Anyone paying any sort of attention to what has been happening politically, and more specifically in the political media ecosphere, will have started noticing that Reform UK have not been having a great time of it this year.
They have gone from their high watermark last year, in which every poll was proclaiming them to be the next government and Nigel Farage actively measuring curtains for No. 10 to where we find ourselves today - being overtaken by the Conservatives, falling well behind Labour and for the most part, looking more and more like the dodgy outfit that we have all known them to be for rather a long time.
It started in April this year when the Guardian published the story that Farage had received that rather inconvenient, undisclosed £5m gift from his Sugar Daddy, Christopher Harborne, which was, according to Farage variously for his security, a “well done you” for delivering Brexit and, in one rather tetchy exchange, none of our damned business.
That is the point at which I would say the floodgates opened.
In rapid succession after this, we learned from The Sunday Times about the cosy financial relationship that Nigel Farage has been enjoying with convicted fraudster George Cottrell, the September Channel 4 News and Verbatim investigation that exposed Reform UK secretly commissioning polls, paid for with foreign money, to blow smoke up everyone’s arses and looking like they’d happily accept illegal donations from abroad and now, most recently, just how incredibly racist, misogynistic and intensely grubby many Reform candidates and councillors can be with the ITV documentary and year long undercover investigation.
While I would definitely describe these as the most significant investigations, they were far from the only ones, with in no particular order, other excellent journalism found that:
Organisations in the network around Reform had been bankrolled by Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government, according to an investigation by Byline Times.
Multiple suspicious activity reports were raised to the NCA in connection to money that went to Reform and some of its senior members.
Peter Thiel had quietly routed a donation to Cambridge through James Orr, now Reform’s head of policy, who has openly talked about recruiting Reform talent there.
A September exposé by Sky News found that Durham County Council, Reform’s flagship council, was not so much being governed as being a little playground for Reform councillors with allegations of bullying, infighting, factionalism and administrative dysfunction.
There has been a lot of scrutiny on Reform - and rightly so. If you’re placing yourself as a future government of this country, you have to expect you will be placed under the proverbial microscope and scrutinised within an inch of your life.
Farage and co, however, did not like this. Not one bit - and their responses have been nothing short of a masterclass in DARVO (deny, attack and reverse victim and offender). Every report has been variously described as political hit jobs, stitch ups, the establishment coming after them, and each time we’ve been treated to a terribly aggrieved Farage looking like someone had just pissed all over his batteries.
And I get it. For years Farage and those around him have been treated by the media like they were plucky anti-heroes. The people who are making waves, who are upending the establishment, who are, above all, entertaining.
This, however, is rapidly coming to an end, because Reform has finally overplayed its hand in its most recent reaction to the ITV investigation.
Yesterday Zia Yusuf took to Twitter to announce that the party has reported ITV, its journalists and even its board of directors to the police, with a promise to pursue them relentlessly through the courts.
Reform, in this case, has made a spectacular miscalculation - because there is a fundamental difference between attacking a newspaper’s reporting (something which has been done by politicians of all colours since the invention of newspapers) and attempting to use the police and threats of litigation against journalists whose investigations have found you out to be a bit fucking dodgy.
Investigative journalism, good investigative journalism, isn’t supposed to be comfortable, and it’s certainly not supposed to make powerful people feel good about themselves - and it’s almost certainly not going to stop just because a political party has thrown its toys out of the pram after being exposed as a safe haven for racists.
The rather uncomfortable truth for Reform is that ITV didn’t manufacture the racism it recorded - none of the journalists involved coerced or forced the people in the documentary to tell them exactly what they thought of ethnic minorities, Muslims and in some cases the female councillors that work with them. They said all of those things themselves.
It’s also worth adding to this post that investigative reporting, including undercover reporting, isn’t some grubby new trick that was made up with the specific purpose of embarrassing Farage - it’s one of the oldest and probably most important tools in British journalism. It exists precisely because some things only ever get said when people think that no one is watching.
It’s how the public found out about the grooming gangs scandals after the intrepid reporting by Andrew Norfolk, it’s how the abuse of people with learning disabilities was exposed at Winterbourne View, about detainees being mistreated at Brook House and about sitting MPs happily taking money to table parliamentary questions.
None of those stories would have been possible without investigative journalism.
Reform is also hardly the first institution to respond to being caught by going after the messenger - in 2003, after Mark Daly went undercover for the BBC and filmed police recruits being openly racist, it was Daly himself who was arrested before the investigation was even broadcast, not the recruits themselves.
The Home Secretary at the time, David Blunkett, called it a stunt - but the officers resigned, Daly was never charged and Blunkett was forced to admit that using the word “stunt” had been a mistake.
Twenty-three years on from that, if you mention The Secret Policeman, it’s not remembered as a scandal about journalism - it’s remembered as a scandal about racism in the police, and I would put good money on the ITV investigation being remembered in exactly the same way.
Reform can argue and feel aggrieved about the methods used until the cows come home, and if there is genuine criminality, that deserves investigation - but none of that is mitigation to the footage that was aired.
A bit more importantly than that though, Reform have just handed journalists an entirely new story to cover - a story of how a party that’s supposedly set on being the next government of this country responds when the press holds it accountable.
This last point is the one which I suspect Farage and his cronies will most regret, and has the potential to ramp up the scrutiny right up to 11.
Journalists are, by their very nature, a curious bunch. Threatening them with police investigations and lawsuits is almost certainly not going to make them less interested in what it is you’re up to - if anything, it raises the rather obvious question of just how many other skeletons you have in your closet and what else you might be desperate to keep away from the eyes of the public.
Reform has spent years presenting itself as the great defender of free speech, the enemy of censorship and the fearless challenger of powerful institutions.
Now, faced with scrutiny of its own, it is threatening the people doing the scrutinising.
And if this is how Reform responds to being investigated as a minor opposition party, the public has every reason to ask how it would respond to being investigated in government.
The journalists aren’t the ones making Reform look like Reform.
Reform is managing that perfectly well all by itself.
It's almost like hypocrisy. . . . . . .
I think the phrase is 'boohoo'. Have I got that right Mr Jenrick?