Why is the mainstream media so uninterested in the Nathan Gill scandal?

When Jared O’Mara, the former Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam, was charged with seven counts of fraud in August 2019, one rival politician was disgusted by the lack of coverage the case received. “You have to delve deep to find out what party he belonged to,” he wrote on what was then Twitter, sharing a link to a BBC news article about the case. “Could you imagine if he had been UKIP, it would have been front page news implying all party members are equally crooked. Oh BBC.”

O’Mara eventually received a four-year prison sentence. Now, the author of that moaning tweet, Nathan Gill – once Ukip’s leader in Wales, then a Brexit Party MEP and finally Reform’s leader in Wales – is himself facing a stretch inside when he is sentenced on November 26 after admitting he took bribes to make statements in favour of Russia while serving in Brussels.

Ironically, a glance at social media reveals no end of people complaining that Gill’s case is being downplayed by mainstream broadcasters and the right wing press. The BBC is widely castigated for not devoting enough time to the scandal, which involves payments to Gill – a long-standing colleague of Nigel Farage and an MEP from July 2014 to January 2020 – by Oleg Voloshyn, a man described as a “pawn” of the Russian secret services.

This week, the former Reform MEP Rupert Lowe said of working alongside Gill: “He seemed particularly interested in Russian/Ukrainian developments, which I found peculiar.

“There was one event, right at the beginning of our term, which he asked me and other MEPs to attend… it had a very pro-Russian slant, with individuals who claimed to be close to Putin there. For obvious reasons, I did not attend another such event.” That this might have been a bit fishy seems to have escaped the attention of Farage, who said this week that he expects to be Britain’s next prime minister.

On social media, the BBC is most widely blamed for not making more of the story. This seems slightly unfair given that several key moments in the reporting of this scandal have happened on BBC shows, while the right wing press and GB News remain remarkably incurious about the whole affair.

BBC News reporter Meleri Williams memorably confronted a non-verbal Gill outside the Old Bailey after his guilty plea and BBC Breakfast’s Jon Kay let Reform policy chief Zia Yusuf imply that Farage had barely known Gill, while showing several photographs of the pair smiling together. Greens leader Zac Polanski was allowed to jab at Yusuf on last week’s Question Time before Fiona Bruce stepped in, and most recently Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire kebabbed Tory-to-Reform defector Maria Caulfield with a long list of Farage’s links to Gill, and the question, “does that make you doubt your leader’s judgement?” (“No, not at all,” was the predictable answer).

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Hopefully, more will follow once Gill is sentenced, including serious questioning of Farage about what he knew and when. Will the Mail, Telegraph, Sun and co take an interest? Apart from to whine about a witch hunt, almost certainly not.

Looking at some of Gill’s other tweets from his time as an MEP, what comes across is not just his extraordinary naivety about the benefits Brexit would bring (leaving the EU would let us “sack our politicians every five years if they’re going down a direction that we do not like,” he declared two days before the 2016 referendum, apparently not having heard of elections before). Notable too is his determination to call his opponents traitors and betrayers. Alanis Morrisette would have a word for that.

The MEP who took money to represent the interests of a country that is not his own railed against “treacherous MEPs” (Jan 2019), the “treacherous ruling classes” (April 2019) and “treacherous MPs” (Sept 2019) and wrote “Theresa May has aided the EU and quite frankly shown treacherous qualities” (May 2019) and “Mark Drakeford is a traitor” (Oct 2019), all while taking Russian money. Before the bribery started, he had railed against Remainer John Major “saying all things you’d expect from the Maastricht traitor” (Dec 2015) and called anti-Brexit Tory Dominic Grieve “treacherous” (July 2018).

Doubtless after Gill’s sentencing, the case will be discussed more widely in the Commons too. It cropped up at Wednesday’s PMQs, when Keir Starmer said: “The member for Clacton and his deputy worked alongside someone who took money to spread Putin’s propaganda. Whatever their denials, they have serious questions to answer about what they knew.”

Farage responded on X with a tweet that seemed more like an excuse for his next jaunt to the US: “Yet another session of PMQs where I get mentioned but can’t respond. There is not much point me even being there.” But of course, this is nonsense.

Right after PMQs, Farage could have asked to make a detailed personal statement to the Commons in which he could have laid out, in full, what he knew of Gill’s Russian links and when. The floor would have been his, he would have been able to speak without interruption and would have needed to take no questions. His statement would then be a matter of record, available to be picked apart in future.

Perhaps a Farage statement, together with devastating Mail, Telegraph, Sun and GB News exposés of Gill and Reform will come after November 26? Let’s not hold our breath, shall we?