Farage under pressure over gifts from convicted fraudster – The Latest
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What allegations are emerging against Nigel Farage?
This is The Guardian.
Cottrell is a minor aristocrat who sometimes claims to have come from significant wealth. He's got that very baby-faced look. He's been around Farage for a long time. He was in his entourage even during the Brexit referendum. It's just an old friend of his.
He's got no role in the film.
Are you friends with many criminals who have interests? Well, people do make mistakes in life. Farage's idea of being a man of the people has always been slightly fictional, given we know he's a public school educated former metals trader. And the problem for Reform UK is that Farage is the party.
From the Guardians today on Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hull. Nigel Farage has for some weeks now been keeping a relative low profile as he faces questions and now an investigation into a gift of £5 million given to him by his friend, the crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourn. Peter Walker, our senior political correspondent, there are now fresh allegations about his finances from another close ally. What have we learned over the weekend?
What we've learned is that it seems that Nigel Farage also received more money in the one-year period before he became an MP, which under the rules, if there's anything relevant, should be declared once the person is actually elected to the Commons. Farage didn't do that with the £5 million. He said that was just a gift, so he didn't need to. The Standards Commission is now looking at that. And there's been calls for the Standards Commission to look at money and services that Farage received from a close aide called George Cottrell, which including staffing, security, use of a very, very lavish five-storey Georgian townhouse near the Buckingham Palace. So essentially, the complaints are similar, but it's from a different person.
The figure of George Cottrell is fascinating in and of itself, isn't it? He might be familiar to any longtime Farage watchers as Posh George. He's often seen at Farage's side. Tell me a bit more about him and what makes him so interesting.
Well, he's still relatively young. He's 32. He looks younger. He's got that very baby-faced look. He's been around Farage for a long time. He was in his entourage even during the Brexit referendum years, so when he was very young. Cottrell is a minor aristocrat who sometimes claims to have come from significant wealth. How much wealth he actually comes from is a debatable subject. He's made quite a lot of money through gambling. He lived in Montenegro for a period where he kind of gambled a lot there. He's got a conviction in the US for wire fraud, which he admitted to. He served a small jail sentence there. And he's one of these slightly shadowy figures, but he's not very well known. People might spot him in the background of a lot of pictures of Nigel Farage over the years.
But they're extraordinarily close. There is a story, no one's ever confirmed this to me firsthand, that he calls Farage daddy, which is slightly unusual.
It gave me the creeps this morning.
I was like, this is not my way and I have to say. But he's very much part of the inner circle. But he's got this unofficial role. The Times this morning printed a photograph of a Reform UK business card that Cotterill uses. But the party says he's an unpaid aide. Yeah, he's kind of like, he was always known as a bit of a kind of bag carrier as much as anything else.
Who is George Cottrell and what is his connection to Farage?
But now it seems he's also been giving quite a lot to Nigel Farage in a direct way, whether in terms of money, but also in terms of these like services, like somewhere to stay in security and all that stuff. So he's quite a central figure.
Yeah. So we had Robert Jenrick, obviously former Tory minister who's now defected to reform, who was given the gift of doing the Sunday broadcast rounds yesterday morning. Farage issued a statement later, but the two are sort of similar in the way that they've tried to bat off the Christopher Harbourn allegations, aren't they, saying that these are friends of Farage. Tell me more about how they've tried to come out fighting against this.
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