Farage's hypocrisy over Louise Haigh

Reform continues to rail against Andy Burnham’s appointment of Louise Haigh as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 12 years after she pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation in a case involving a stolen work phone.

Earlier this month, while Haigh was still acting as the incoming PM’s right-hand woman as they plotted his premiership, self-styled ‘shadow chancellor’ Robert Jenrick was writing on X: “Andy Burnham is about to give a convicted criminal, Louise Haigh, a plum job in his government. You don’t get to play these silly games.”

Now Farage has used an interview on the right wing podcast Triggernometry to turn questions about his own convicted criminal, ‘Posh’ George Cottrell, against Haigh, dismissing criticism of his closeness to the former jailbird by saying: “Well, hang on. Louise Haigh is a convicted fraudster about to go in Andy Burnham’s cabinet.

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“George, as a young man, got into trouble in America. If you are involved in tax avoidance schemes, it is very easy in America to get into very, very big trouble.” (Cottrell was not jailed for involvement in tax avoidance schemes, but for conspiring to launder millions of dollars’ worth of drug money using offshore bank accounts after meeting dealers in Las Vegas who turned out to be undercover IRS federal agents).

“He was 20, 21 at the time this happened. He went to prison in America, he came back and everybody said to me ‘oh, you must never see him again, you must never speak to him again’. Well, I don’t do that. I don’t dump people. I do actually believe in Christian forgiveness.”

So, Cottrell, jailed for eight months at the age of 23 in 2017 for conspiring to launder drug money, gets Christian forgiveness. Haigh, given a conditional discharge after following a solicitor’s advice to plead guilty to fraud over a mobile phone at the age of 26 in 2014, not so much!