You could tell that, ahead of the UK’s general election on July, 4 Nigel Farage, the leader of the upstart “populist” Reform UK Party, had leaders of the more established political outfits rattled. Rather than debating him about his actual policies head-on, such as his idea of swapping around Net Zero on carbon emissions for Net Zero on mass immigration, his rivals decided to begin smearing him as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin instead.

How so? Because, on June 21, Nigel went onto the BBC and traitorously told his interviewer the West had “provoked” Putin into invading Ukraine back in 2022. Or did he?

According to outgoing PM Rishi Sunak, Farage’s comments “play into Putin’s hands” and were “completely wrong” – as in, “wrong morally”, rather than “wrong factually”. Sunak’s opposite number, Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, labelled them “disgraceful” and “disgusting”. John Swinney, head of the Scottish National Party, called Farage a “traitor to the interests of these islands” – most unlike the SNP themselves, who wish to denude the UK of its current submarine-launched nuclear deterrent, a policy Putin would welcome much more warmly than a few words of lukewarm apparent support during a 30-minute BBC interview. 

Yet examination of Farage’s comments, as opposed to his rivals’ hyperbolic disparagement of them, reveals he actually spoke as follows:

“We provoked this war. Of course it’s his [Putin’s] fault, [but] he has used what we’ve [the West] done as an excuse … It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to [go to] his Russian people to say ‘they’re [the West] coming for us again’, and to go to war.”

Farage was not defending Putin’s invasion whatsoever. He clarified he was not a supporter of the Russian strongman, although he did admire him as a “political operator” – i.e., he felt Vlad had been running rings around the West for decades. Admitting this unfortunate fact should more accurately be labelled “honesty”, not “treachery”.

Yet opponents suggested otherwise. Christopher Steele, who ran MI5’s Russia Desk from 2006 to 2009, saidFarage was simply “spouting the speaking lines of our adversaries in Moscow”, almost as if he had been paid to do so, declaring he was “not at all sure Nigel Farage is a sound supporter of NATO.” “This is the true face of Nigel Farage,” an unnamed Conservative MP told The Sunday Times. “He … seems to have the hots for strongmen all over the world.” “The virus of Putinism, unfortunately, infects people,” further lamented the office of President Zelensky.

Context is everything – or nothing

But none of this is plausibly maintainable if you actually examine Nigel Farage’s full verbatim words. In a subsequent newspaper article, Farage clarified further:

“I am not and never have been an apologist for Vladimir Putin. His invasion of Ukraine was immoral, outrageous and indefensible. As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin was entirely wrong to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine … I have never sought to justify Putin’s invasion in any way and I’m not now … [But] the expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving Putin a pretext he would not ignore.”

This is simply a debatable geopolitical and military opinion. All Farage said was that the West had helped give Putin “an excuse” to invade by NATO and the EU moving ever-eastwards – not a valid one, just “an excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway”.

It is perfectly legitimate to dispute this viewpoint. Other politicians, if their response had been rational, not rhetorical, could simply have replied that, even without NATO and the EU’s eastwards expansion, Putin would just have confected different excuses to invade Ukraine regardless. Either side may then have won or lost the subsequent debate, but at least this would have resulted in a rational exchange of views, rather than simply a string of wholly undeserved abuse for something Farage never even actually said.

East is East, but West Is best

The whole invented row was nothing more than the usual self-interested electioneering disguised as a defence of the national (and international) interest. No major UK politicians reacted anything like as strongly to the following Ukraine-related words, delivered to the European Parliament in 2023, by another prominent Western geopolitical figure:

“The background [to the war] was that President Putin declared in autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement [in return for peace] … And [it] was a pre-condition not to invite Ukraine [into NATO] … The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO … We rejected that. So, he [went to] war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite”.

So, here’s another person openly arguing Putin only went to war – or at least said he only went to war – to counter NATO expansion in the East. And who was this dangerous quisling? None other than General Jens Stoltenberg … the current Secretary-General of NATO.

Was Stoltenberg, too, a traitor against NATO, the West, and the geopolitical and security interests of Great Britain? No, because Stoltenberg was never standing for direct election to the UK Parliament, unhelpfully stealing away large numbers of disaffected voters from the Conservative/Tory and Labour Parties, unlike Nigel Farage.      

Another critic of Farage was former Tory PM Boris Johnson, who mocked him as Putin’s parrot for supposedly regurgitating Vlad’s own geopolitical views unquestioningly. Amusingly, Farage then immediately dug up some old comments of Johnson’s own, blaming the EU’s eastwards expansion for provoking Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as shown by this 2016 newspaper front-page: 

Why was it OK for Johnson to make precisely the same point about EU hubris here as Farage later did, but not for Farage to do so himself? Reform UK’s leader was doing nothing more than advance an honest, if contentious, personal opinion upon foreign affairs. Isn’t that what candidates for high office are supposed to do come election time?

Taking the rap

It isn’t just Farage himself who had his words distorted to discredit him ahead of the election. Malcolm Cupis, Reform UK candidate for Melksham & Devizes, had apparently called black women “gutter sluts”, or so an appalled BBC informed us. Yet, when you read his actual social media words, he had merely commented on two specificscantily-clad black females gyrating sexually in a rap video to the effect that “Why would any self-respecting young woman aspire to behaving like a gutter slut in this way?” His specific problem was that the video was available to young children to view easily online. Cupis refused to apologise, saying “people want politicians who speak plainly, who are not constrained by political correctness, who speak their minds and represent their views,” like he does.

