The scrap between Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, owners of the Times and Sunday Times, and Reform continues – but this time with a serious impact on the wider public. It seems the tiff has cruelly prevented the publication of an ‘at home’ profile of deputy leader Richard Tice and his charming fiancée Isabel Oakeshott.
Reform, and Tice in particular, have been at war with the Times newspapers ever since they started publishing articles about the party’s rococo financial arrangements. In March, the newspaper ran a story on its front page headlined “Tice ‘avoided £600,000 in tax”, outlining how Dubai Dicky managed to avoid paying the sum after obtaining a rare and obscure legal status for his company, which owns a number of industrial estates.
A month later it published a follow-up story claiming that Tice’s company did break the law by failing to pay tens of thousands of pounds in tax on dividends which were paid to him and his offshore trust. It said that Tice, the party’s business, trade and energy spokesman, received at least £91,000 in excess as a result of the failure (Tice has called the failure a “technicality” and said “overall HMRC received the correct amount of tax due”).
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Four months on from the first article, having suggested he would take sue for defamation, Tice is understood to have yet to trigger legal action against the paper, quite possibly because it was at pains to say throughout that the Reform man was not accused of doing anything against the law.
But now Tice – currently also waging a ‘people versus the establishment’ culture war as part of boss Nigel Farage’s bid to defend Clacton from a bin – has moaned that the row had led to the spiking of “a lifestyle magazine article” about him and his fiancée. Because nothing says ‘anti-establishment’ like a puff-piece profile in noted revolutionary journal the Sunday Times!
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“The Times Group despise Reform & its senior figures so much,” Tice whinged on, inevitably, X. “The bosses even cancelled a lifestyle magazine article on Isabel and I, after it was commissioned.
“Perhaps they feared it may present us in a good light. People need to know just how vindictive Times bosses are.”
Pity the poor readers who will never find out which of them does the washing-up in their Dubai apartment. One might think Oakeshott might have a word – given that she remains international editor of News UK’s little-watched online channel, Talk.
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