UK Column News — 4th September 2026

**Mike Robinson** (0:08)
Good afternoon, it's Friday the 4th of September, 2026, just after one o'clock. Welcome to UK Column News. I'm your host Mike Robinson. Joining me by video link today is Basil Valentine. And later in the program, we'll have more on live official recognition. We'll also be taking a look at Israel's threats to the UK, and the reaction of the Tony Blair Institute to allegations. Blair was working to have the word Palestine dropped from school textbooks in Palestine. But we'll begin today with listing on the Reform Party.
Because of course, yesterday evening, as everybody will know by now, Channel 4 News broadcast hidden camera footage of Nigel Farage and his closest aides discussing foreign money donations to the Reform Party. Let's just have a look at a very short clip.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:52)
What you're about to watch is a plot to break the Bloron Party funding at the highest levels of Reform UK. If we're technically in a nation we can't even find out, I'm not going to tell you about all this even if it's a lot. So, the reality is we could use a little bit of a way with it. There's a little clandestine project, it's so valuable. And they take it right to the top.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:13)
For the fact of relatively modest, £30,000.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:16)
Amazing.

**Mike Robinson** (1:20)
So, the rest of that report is on the Channel 4 News YouTube channel if anybody's actually interested in watching it. But the operation was run via two invented characters, one called William Lockwood, who was supposed to be a UK resident. And he was supposed to be the Anglo-American son of a wealthy financier. And the other party was his supposed father, Ian, who was running the family business in Wyoming. William was played by this guy, Lewis Wilson, formerly head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness.
Ian was the father, was played by a Broadway actor. The operation set up and controlled the US company to make payments in the father's name. So contact began in September 2025 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC, where Wilson met James Orr, Reform's head of policy and Cambridge academic. James Orr agreed to help direct the family's money towards British right-wing causes, apparently. The family money was not to be given as a straight donation, but as payment for polling that Reform had already commissioned. In January 2026, over gin and tonics at Mark's Club in Mayfair, James Orr proposed that Lockwood's company settle an £18,000 invoice from the polling company JAL Partners. The results ran on the front page of the Daily Telegraph and were labeled as an opinion poll for the Daily Telegraph. But Reform's role was not disclosed on that report, Norr was the funder. And Orr had promised that Nigel doesn't know and Nigel won't know. Two more payments followed, one in April this year at Brown's Hotel for Azure's de facto chief of staff. We just bring this back on screen. I'll bring Dan Dukes on screen. He secured £4,500 for another opinion poll, this time supporting Reform's local election slogan and calling the arrangements an amazing sweet spot because they don't show up anywhere in public records. And then in June, this year, £10,000 was paid for an opinion poll of union members, and that made the front page of the Times. So that's a total of £32,500 in five months, and that was all wired from the US company to the polling companies. Both of for Azure's aides asked for a larger formal donation. Duke suggested that the father's money could be routed through the son, and he claimed that other reform donors were using that same method. Or told William, who was now considered to be a permissible donor by reform, and sorry, he told William that he was a now considered permissible donor by reform, and so a figure of £500,000 was discussed.
Or dismissed the Electoral Commission as completely useless and said that we could easily get away with it. So then on the 20th of July, over oysters at a restaurant near Clacton, Farage met both the Lockwoods and Inverter Commons.
He was told that the American had paid for the opinion polls, and despite the fact that we'd already been told that he wasn't told about those opinion polls, he didn't query that information. So perhaps he did know.
And then when William outlined the next phase, Farage said it was all above board. So those are the basic facts, but I'm more interested in the people behind this thing, because the undercover work was not Channel 4's. It was carried out by this company, Verbatim.
Now, this is a so-called investigative non-profit, which has only existed for eight weeks. Channel 4 News claims to have verified the work that they did afterwards. Verbatim discusses having journalists, but only two are identified on the website. One is Lawrence Carter. He's the sole director. He was seven years at Unearthed, which was Greenpeace UK's investigative unit, as a senior reporter and a special projects editor. Then he co-funded the Center for Climate Reporting in 2021 We're going to come back to that organization in a second, but their registered address, CCR's registered address at Company's House is the same as Verbatim's. Carter has a history of running exactly this type of sting. He posed as a headhunter to lure two former Exxon lobbyists into Zoom meetings, and he recorded those meetings in 2021 That was known as the Keith McCoy Sting, and that triggered US congressional inquiries. He's also one of the two reporters who posed as relatives of a fictitious conservative donor to record Russell Voight, who is a colleague of Trump's on Project 2025 That happened in 2024, and they used fake websites, a fake LinkedIn profile, and cameras hidden in a hotel suite. Lawrence Carter, by the way, does not allow his photograph to appear online, it seems. But if you just bring that back on screen for a second, we'll just have a look at the About Verbatim section here, because they say this is a not-for-profit investigative project. As I say, it's only existed for a few weeks. Now, the other named representative of Verbatim is the guy that we mentioned earlier, Lewis Wilson, who played William Lockwood in the Reform Sting. He was formerly head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness, where his last story was an undercover investigation published with the BBC revealing COP29 officials facilitating fossil fuel deals for a fake investor.