With Reform topping the last 150 opinion polls and Vladimir Putin about to be handed victory in Ukraine by Donald Trump, you’d have thought a story that featured both, but added a heavy dose of corruption into the mix, might have excited the British media.
Yet after Nathan Gill, a close ally of Nigel Farage and his party’s former leader in Wales, was jailed for ten-and-a-half years for accepting Russian bribes last Friday, Britain’s right wing papers and its far right TV channel seemed quite uninterested. Funny, that.
GB News, which purports to be a serious current affairs channel, didn’t bother taking the live feed of Gill’s sentencing at the Old Bailey. As the crooked Brexiteer headed for the cells, its own news agenda was led by moaning about the previous day’s Covid inquiry findings, the energy price cap increase and a supposed new turn in the Keir Starmer v Andy Burnham leadership battle. Talk of Gill was largely confined to the news headlines, though when a brief discussion did manage to break out, Reform’s Epping vice-chair Orla Minihane argued that the story was not embarrassing for the party and host Patrick Christys assured viewers that “the overwhelming consensus” is “that a bad apple doesn’t ruin the whole batch”.
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The story provided the front-page ‘splash’ in the left-leaning Guardian and Mirror, but was nowhere to be found on the fronts of the Mail and Sun – both rumoured to be switching their support to Reform at the next election – nor the Times, Telegraph and Express.
Inside, coverage was paltry. The Mail made room for Gill on page 10, knocked down the running order by stunning investigative journalism on how much Christmas dinner costs at Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant (page two), “how the shape of your beer glass can change how your drink tastes” (page four) and a spread of developments at Strictly Come Dancing (pages eight-nine).
He was on page nine of the Telegraph, further back in the paper than the story of a dance teacher seeking £200,000 for an “emotional meltdown” on a yoga course (page seven, illustrated by a large picture of the dance teacher in a skimpy top). The Express gave him less than half a page on page eight, less prominent than negative stories about John Healey (page two), Sadiq Khan (page four), Ed Miliband (page six) and Rachel Reeves (page seven).
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