Nigel Farage and the 'establishment hit job'
The man who dined with Murdoch and whose party is never off TalkTV claims that The Sunday Times is bullying him and the man-boy who calls him "daddy".
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In the time before Brexit — remember that? — when UKIP was still Nigel Farage’s vehicle for dominating the national debate, he had dinner with Rupert Murdoch. In March 2013, the pair spent an evening together in the billionaire tyrant’s1 London flat. The cosy gathering took place days after UKIP had forced the Tories into third place in the Eastleigh by-election.
Farage told the BBC that Murdoch was “a remarkable bloke” but refused to say anything more about what had been discussed. Meanwhile Murdoch, who was disturbingly active on Twitter at the time, tweeted that Farage was “reflecting [public] opinion”. The following year, Murdoch and Farage met again privately while the UKIP leader was in New York giving interviews to Fox News.
After the Brexit referendum in 2016, the pair celebrated the win for leave at a garden party at Evgeny Lebedev’s London home, alongside a rash of Tory politicians, and… Lily Allen, who tweeted pictures of the men chumming around with each other. She told The Guardian at the time:
The interesting thing is that these people will go on about how much they hate each other but they are willing to sit and break bread with each other. It just shows that it is a game, it is not real.
In 2017, Farage became a paid commentator for Fox News and in 2025 alone, he earned £25,000 as a pundit for the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia. Last year, Farage was also a prominent guest at Lachlan Murdoch’s summer party and dined privately with The Sun’s editor, Victoria Newton. During the 2024 general election campaign, Reform UK spent £1.3 million — 25 percent of its total budget — on ads in the right-wing press, with £308,723 of that going straight to The Sun.
I’m picking over this old news because the fresh news today is dominated by Farage complaining of being the victim of an “establishment hit job”. The catalyst for that was a Sunday Times splash this weekend focused on undeclared benefits — including staff, security and housing — provided by his aristocratic, crypto-gambler right-hand man George ‘Posh George’ Cottrell.
Cottrell, who calls Farage “Daddy” — try not to vomit — was caught agreeing to launder money for drug traffickers in an FBI sting operation in 2016. Facing 20 years in jail on 21 counts including money laundering, fraud, blackmail and extortion, Cottrell took a plea deal, admitted to wire fraud and served eight months in a US prison.
After his release, Cottrell moved back to the UK before relocating to Montenegro where he was central to the creation of Tether.bet, an online bookmaker, casino and prediction market where users can stake large sums on sports and politics using cash or, crucially, cryptocurrency. The main cryptocurrency in use on the service is Tether, which is part-owned by Christopher Harborne, the billionaire whose undeclared £5m gift to Farage has been at the heart of the Reform leader’s troubles in recent months.
Despite Farage saying at the time of Cottrell’s conviction that he could not be held responsible for “what everyone around me does”, the pair’s close relationship continued. The Sunday Times reports that in 2023, Cottrell linked Farage up with Jack Anderton, a 25-year-old right-wing activist, who was hired to run the politician’s social media operation, especially his TikTok. Cottrell bankrolled Anderton’s £55,000 salary as well as negotiating Farage’s £1.5 million fee for appearing on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here and funding a security team of former soldiers.
What’s interesting about The Sunday Times report is the timing. As Reform UK’s poll lead is starting to erode and Farage himself is finally getting significant pressure in the media and responding to it badly. The questions around ‘Posh George’ are not new. Last summer, Cottrell was given space by The Spectator to whine about Labour attacks on him and his family’s funding of Reform and Farage personally, under the headline Dirty tricks have gone too far:
In recent weeks, anonymous online accounts and attack blogs have engaged in a sophisticated and targeted disinformation campaign against me. Following the allegations in The Spectator last week, some of these soon vanished. Who was behind them? Where did the money come from to fund various X accounts? And what, exactly, are the limits of Labour’s ‘opposition research’ – better known as the ‘dark arts’?
… My association with Nigel Farage, exacerbated by my family’s financial support of Reform UK, has painted a bullseye on my back – and theirs. The assaults are manifold: in 2016, at the Republican National Convention supporting Donald Trump, I was arrested on allegations of a money-laundering conspiracy from my finance days, when I was 20. The tabloids had a field day, transforming it into a sensational saga of intrigue and excess prompting scurrilous claims of Russian interference.
There were farcical allegations of illicit political financing in Montenegro, where I have lived for years, and lurid tales of investigations and arrests, along with whispers of shadowy business dealings with gangsters and despots. These tales disintegrate under scrutiny – but they were never intended to be proven. They are designed to depict me as a Bond-esque rogue.
Later in the same piece, Cottrell finally gets round to mentioning the 2017 plea deal and his ongoing attempts to secure a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. The mention of his age at the time of his arrest — 20 — seems to imply that he believes he was simply not old enough to realise that planning to launder money for drug dealers or — as he claimed he actually planned — to steal money from drug dealers is unwise.
