It was like an infestation of giant wasps: across the website of The Standard – formerly the London Evening Standard – the banner ads in yellow and black blared: “Vote Reform: Get Starmer Out”. The same message appeared wrapped around the Standard in print and across the front pages of local newspapers across England and Wales. Reform UK spent big to get its message across ahead of election day.
The morning after, a bombastic Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, appeared on TalkTV, crowing: “[These results] are a rejection of the sneering, the smearing, the libelling from the establishment media that behaved abominably in recent months, trying to essentially kill us off electorally.”
Later, on The Daily Telegraph’s Daily T podcast, Nigel Farage was greeted by the hosts, Camilla Tominey and Tim Stanley, like a familiar friend. “Good morning, Nigel, congratulations on your results so far. Give us a picture of how Reform’s doing across the country,” Stanley simpered.
In the world presented by The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail, GB News – where Farage remains a primetime host – and TalkTV – which rarely goes a week without broadcasting an early-morning love-in between Tice and the reliably awful Jeremy Kyle – Reform are not subjected to sneering. They’re given an easier ride than a toddler on the teacups at a touring fair. It will be interesting to see how these Fleet Street Farage fanboys will cover the story about the Reform leader’s £5 million crypto donation, and what, precisely that money was used for.
Let’s start by looking at a piece published by The Sun’s political editor, Jack Elsom, a week before the local elections. The headline was breathless. “Mobbed by crowds, Trump talk & beer… on the campaign trail with Nigel Farage as he rallies ‘Brexit Army’ to stop Starmer”.
Elsom’s article began: “Is Nigel Farage the Messiah or just a very naughty boy? His fans here in Yorkshire certainly mob him with an almost God-like reverence as he tours the towns and villages.” It makes the old Simpsons line, “Mr Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?” seem Paxmanesque.
Just below that opening paragraph, there’s the now traditional picture of Farage with a pint of beer in one hand and a rolled-up copy of The Sun in the other. This pub-based pantomime is the Reform leader’s familiar schtick. Elsom plays it up in his copy: “‘They come up to me, grab my hands and say, ‘Save us’,’ the Reform leader tells me… We are well into our day on the campaign trail – and a few cheeky pints to the good – by the time I sit down with him for a chat at Barnsley social club.”
Elsom’s “chat” with Farage gave the politician a chance to slam the Greens, commenting: “I see [their vote] as being ethnic minorities. Many who don’t speak English. Many who have foreign passports, but are still allowed to vote, for reasons that are totally beyond me.” He also distanced himself from Donald Trump.
Curiously, the previously undeclared £5m donation from the foreign-based British-born crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne didn’t come up. Nor did any of the cases involving Reform council candidates saying wildly racist things. Well, this was a ‘chat’ after all and not anything resembling an actual interview.
Still, for his final question, Elsom hit Farage with a difficult one: “As we part, I ask if he is perhaps the most famous man in Britain.” Ooh, how will big Nige get out of this one? “‘I’m not famous,’ he tells me. ‘I’m infamous.’” Yes, we’re meant to take seriously the sight of a 62-year-old former commodities trader talking like a character from a Jason Statham movie.
Over at The Daily Telegraph, Allison Pearson was dispatched to Romford to speak to Essex’s most fervent Farage fans. She duly did so, hunting down a nameless cheesed off small business owner and a delighted mother mooching around a shopping centre.
But she didn’t even need to speak to some of them – she could just go on vibes. “Inside the polling station on Thursday, I noticed several men in paint-spattered trousers and heavy boots who had come to vote in their lunch hour. No need to ask who they were voting for.”
Like so many other figures in the right-wing press, Pearson also made sure to point out what great pals she is with Farage. She wrote: “Mid-morning on Thursday, I WhatsApped Nigel Farage to ask how he thought things were going. ‘Up the workers,’ came the ebullient reply, quick as a shot. Farage’s antennae are among the keenest in politics, and he’s rarely wrong about these things.”
