Kemi Badenoch's big fat Greek meeting with Rupert Murdoch

With Reform wobbling, it seems like Rupert Murdoch is now smiling on Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader and her husband were recently treated to an all-expenses-paid meet-and-greet with the nonagenarian media tycoon and his top team courtesy of News Corp.

Badenoch has just declared flights from Rome to Athens and Athens to London paid for by Murdoch’s company to the parliamentary authorities. She and husband Hamish flew for the meeting in Greece with the Sun and Times owner directly after having coffee in the Italian capital with prime minister Giorgia Meloni.

According to an entry lodged this week with the House of Commons’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests, the £8,177 cost stumped up by Murdoch comprised £4,000 for flights, “ground and transportation and transfers” – think limo rather than courtesy airport minibus – at £1,752. The Badenochs also enjoyed two nights’ accommodation at £2,425 – a luxurious £1,242.50 per night.

The “purpose of visit” was declared as “Attending on-site meetings with Mr Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives from News Corp and News UK.”

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The trip will please senior Conservatives who had been concerned that the Sun in particular was edging towards endorsing Reform come the next general election.

But recently its stablemates the Times and Sunday Times have run a series of critical stories about Reform’s funding, particularly around Nigel Farage’s friend “Posh” George Cottrell, described by the party as a coordinated “smear”, a “hit job” and part of an anti-Reform establishment campaign.

Badenoch is the first Tory leader to declare a trip paid for by Murdoch since Boris Johnson, who in 2022 enjoyed a “business meeting” costing £11,559. That trip – paid for by ‘Keith Rupert Murdoch’ entailed – involved “internal US travel, accommodation and hospitality for me and two members of staff”. Rishi Sunak enjoyed no such hospitality, and Liz Truss was not around long enough.

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And what went on in Greece has remained a secret – unlike what turned out to be an awkward encounter for Badenoch with Meloni. Following that, the Times ran the headline “Meloni warns friend Badenoch against deal with Farage” with political editor Steven Swinford reporting how the prime minister had urged Badenoch to “be your own woman and stand your ground” against Reform.

The story, however, mysteriously disappeared from the Times’s website after a source told the Daily Telegraph that “[Meloni] never suggested to Badenoch that she should not ally with Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party. [She] has no reason to be hostile towards Farage and his movement… [and] did not enter and does not want to enter into domestic political dynamics and relations between British parties.”

Meanwhile, spending his summer fighting a by-election against a bin seems to have dented Nigel Farage’s outside earning potential. His latest declaration to the register is a paltry – by his megabucks standards – £1,696.

Worryingly for a man about to launch Reform’s own online TV channel, £1,406 of it was from Google – presumed to be in receipt of his YouTube earnings.