I embarrassed thin-skinned Farage. Now I’m banned from Reform’s conference

Take it as a “badge of honour”, several friends have told me. Over the past two days the Reform UK press office seems to have been more chaotic than ever. First, on Tuesday evening I got an email telling me my request to attend the party’s annual conference, which starts in Birmingham today, had been rejected. They gave no reason. But then, just after midday on Wednesday, I got a much friendlier message from Reform granting my accreditation, and even saying they were “looking forward” to “welcoming” me to Birmingham. That was nice. It didn’t last. Two hours later came a third email again rejecting my application. It soon emerged that the same thing had happened to at least three other journalists, including the author and blogger Peter Geoghegan, Imran Mulla of Middle East Eye, and Anna Isaac, City editor of The Guardian. Perhaps I was barred because of my independent biography of Nigel Farage, One Party After Another, published four years ago, which exposed his alleged racism and antisemitism while a teenager at Dulwich College. Or perhaps Reform didn’t like my more recent criticism of Farage, much of it expressed on this site. I’d noted his new irritability and almost bestial anger over persistent questions from journalists about the notorious £5m “gift” he received from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne just before the 2024 election. Then came his absurd and pointless Clacton by-election when the normally personable Farage refused to attend the result and come face-to-face with his satirical main challenger, Count Binface. In just a few weeks, I argued, Farage had gone from the affable to the laughable. Or maybe my ban is simply Reform chairman Lee Anderson exacting revenge for a film I made for Mail Plus during the 2019 election in Anderson’s Nottinghamshire constituency when he was still a Conservative. My cameraman caught him on tape dishonestly trying to set up a friend to pretend to be a sympathetic constituent he’d never met before. The video went viral, and Anderson looked a real chump. On Wedenesday afternoon, a Reform spokesman told The Guardian that Peter Geoghegan and I were “minor figures”. I can live with that. So can Peter, who has spent years exposing the finances of Farage and his parties, but reckons his big offence may have been his revelation that the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, girlfriend of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, had allegedly written in 2024 that she “didn’t like” Christopher Harborne and regarded him as “untrustworthy”. Oakeshott now defends the £5m gift. Mulla, the UK political correspondent for Middle East Eye, wonders whether Reform banned him for exploring Reform’s close ties to the United Arab Emirates. With Anna Isaac of the Guardian, her “offence” is blindingly obvious, though Reform won’t admit it. It was Isaac, last April, who broke the news of Harborne’s £5m gift, the great scoop which has caused Farage so much grief. Political parties have every right, of course, to decide which journalists attend their conferences. But to bar reporters who regularly embarrass them, or ask tough questions, looks thin-skinned, undemocratic and authoritarian. For a party like Reform, which claims to believe in both free speech and freedom of the press, it looks hypocritical with a capital “H”. Labour has barred reporters too. Last year they tried to exclude several media people from their annual gathering in Liverpool. In most cases, the party backed down and let them in. In the case of Farage and Reform, though, one wonders if they’ve spent too much time in Washington and at Mar-a-Lago schmoozing with Donald Trump and his henchmen and admiring their bullying ways. In both his presidential terms, Trump has excluded journalists from the White House for asking difficult questions. Last year, for example, he banned everyone from the Associated Press because the global agency continued to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” rather than adopt Trump’s ridiculous new term “Gulf of America”. More serious still, Trump has used the power of his presidency to force two major TV networks, CBS and ABC News, to make $16m and $15m donations respectively to Trump’s presidential library as settlements in defamation claims he took against them. The networks coughed up because they feared the Trump administration might made official decisions which would damage their businesses, notably over broadcast licences. Similarly, in the unlikely event of Farage reaching No 10, would he ban reporters for daring to ask tough questions or to adopt his terminology? Given his past sycophancy towards Trump, it seems quite likely. Would he threaten to reduce BBC funding if he perceived the corporation’s coverage of his government was unfair? Probably. When Trump sued the BBC earlier this year, Farage exploited the corporation’s embarrassment to denounce it as “rotten to the core” and “institutionally biased for decades”. Reform would scrap the licence fee “for good”, he says, and demand a “very much slimmed-down” BBC. Personally, I’m not that disappointed to have been barred from the Reform conference. I would probably only have gone to Birmingham for a day trip, whereas three or four weeks from now I’ll spend three days, as usual, at both the Conservative and Labour conferences. The traditional conferences, for all their faults, still involve huge debate and exploration of policy behind the scenes and on the fringe, and party members still have the ultimate say in who leads them. Reform’s annual event is really just a Farage love-in, in a party which effectively remains a one-man dictatorship – albeit far from “minor”.