Farage warned his ‘establishment hit job’ jibe about unregistered gift allegations could lead to harsher punishment
Good morning. Two weeks today (unless there is some news development in the totally unexpected category) Keir Starmer will formally resign as PM, and the king will appoint Andy Burnham to replace him. Starmer has been forced out in part because of the rise of Nigel Farage; Labour MPs might have forgiven bad local election results, but not when they implied a new insurgency party was on course to win in 2029, with a far-right agenda that might tear up liberal democratic norms cherished by Labour MPs (and many others).
By some cruel twist of fate, Starmer is now on his way out just as the electoral threat from Farage is, while not disappearing, certainly falling back a bit.
At the weekend Rowena Mason, Ben Quinn and Peter Walker published a good long read looking at all the reasons why some people in Reform UK are starting to think that the Farage era is nearing its end.
And then Sunday Times published its own investigation with more, potentially damaging allegations about Farage.
Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary standards commissioner, is already investigating claims that Farage broke Commons rules when he did not disclose a £5m donation from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Greenberg is now being urged to investigate the latest allegations as well.
Last night, in a statement to the Daily Express, Farage claimed he was the victim of “establishment hit job”. He also said:
I have done no wrongdoing, followed the rules and I am now considering legal action against The Sunday Times.
It’s now clear the establishment will stop at nothing to hurt Reform – we want to smash their cosy consensus.
(In the past, when Farage has threatened to sue newspapers over negative stories, those threats have normally turned out to be empty.)
On the Today programme this morning Harriet Harman, the Labour peer and a former chair of the Commons standards committee, said that it was a mistake for Farage to respond to the allegations in the way he did. She said that while the parliamentary commissioner (who investigates allegations about MPs breaking Commons rules) and the standards committee (which decides what punishment should apply if the rules have been broken) were willing to be lenient where MPs make an honest mistake, attacking the system could be seen as an aggravating factor that could lead to a higher punishment.
She said:
By Nigel Farage saying this is an establishment hit job – what he should be saying is ‘These rules are important, they keep our parliament clean, I’m going to at all times comply with them, I have complied with them. I’ll cooperate with the investigation, and I’m confident I’ll be found not to have broken the rules.’
But he’s not doing that. He’s attacking and trying to delegitimise the system.
And if it comes to a finding by the commissioner that he has been in breach of the rules, the way he’s conducted himself whilst he’s been under investigation will be taken as an aggravating fact when it comes to the penalty.
There is no precedent for an MP wrongly failing to declare a donation worth as much as £5m and, if the commissioner does find against Farage, it is possible that the committee could decide to suspend him from parliament for more than 10 days – which would allow the voters in Clacton to trigger a recall byelection.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM, hosts a phone-in with LBC (where she is one of several politicians standing in this week for James O’Brien, who is away.)
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Dan Jarvis, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
F-35 jets intercepted Russian plane following UK carrier strike group, MoD says
UK fighter jets intercepted a Russian maritime patrol aircraft after it “repeatedly approached” the carrier strike group in the Norwegian Sea, the Ministry of Defence has revealed.
An MoD spokesperson said:
While operating in the Norwegian Sea on Operation Firecrest, the UK’s Carrier Strike Group was repeatedly approached by a Russian ‘Bear-F’ maritime patrol aircraft.
The Bear-F passed at low altitude and unnecessarily close to HMS Prince of Wales and dropped a large number of sonobuoys in close proximity to the carrier.
This activity was unsafe and unprofessional. The Russian aircraft was intercepted and escorted by two UK F-35 jets from HMS Prince of Wales until it left the area.
Farage’s treatment by Commons standards system ‘opposite of establishment hit job’, says Harriet Harman
In her Today programme interview this morning Harriet Harman, the Labour peer and a former chair of the Commons standards committee, said that Nigel Farage was completely wrong to claim that he was the victim of an “establishment hit job”. (See 9.36am.)
Farage may have been referring specifically to the Sunday Times story. But he also seemed to be implying that the fact that he was being investigated by parliament was evidence that Reform UK was being victimised by the establishment. This is exactly what his ally Donald Trump has done in the US in response to the many judicial sanctions, threats or investigations that he has faced.
