Rory Stewart

There was some very odd reporting over the weekend that Nigel Farage was not doing your famous Ken Baker trick of setting expectations very low.

In fact, he was doing the opposite.

He was doing something that you almost never see in local elections.

He was going around saying, this is going to be an amazing win.

This is going to be a great Bonanza win, which of course gives people at the Conservatives the opportunity to say in Harlow, for example,

where there were 11 seats up and where reform seemed to be talking about getting seven or eight, the Tories have got a clean suite.

And remind us the two.

So with Polanski, I noticed there was a front page article in the Times saying that he'd not paid council tax on a canal boat that he'd been living on.

That's a lot of money.

I'd be interested also, I don't know whether anybody's polled reform voters, what the range of opinion is about Farage taking five million pounds personal donation

Somebody's pointing out to me when I said, why do you take it as a personal donation rather than speaking fee or something?

Apparently, the answer is income tax.

If Chris Harbour decided to pay him five million pounds to give a speech, he'd have to pay income tax.

Gifts, there's no tax on it, so it's worth twice as much to him.

But he'd need to earn effectively 10 million pounds to end up with 5 million pounds in his bank account, which is sort of money well beyond a kind of partner in a fancy law firm or any of this kind of stuff.

Well, well beyond.

So he's putting himself not into the category of...

I want to be financially secure and live a middle-class lifestyle, he's trying to put himself in the category of, I suppose, the top 0.01% of the British population.

Yeah.

So you're pointing to something which is about structure.