Reform’s attack line against The Sunday Times is that it backed Labour in the 2024 general election. That’s easily rebutted by the author of the piece and editor of the paper’s Insight investigation team, Gabriel Pogrund, because also the co-author of pieces about Keir Starmer’s freebies from Lord Ali and Labour Together’s failure to declare £730,000 in political donations. The latter of those investigations led to Labour Together, under Josh Simons, soon to the head of Andy Burnham’s policy unit, commissioning private investigators to dig into critical journalists backgrounds, including an attempt to dig up dirt on Pogrund.
In October 2025, The Guardian reported that Cottrell’s finances were being examined by HMRC “amid questions over his income from wealth and business activities”. Cottrell has made a legal complaint about the story. In February 2026, Lord Ashcroft’s Biteback Publishing released How to Launder Money, a book co-authored by Cottrell, which is designed “not to enable wrongdoing but to illuminate it”. The launch was attended by a veritable who’s-who-you-can’t-stand of senior Reform figures.
A tweet by Gabriel Pogrund in September 2025 is worth looking at:
Back in 2023, Harry Yorke and I published a lengthy investigation on Labour Together’s failure to declare £700k before Starmer’s election as leader.
Even though it was awkward and not the right time in the political cycle the Sunday Times had the conviction to put it on the front page.
Few cared — but the Qs that remained unanswered were first posed here, among them: why did LT claim it was all a big admin error when senior figures, including Shabana Mahmood, had asked for assurances re declarations and received them?
The phrase “not the right time in the political cycle” is the important one here. Picked up on it by another Twitter user who suggested that it showed what a game political reporting actually is, Pogrund replied that it showed “while the public narrative was far more focused on Tory sleaze, we were pleased to report it, on our front page, anyway”.
That 2023 front page came well before Labour dropped its commitment to pursuing the long-shelved second part of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards in the summer of 2024, ahead of the general election. The i paper reported that The Sun and Sunday Times endorsements for Labour came after a meeting between Starmer’s team and senior News Corp figures. At the time that Pogrund and Yorke reported on Labour Together’s shenanigans, their paper hadn’t yet swung behind Starmer.
The cynicism baked into the words “not the right time in the political cycle” should not be ignored. That phrase is an indication of a very deep-rooted mindset among political hacks who live and die on access. Farage is going through a period of turmoil at the moment. It’s the ideal time to publish the ‘Posh George’ story and allows the Sunday Times to set the agenda. That does not mean that we won’t see it throw in its lot behind Reform UK at the next general election nor does it indicate that it intends to back Burnham. I expect several scandal stories on the new administration to drop within the first few weeks that he’s in Downing Street.
Doing the media round yesterday, Reform’s economics spokesman and self-styled shadow chancellor Robert Jenrick called the Cottrell splash a “very old story that has been dredged up”, while his charmless colleague Sarah Pochin claimed there have been “relentless” establishment attacks on Farage. While it’s very easy to prove that Farage — the Dulwich College-educated former city trader who dines with Rupert Murdoch — is the establishment, that doesn’t matter to his hardcore supporters. Ever since the so-called ‘debanking’ scandal, he’s been able to present himself as under attack, even as he hoovers up cash from exploits like hawking gold bullion.
The bet that Reform UK are making is that Farage’s reputation as a spiv and a chancer is priced in. It’s the same notion of ‘honest corruption’ that has powered Donald Trump in the US; voters think all politicians are bent so why not vote for someone who is so blatant about their desire to coin it in?
There’s another factor in the political reporting as professional wrestling world that Farage and Reform UK operate within. While he and his outriders decry The Sunday Times as the chosen weapon for an “establishment hit job”, Farage and his outriders are never off the TalkTV airwaves. The station, also owned by News Corp, gives Reform endless coverage with lickspittle presenters like Jeremy Kyle warmly greeting figures like deputy leader, Richard Tice, by their first names and allowing them to deliver long monologues attacking their political rivals.
While The Sunday Times plays at putting Farage under scrutiny, the tabloid end of the same business — TalkTV and The Sun — continue to be startlingly soft on him. The angle of The Sun’s report on its sister paper’s investigation today? Nigel Farage’s allies insist no rules broken in fresh row over Reform leader’s gifts from aide.
The ongoing victims of the establishment stitch-up are the rest of us. The ones who don’t have an invite to Lachlan Murdoch’s summer party or the Spectator garden party. The pressure Farage is under now may only be temporary. Other scandals which promised to topple him in the past have evaporated like so much morning dew. While Farage pretends the establishment is out to get him, his invites to its parties are not going to dry up any time soon.
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Not my words, but Murdoch’s own in The Simpsons episode ‘Sunday Cruddy Sunday’ (Season 10, Episode 12)
Like flies around 💩💩