A fair point, I would have said?

We will shoot them on the beaches

The main front-page headline on The Times for June 28, meanwhile, was “Shoot illegal migrants, said Reform campaigner”. How appalling! Was that how Reform actually planned to achieve their Net Zero immigration pledge – genocide? Not really. 

The headline was a reference to unvetted low-level Reform UK canvasser Andrew Parker, who had been filmed undercover by journalists for UK TV station Channel 4, for their notably left-wing nightly news bulletin, obviously showing off by saying this as a crude joke, not as an actual genuine policy suggestion, to a potential voter on their doorstep: “Get the young recruits there, yeah, with guns on the beach, target practice. F***ing just shoot them.” This was simply an unwise and intemperate way to say “Unlike the other parties, we will actually deport illegal immigrants”, rather than a literal promise to massacre them all. Likewise, Parker was also recorded saying “We’re f***ing kicking all the Muslims out of the mosques and turning them into Wetherspoons” [a popular national chain of UK pubs], and telling a paramedic to deny oxygen to any patients if they are “any of that f***ing lot” [i.e., Muslims]. The paramedic’s response was to laugh. Because he knew Parker was clearly joking.

Mr Parker also inaccurately called the Conservative Party’s then-PM Rishi Sunak a “f***ing Paki”, despite his Indian Hindu heritage. Not very nice, maybe, but this fact led the news agenda the following day; Sunak himself was all over the TV, complaining that this slur was wholly unacceptable, and may even make his small children cry.

So, that was the most important news story a week before a General Election – that one man had just called another man a rude word. Shouldn’t media coverage of an important election be focusing rather more on the actual policies of the parties and their leaders?

Furthermore, earlier this year, an eerily similar row had erupted when a major Conservative Party donor, Frank Hester, was revealed to have speechified that the (admittedly highly annoying) prominent black Labour Party MP Diane Abbott “should be shot”, as her general irritating actions made him “want to hate all black women”. Hester’s subsequent apology, and excuse that he was only joking and didn’t hate black people at all, was fully accepted by Rishi Sunak, who consequently refused to return his £10m-plus in donations. Andrew Parker’s own subsequent apology, and excuse that he too was only joking, having had Muslim girlfriends in the past, was not quite so forgivingly accepted by Rishi Sunak, however.

Beyond all Reform?

Whatever Labour or the Tories do, they are allowed to apologise and move on, whereas with Reform UK, it is taken as indisputable proof they are forever unfit for office as a bunch of loony neo-fascist SS men: Farage’s direct Tory electoral opponent in the constituency of Clacton, Giles Watling, described Nigel’s campaign events as being “reminiscent of Nuremberg”. Only in the sense that, unlike Mr Watling’s, they were actually well-attended.

Farage has further been alleged to have wound up his left-wing teachers by pretending to be a Nazi as a teenage schoolboy, by making play out of the fact his initials were “NF”, as in “National Front”, an old UK neo-Nazi group – but, again, if true, this was all meant in jest. The following tweet, however, from fishwife-voiced left-wing media rent-a-mouth Narinder Kaur (who has happily been a guest on Nigel’s TV chat-show in the past), was apparently meant in all seriousness: 

No, it’s just you. You can’t even spell “Hitler-esk” properly, never mind recognise such a quality in others.

One video put out by Farage’s team online, meanwhile, featured as background music L’Amour Toujours, a 1999 Italian disco song. This video was then quickly taken down, after someone pointed out this same song had recently been co-opted by German ethnonationalists who had altered its chorus to “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out!”, being filmed making “Heil Hitler!” salutes whilst dancing to it. Farage called this a “mistake”, the staffer who had used it having no idea of its new meaning.

I guess you can believe this or not.

Definitely not a mistake, however, was that at a recent meeting of Warwick University Conservative Association, the 1938 song Erika, written by an actual Nazi stormtrooper, had been played, whilst Tory partygoers had chanted “Kill the Jews/Hughs!” in reference to the name of their local Conservative ex-chairman, Herr Hugh Herring. Again, I would tend to interpret this as merely juvenile offensive student humour rather than a genuine endorsement of genocide. But, if we’re going to treat everyone the same here, shouldn’t the Conservatives now be considered a rabble of unelectable brownshirts too? 

Perhaps the most egregious treatment of a Reform UK figure was of George Jones, an event campaigner, who was secretly filmed reacting to a passing police-car with a Gay Pride flag painted on it by saying “You see that f***ing degenerate flag on the front bonnet? What are the Old Bill doing promoting that crap? They should be out catching nonces [i.e., gay paedophiles/child groomers], not promoting the f***ers.”

When it comes to organisers of obscenities like Drag Queen Story Hour, then I quite agree – and so would millions of ordinary people. Knowledge of Jones’ words will probably have made many voters much more inclined to vote for Reform UK, not less so, as the know-nothing mainstream media seem to have wrongly presumed when splashing them about all over the place and publicly lynching him. Jones also went on to imply that officers dancing about like idiots at gay parades was also a pointless waste of police time and resources – which it is. The police later investigated (and subsequently cleared) Jones for daring to criticise them and their big fat gay-car, on the grounds it may potentially have been a “hate-crime”. Doesn’t this rather make Jones’ whole point for him?