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It has less in common with political journalism than it does with the kind of puppy-dog prose you’d have found in 1970s annuals dedicated to the qualities of David Cassidy and Donny Osmond.
This is Pearson playing at being Betjeman or Dylan Thomas, a decades-long member of the media elite, fetishising the working class: “The plumbers, the entrepreneurial painter-decorators who employ a couple of lads, the cab drivers, the small business people having to file another sodding tax return, the publicans, the nightclub bouncers, the florist, the hairdresser who smiles dreamily when I mention his name… they love Nigel just as they loved Margaret Thatcher.” She rocked up in Romford knowing exactly what she and her editors wanted to find there.
When the Telegraph ventured out on the campaign trail with Farage, again in Essex, on an open-top bus in Southend-on-Sea, it painted a picture of “women sunbathing on the beach [standing] up to wave at him… shirtless men drinking pints on the seafront [giving] him a thumbs up” and him being “quite literally mobbed by school children”.
A large section of the piece was dedicated to dodgy characters among the Green Party’s candidates. There was no mention of any issues with Reform’s selections, beyond a glancing reference to previous problems: “Mr Farage claimed there was more scrutiny of his candidates than of the other parties, but acknowledged that the vetting process had not been up to scratch in the past.”
The piece ends with Farage doing his Messiah act: “There is one particular phrase that I get all over the geography, through ages, through races, through a variety of things… ‘Please save us. Please save us.’”
Oddly, the hardbitten cynicism of Westminster political hacks seems to evaporate when they’re jotting down Farage’s homilies. What would be considered outrageous egotism or just slightly comical coming from the mouth of a politician less in tune with their editorial line is treated as admirable, practically a profile in courage.
Ahead of the election, Farage granted one of his exceedingly common “exclusive” interviews with Jason Groves, The Daily Mail’s political editor. While The Sun’s “chat” took place in a social club, this conversation was hosted in – per the Mail – “an upmarket hotel in Durham”, where the pictures show more glasses of red wine than pints of beer on the table.
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While there was again an absence of tough questions about Reform’s policies or the behaviour of its candidates, the Mail was, at least, a little less hyperbolic about its leader’s appeal: “On the streets of South Shields and Gateshead, the public reception for Mr Farage is generally warm, but it would be an exaggeration to say he is mobbed.” Farage’s explanation for the “eerily quiet South Shields”? “Everyone is saying it’s the parking charges.”
In The Times, the more genteel face of the many-headed hydra that includes The Sun and TalkTV, the campaign trail report came from the Sussex coast, beginning with Farage facing hecklers. We’re told he continued unbothered: “‘Great response,’ he reflects happily as he sits down on the bus, a can of gin and tonic in hand.”
No pints here, but there was a section on that £5 million donation, which Farage dismisses as “an unconditional gift”. Asked again about it later, he gave the interviewer some Thought For The Day-style babble: “I’m not a perfect human being, I’ve had all the normal sins [that] human beings have, but what am I going to worry about?” A parliamentary standards inquiry, perhaps.
Despite the mild scrutiny, The Times profile presents Farage as an ebullient man of the people, “atop the bus [addressing] passers-by with a microphone, to thumbs-ups and cheers”. Stories of young men approaching Farage and telling him, “you’re, like, my idol”, end up giving this kind of reporting the tone of old features in the music press about bands being mobbed, fans fainting at the sight of the tour bus. Everything is seen through a pair of turquoise-tinted spectacles.
Trudge through the output of the right-wing press on Reform UK in general and Farage in particular, and you don’t find the sneers, the smears or the libels that Tice claims the “establishment media” have pelted the party with. In the bubble they have created, he’s treated more like a star than a politician, with hacks desperate to report that they’ve had a pint with their new pal.
Far from trying to “kill off” the party’s electoral chances, those newspapers have done everything to suggest that the public’s reaction to Farage is Beatlemania with a ballot box.
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