Nigel Farage has more questions to answer over his phone hacking claim

When not bashing Andy Burnham, the Mail papers are eager to lend a hand to Nigel Farage’s distraction campaign over his distinctly dodgy undeclared £5m donation from Thai-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

On May 24, the Mail On Sunday devoted its front page to an interview with Farage by chief political writer Glen Owen, whose stenography regularly produces cover stories based on dubious claims by the Reform leader. The latest one was that “Farage claims Russian spies hacked his phone to obtain details of his controversial £5million gift”, with a ‘party source’ telling Owen: “Only four people in the world knew about the gift, and so Nigel decided to submit his mobile phone for forensic analysis by counter-espionage experts. They concluded that hostile state actors, almost certainly linked to Moscow, had used “spear phishing” tactics to compromise his phone, email and bank accounts.”

Suggested Reading

Nigel Farage’s fascist-adjacent Makerfield candidate

Rats in a Sack

Did Owen conduct his own analysis of the phone, and has Farage now handed it over to the police so they can do theirs? The article did not say. Nor, it appears, did Owen bother to ask about whether Farage ring-fenced Harborne’s £5m entirely for his personal security, as he initially appeared to suggest, or whether he used some of it to buy a £1.4m property in Surrey, the MP’s claim that he purchased that with money earned on TV’s I’m A Celebrity… having been comprehensively debunked.

Nor was Owen curious about Reform’s abysmal vetting. This has led to the election in Barnsley of a councillor who has had his a swastika tattoo covered up (his wife claims “my husband briefly explored Buddhism and had a symbol tattooed on his arm during that period”) and the adoption to face Burnham in Makefield of Robert Kenyon, who posted on X a series of sexist, violent and homophobic messages, including Covid conspiracy theories, and shared a sexually explicit message sent to TV host Carol Vorderman, commenting “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.”