Reform Watch: Nigel Farage's smoking gun
Plus: Matt Goodwin's latest blunder, Farage's football folly in Ipswich, and a PMQs pity party.
The Lead is keeping an eye on Reform UK and their fellow travellers. Get in touch on X, Bluesky and Instagram or email ella@thelead.uk with tips and stories. We especially want to hear from readers whose local council is now run by Farage’s followers.
Nigel Farage loves tobacco [money]
Nigel Farage’s assertion that he will repeal the generational smoking ban should Reform win the next election is entirely unsurprising given the large swathes of funding he receives from Big Tobacco firms. Writing in the Telegraph this week, Farage called the law, which will make it permanently illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, “pious grandstanding that is masquerading as legislation.”
He added there were other ways to dissuade young people from taking up vaping and smoking. “As for those like me, known to enjoy a pint and a cigarette,” he wrote, “we have been told the risks and we are prepared to take our chances.”
We are sure he also enjoys the funding his party has received from the likes of Japan Tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies in the world, which helped sponsor a panel and last year’s conference titled “Revitalising the Great British High Street – how to reverse decades of decline” at last year’s Reform Party conference. Another panel called “The Politics of Prohibition: The Fight for Choice” was hosted and sponsored by Forest Online, which lobbies against regulation of smoking and has received money from several major Tobacco firms including Phillip Morris and Japan Tobacco International.
It isn’t the first time he’s pulled a move like this. In 2024, links were found between Farage’s anti-WHO pressure group, Action on World Health, and tobacco interests. And, a decade earlier in 2014, Nigel Farage made a high-profile appeal in support of electronic cigarettes shortly after UKIP received donations totalling tens of thousands of pounds from Pillbox 38, an e-cigarette manufacturer.
Matt Goodwin cites fake Orwell quote in long-winded rant
The suggestion arising from a public consultation that future banknotes may feature native wildlife instead of historical figures drew predictable howls. Not least from Matt Goodwin who was appalled by what he characterised as “the slow disconnection of a people from their own history and collective memory,” in a lengthy post on X, citing conservatives thinkers including Roger Scruton and Frank Furedi, the guru of the Living Marxism/Revolutionary Communist Party sect that has provided much intellectual cover for Reform UK.
Goodwin also chose to cite George Orwell, with the devastating quote: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
A stirring line. But it’s not by Orwell.
Orwell Society’s publicity officer, responding to an inquiry from the debunking website Snopes, noted that: “As with so many of these misquotes/misattributions, it chimes with much of Orwell’s thinking – the sentiment is echoed in his writing. In Nineteen Eighty-Four of course he does describe in length how the party alters history and destroys aspects of historical record that do not suit its present power base. But there’s no evidence he actually wrote this, and I’ll add that the language of this phrase doesn’t sound Orwellian to me.”
Given the recent accusations Goodwin’s new book is full of “false quotes and basic misinterpretations of data that appear to be AI hallucinations,” we are not surprised.
Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the populist right? The breakthroughs are less decisive, the contradictions harder to ignore, and the coalition more fragile. At the very least, the far-right is no longer inevitable. Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald argued the case this week…
Elsewhere:
On Tuesday, Farage and his team staged a photoshoot at Ipswich Town’s Portman Road stadium. They bought personalised shirts (the club has confirmed they were not gifted) and booked a tour without informing the club that Nige would be there and taking photographs, too. According to the club, Reform did not use Farage’s name or the party’s when they initially arranged the tour, and there was no official invite or meeting with the managers or owners.
And, yesterday, Farage and his cronies – who, astoundingly, all happened to be in parliament at the same time – staged a walkout during Prime Minister’s Questions, after Starmer landed a well-timed jab at Farage’s crypto funding. Hilariously, it at first appeared that Jenrick, Braverman and Rossindell didn’t quite get the memo, until they scurried out late after their leader.
Reform UK’s Southport branch has landed in hot water after loudly claiming it had uncovered wasteful spending by Sefton Council over the planned demolition of Toad Hall – only for that claim to unravel almost immediately. The £1.5m figure they attacked isn’t even a contract but a rough estimate, no tender has been issued, and their supposed “cheaper quote” appears to have been conjured without access to the building or any formal process. All this and more reported by our original on the ground journalism in Southport.
For more on Reform, read Sam Bright’s recent post on the most dangerous Reform policy no-one’s talking about.
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