The Spectator newsletter reports:
Reform is having a difficult morning. Channel 4 News, working with Verbatim, has broadcast undercover footage which appears to show James Orr and Dan Jukes, senior allies of Nigel Farage, plotting for a foreign donor to fund three polls commissioned by the party at a cost of £32,500. Jukes, Reform’s head of policy, is also shown meeting a man posing as the British-based son of a wealthy American businessman to arrange a potential future donation of £500,000. In further footage, Farage is shown meeting the man posing as the son and an actor playing his father at a lunch in Clacton. Bob Posner, a lawyer and former Chief Executive of the UK Electoral Commission, said there should be a criminal investigation as ‘serious criminal offences’ may have been committed. Reform has denied any wrongdoing.
Presumably the serious criminal offences being committed here are impersonating someone else, filming a meeting without the other participants' permission (if that is the case) and trying to entrap politicians with propositions of illegal donations?
A bit like the Russian pranksters who have caught out various high-level politicians, getting them to say stuff they have later regretted.
Wait a minute! Maybe this is another 'hybrid warfare' Russian plot to prevent Reform getting into power to prevent illegal immigration being stopped to prevent the UK being further undermined by the ongoing immigration crisis.
Hmmm. Could be, right?
If Reform has indeed accepted foreign donations that are illegal according to Electoral Commission rules, then of course this matter should be treated seriously in accordance with the law and the people accepting these donations expelled from the party.
If not then it is a smear.
Because if Channel 4 were truly acting in the public interest it would have done the same prank with all the other major parties (Conservative, Greens, Labour and Lib-Dems) and then been able to report objectively on the results of all 5 of its pranks.
But it didn't.
So what does that tell you?