’s an unconditional gift. I can spend it on Ferraris if I want. That’d be entirely up to me,” he said, adding: “I can do what I want with it. I can put it on the horses.”
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, he said he was “deliberately, wilfully” refusing to discuss how much of the £5m had been spent on his security. Farage claimed, without explanation, that to answer it would endanger him.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday if he would return the money, Farage said: “I don’t think it’s any of your business, frankly.” The gift is being investigated by the standards commissioner, and Farage intimated he might return to this possibility if it had been found he had broken the rules.
Farage also sought to combat claims he has offered shifting explanations for the gift by welding them together into a single story on Tuesday.
He told LBC: “Look, there are not two stories. One is I was given the money unconditionally. I believe it was a reward for giving up a quarter of a century of my life, giving up a huge income in the City of London, putting up with lots of abuse. I believe that was the motive, whether it was or not. That is that side of the equation.
“The other side of the equation is what I intend to do with that. I’ve made that perfectly clear,” he said – referring to comments he had made earlier in the interview about needing to spend the money on personal security.
Pressed by Nick Ferrari about how he was spending the money, Farage snapped: “These are ridiculous questions.”
The Reform leader initially responded to the Guardian’s pre-publication questions about the £5m gift by asking for more time; with his representatives claiming they could not reasonably be expected to respond immediately.
Yet Farage did find himself able to respond immediately. He and Harborne used the time to sit down with a Daily Telegraph journalist to get their version of the story out, and the article appeared at the precise moment Farage was expecting the Guardian would publish on 29 April.
What he and Harborne stressed to the rightwing paper was that Farage was given the money to help him with his personal security. Farage cited a firebombing at his home among such concerns; despite it having happened the year after the gift from Harborne. Security concerns had not been cited as a reason for the gift during pre-publication correspondence with the Guardian.
Harborne also referred briefly to another motivation, telling the paper: “I gave him the money because of my great admiration for the decades of work he had done to achieve Brexit. He had stood down from politics and barely had any income before he went into the [I’m a Celebrity …] jungle.”
But Farage seemed to dismiss this, telling the BBC less than a week later, on 5 May, the £5m gift had been given “for one purpose”, adding: “This money is the only way I can look after myself, and protect myself for the rest of my life.”
That version of the story lasted a little more than a week – until Farage sat down with the Sun.
In that interview, he seemingly contradicted himself, saying he had accepted the money as a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit after all. “This was given to me on an unconditional basis, completely unconditional basis. But, frankly, it was given as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years,” he told the paper.
As well as talking up the security concerns, Farage was seeking to portray the £5m gift as having no connection whatsoever to his career as a politician. On 5 May, he told broadcasters it was “purely private” and “wasn’t political in any sense at all”. He added that there was “no obligation to declare something that is an unconditional, non-political, personal gift”.
Farage said on Tuesday he “wasn’t in politics” when the gift was handed over. But the BBC’s Nick Robinson pointed out that the Reform leader had been openly entertaining questions about standing in the 2024 general election at the time. Indeed, Farage announced his intention to do so shortly afterwards.
Critics have asked how this stacks up alongside his and Harborne’s claims the money was a reward for Brexit.
And they have also dismissed as irrelevant the Reform leader’s claim the money was a private matter because it was given to him while he says he was away from the British political frontline. They have said it does fall within rules requiring MPs to declare any potentially relevant gifts or donations received in the 12 months before entering parliament – and the parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating on that basis.
Coming under increasing scrutiny, Farage told the Mail on Sunday he believed details of the £5m gift had become public as a result of a state-sponsored Russian hack.
Farage said the alleged Russian activity was “deeply concerning” and highlighted the “threat they pose to British security”. But, despite calls to do so from political opponents, he declined to report his concerns to the relevant authorities.
After giving the Reform leader several days to think it over, the Labour party did it for him. Its chair Anna Turley asked the Metropolitan police and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate Farage’s claims that his phone was compromised by hostile actors linked to Russia.
A spokesperson for the Guardian described Farage’s initial claim as “an attempt to deflect attention from legitimate scrutiny of his financial affairs”. They added: “Nigel Farage is once again hiding behind a baseless attack on the media rather than facing up to scrutiny from journalists and politicians.”
The spokesperson said it was absurd for Farage to suggest it had found out about the gift from a Russian hack.
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