Harman told the Today programme that the standards rules, and their enforcement mechanisms in parliament, were not there to protect the establishment; they were there to protect the interests of the public, she said.
She said that the parliamentary commissioner for standards was not a political figure, that the standards committee was chaired by an opposition MP, and that half its members were not even MPs. She went on:
This is the opposite of an establishment hit job. This is so that the public can know that the establishment, in terms of people with lots of money, are not buying their members of parliament.
And over the decades that I was a member of parliament, each time there was a review of the code of conduct, the standards were raised because of the need to keep public trust and confidence.
People need to know when they vote that what their member of parliament does will be on behalf of the voters and the country, not because they’re being paid large amounts of money to make speeches and push for votes in the House of Commons, or even lobby the governor of the Bank of England.
Keir Starmer has been posting on social media about the England-Mexico game.
One of the greatest England matches I’ve ever seen. We are through to the quarter finals!
AI poses ‘Hiroshima’-style threat to humanity without global rules, says Cooper
Artificial intelligence poses a “Hiroshima”-style risk to humanity if governments do not agree to curb how it is developed, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, has warned. Kiran Stacey has the story.
Kiran’s story is in part based on an essay that Cooper has written for Chatham House published here.
Farage warned his ‘establishment hit job’ jibe about unregistered gift allegations could lead to harsher punishment
Good morning. Two weeks today (unless there is some news development in the totally unexpected category) Keir Starmer will formally resign as PM, and the king will appoint Andy Burnham to replace him. Starmer has been forced out in part because of the rise of Nigel Farage; Labour MPs might have forgiven bad local election results, but not when they implied a new insurgency party was on course to win in 2029, with a far-right agenda that might tear up liberal democratic norms cherished by Labour MPs (and many others).
By some cruel twist of fate, Starmer is now on his way out just as the electoral threat from Farage is, while not disappearing, certainly falling back a bit.
At the weekend Rowena Mason, Ben Quinn and Peter Walker published a good long read looking at all the reasons why some people in Reform UK are starting to think that the Farage era is nearing its end.
And then Sunday Times published its own investigation with more, potentially damaging allegations about Farage.
Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary standards commissioner, is already investigating claims that Farage broke Commons rules when he did not disclose a £5m donation from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Greenberg is now being urged to investigate the latest allegations as well.
Last night, in a statement to the Daily Express, Farage claimed he was the victim of “establishment hit job”. He also said:
I have done no wrongdoing, followed the rules and I am now considering legal action against The Sunday Times.
It’s now clear the establishment will stop at nothing to hurt Reform – we want to smash their cosy consensus.
(In the past, when Farage has threatened to sue newspapers over negative stories, those threats have normally turned out to be empty.)
On the Today programme this morning Harriet Harman, the Labour peer and a former chair of the Commons standards committee, said that it was a mistake for Farage to respond to the allegations in the way he did. She said that while the parliamentary commissioner (who investigates allegations about MPs breaking Commons rules) and the standards committee (which decides what punishment should apply if the rules have been broken) were willing to be lenient where MPs make an honest mistake, attacking the system could be seen as an aggravating factor that could lead to a higher punishment.
She said:
By Nigel Farage saying this is an establishment hit job – what he should be saying is ‘These rules are important, they keep our parliament clean, I’m going to at all times comply with them, I have complied with them. I’ll cooperate with the investigation, and I’m confident I’ll be found not to have broken the rules.’
But he’s not doing that. He’s attacking and trying to delegitimise the system.
And if it comes to a finding by the commissioner that he has been in breach of the rules, the way he’s conducted himself whilst he’s been under investigation will be taken as an aggravating fact when it comes to the penalty.
There is no precedent for an MP wrongly failing to declare a donation worth as much as £5m and, if the commissioner does find against Farage, it is possible that the committee could decide to suspend him from parliament for more than 10 days – which would allow the voters in Clacton to trigger a recall byelection.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM, hosts a phone-in with LBC (where she is one of several politicians standing in this week for James O’Brien, who is away.)
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Dan Jarvis, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
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