Quotes of the day 5th September 2026
"I’ve used this line many times, but one of the best Spads I’ve worked with used to tell his ministers: ‘If you don’t want to read about it on the front page of the Daily Mail, don’t do it.’"
Tim Shipman, from an article in The Spectator about Reform UK's current funding woes.
There are some other very good lines in the article including the following:
"Deputy heads have rolled. Reform UK, in the person of chairman Lee Anderson, announced this morning that Dan Jukes, Nigel Farage’s right hand man, and James Orr, the party’s head of strategy, have stood down and abandoned the party conference. ‘They have left the building and they won’t be coming back,’ Anderson said."
"Footage screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night showed Jukes appearing to suggest a way to get around electoral law to secure a foreign donation of £500,000. A reporter posed as a UK-based son of an American father, who was to give money to the son to give to Reform after being wooed by both Orr and Jukes. Electoral law sets out that to be a permissible donor to a UK political party you must be a UK registered voter, or a company registered in the UK. In a statement, Jukes said: ‘I totally deny any wrongdoing but have stepped back from politics in order to clear my name.’"
"For a party exposed for apparently operating in a quite different fashion to conventional parties, this was a reassuringly traditional response to crisis, one which has governed British politics for a thousand years – kill the aides in the hope you can save the king."
"Anyone who knows anything about Reform, knows what a big deal this is. Orr was one of the figures from the world of think tanks and ideas who gave the party intellectual credibility. Jukes is like a son to Farage, a prickly working class lad from Sutton Coldfield with Essex Boy vibes who has been with Farage for a decade and is effectively his guard dog. Given any choice at all there is no way Farage would ever have thrown him under a bus. That he has gone is a measure of the seriousness of the situation."
"Faces at their conference in Birmingham, themed around the first 100 days of a Reform government, are near universally ashen."
"The initial reaction, of course, was to attack the expose as a ‘hoax’ on Reform perpetrated by a bunch of climate change activists. The undercover filming was carried out by Verbatim Investigations, founded by journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting. But I’m afraid this is too serious to dismiss with a machine gunning of the messenger, as Reform’s actions this morning tacitly acknowledge."
"Farage has just called the sting ‘entrapment’ and insisted his party had ‘done nothing wrong’. But even he admitted the recordings ‘don’t look good, and that’s why we’ve taken the action we have’. They ‘said things that shouldn’t have been said,’ he told LBC. The footage appeared to show both Jukes and Orr explaining to a potential donor how the rules could be circumvented. It was not the other way around."
"The mood in the bars around Birmingham last night was utterly mutinous. Those who are putting themselves forward as Reform candidates confided their despair. ‘We are giving up our businesses and putting family lives on hold to fight for Reform and this is going on behind the scenes,’ one said.
"The overwhelming reaction in my WhatsApp groups from operatives in the other main parties was incredulity at the recklessness of it all. ‘If this is how they talk to people they don’t know, imagine what they are saying to people they trust,’ observed one former Downing Street Tory. Channel 4 redacted several of Jukes’ comments but he appeared to be explaining how Reform had previously got donations in what must be assumed to be a similar fashion."
"All political parties need more money than they have got, but the art of extracting it is knowing where the rules can be stretched and where they cannot. It is about knowing what is fair game and what sends the shark jumping over the line of propriety. ‘There is no way anyone who has ever worked in CCHQ would talk like that,’ a Conservative staffer said. The view of Labour and Lib Dem operators was much the same. ‘It’s just rank unprofessionalism,’ a Lib Dem said."
"So why did they do it? It is the experience of everyone I have ever known near the summit of politics that political operations take their character and operating logic from the person at the apex of the triangle. Leaders set culture. The worrying thing for Farage admirers is that if Jukes and Orr behaved like this it is because they believed it to be okay by the boss. Both boasted on camera of their closeness to the leader. In the meeting at the pub with the fake donor, Farage seemed both au fait with how the money would be transferred to Reform, and grateful for it."
"The scrappy, sod the rules, bugger the establishment vibe comes from him. This is another reminder of the timeless rule that every major politician’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Farage’s insurgent image has put him in a place where he might win power but made his operation demonstrably less suitable to exercise it."
"You don’t need to be as prim as Miss Jean Brodie to think governments making laws for the rest of us ought to give a passing impression of wanting to stick to them."
"Inside Reform, the footage suggests that the attitude is that the mainstream media are out to get them, the Electoral Commission are dolts and the rules are for losers."
"The wider lesson is that Farage’s view that personal loyalty is the most important attribute, above competence, intelligence, probity or a working knowledge of politics is a potentially dangerous one."
You can read the whole article at:
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