Peter Oborne on Nigel Farage's downfall, and Labour's Palestine U-turn

Ava Santina (0:00)

Am I tough enough? Strong and stable leadership.

Peter Oborne (0:02)

Total ruba. Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge. Not another once.

Ava Santina (0:07)

It's the PoliticsJOE Podcast. Peter Oborne, thank you for coming back.

Peter Oborne (0:13)

Thank you very much for inviting me back.

Ava Santina (0:15)

We are going to talk a little bit about a piece you've written for the Middle East Eye on Ed Miliband, but we'll save that for the latter half of the podcast. So at the top, let's talk about reform. So we've just come out of reform conference.

I'm going to offer up a rather weak question to start with, but Nigel Farage looked rather rattled, I would say, over the last couple of days. He doesn't quite look like he's enjoying it, perhaps the way that he did last year or in the years before that. Do you think that's got anything to do with this latest donation scandal?

Peter Oborne (0:47)

Of course. I mean, there's been a series of donation scandals. Not just the excellent Channel 4 program last weekend, but then it is impossible to praise her too highly. Anna Isaac of The Guardian, who brought to the world the story of the 5 million Bung from a crypto financier based in Thailand.

Ava Santina (1:12)

His Thai name doesn't come to me immediately, but his legal name, Christopher Harville.

Peter Oborne (1:17)

Yes, but he does operate under a Thai name in Thailand. Crypto finance is a major tool of organized crime. And then there have been further revelations about Mr. Farage's assistant, Cottrell, his name is, I believe, and his criminal connections. Now, we have the latest stuff about some sort of this revelation about the, we better not call it corruption, but the regulatory laziness of the reform. There's a parliamentary investigation going on. Remember that actually prompted Farage's by-election. If that record was applied to any other leading party, imagine if it was Polanski, first of all, who's the leader of a far less significant, at the moment at any rate, political party. You can be certain that the Mail, the Sun, the Times, the Telegraph, etc. would have gone bonkers, completely unfit for office.

At the weekend, on the Sunday, Times actually had some little non-story about North and Alley, the non-something, he'd done something hypocritical, also mildly hypocritical yesterday. It was on the front page.

Ava Santina (2:46)

I'm going to contest you on that. I thought that was a fantastic story, that he's a landlord.

I thought that was quite interesting. But I take the full...

Peter Oborne (2:55)

He was a... No, a lot about Tory MPs who have children at public schools and so on, Labour MPs, that's a terribly minor...

Yes, you're right. That North and Alley is against landlords and he is a landlord. That's how you could just as well argue, that shows how dispassionate he is. He's not interested in himself. He's got policies which damage his own interests. And the Sunday Times sees fit, which sees fit to a rather piece targeting North and Alley on this non-tiny story. And it's typical of the way that the mainstream British papers...

Ava Santina (3:39)

Can I offer you another example of where I think would actually validate your point?

Zach Polanski over the council tax when he was living in a boat, off-grid, living in a canal boat, and that was a rolling story. It was rolling news coverage on he may not have paid the correct amount of council tax. Comparatively to the coverage that has been lent to the Farage donations, potential corruption, we'll find out if once the standards commissioner comes back with their assessment. But yes, if you weigh those two up, the coverage that was lent to each story, did Zach Polanski far outweigh the column inches?

Peter Oborne (4:20)

And so reform, the big point I'm making here is that reform is protected. It's a creature of in many ways, the Telegraph Group and the Mail. And there's a wonderful journalist on the Saturday Times, Gabriel Pogrante, who's done some phenomenal work here, by the way. He's brought honor to his newspaper and done a job of a journalist and in exposing reform. But the general reluctance of the mainstream media and BBC to cover this story and make it into, it's a scandal. I promise you that if this series of revelations had hit Burnham, his premiership would be finished. The same was applied to the Tory leadership of Kimi Baden-Arch. And it would apply to Polanski. And so you have a separate set of rules. It's a very interesting thing, this, for leaders of far-right parties.

The same applies, of course, in the States, right? So you had the president Trump, who's a great sort of mentor of Farage, and he's a convicted felon, he's an open racist, he's a systematic law breaker. He profiteers from a public office, and all these things are known. And yet, for some reason, this is not something which can damage Trump, whereas deeply damaging if it applied to his opponents. And the oligarch-owned media has created an environment where the cheeky chappie on the far right has a special set of rules applied to him, whether that's Trump or his, as I say, the man who worships him, Farage. And this is something which is very serious, and it poses a lethal threat to British democracy.