Nigel Farage has a lucrative sideline in selling personal messages from himself to fans online, as well as getting a steady stream of income from X and Meta for his social media posts. In addition to this, he has become a vocal cheerleader of cryptocurrency, devoting much of his recent new year’s message to how “we are at the dawn of a crypto revolution, and there is an exciting chance to make the UK the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”.
How strange then that this tech evangelist has defended the fact he breached MPs’ rules 17 times by failing to register his financial interests within the time limit by claiming… he doesn’t “do computers”!
The parliamentary commissioner for standards has today ruled that the Reform leader failed to register a whopping £384,000 within the 28-day limit, including payments for his presenting stints on GB News, speaking engagements with Google and money earned through the Cameo message service.
Blaming someone else as ever – Farage said he had been “extremely let down by a very senior member of staff” – the Clacton MP said: “You may say, why don’t I enter those things myself. Well I don’t do computers… so I rely on other people to do those things for me. I’m not, I’m afraid, computer literate, which makes me yet more an oddball than perhaps I was before.”
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He also claimed the delays had been the result of “severe growing pains”, saying: “Our political lives have exploded in the last 18 months in ways that we could never have comprehended. We are overwhelmed in every sense. Even my MP e-mail gets 1,000 emails a day.
“And we’ve basically failed to cope with, or to be frank, not just with this, but with many other things too.”
Rule five of the parliamentary code of conduct states that new MPs should register all their financial interests received in the 12 months before their election and that MPs “must register any change in those registrable interests within 28 days”. Farage missed the deadline 17 times, with delays spanning from four days to as long as 120 days.
The commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, has said he is satisfied that the breaches had been inadvertent and that he would not be referring the case to the Committee on Standards.
But perhaps more worrying is the man who would be prime minister and has promised to pivot the economy towards crypto – mocking that “neither the Conservative nor Labour parties seem to understand this world in any way at all” – openly admits he doesn’t know how to fill in a basic online form!
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