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Nigel Farage will say pretty much anything for money. Write him a script, stuff a coin in the slot and off he goes: the man who would be prime minister can be your personal mouthpiece for less than £100.
Or at least, that’s the obvious explanation for why – as exposed by the Guardian – the Reform leader has been churning out written-to-order video messages on request for (among others) Canadian white supremacists, a man jailed for throwing a bottle during the 2024 summer riots, and someone apparently keen to hear him talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “big naturals”, pornified slang describing the breasts of a woman who could be running for US president before long.
Either he wanted the cash badly enough not to ask too many questions, or he actually meant the stuff he was saying, and since he swears he’s not a racist or misogynist – well, draw your own conclusions. For what it’s worth, a representative of the Canadian group now insists they picked Farage “for a laugh” and to teach him the consequences of “being lazy and stupid enough to say anything for a dollar”. To misquote Trump, it ain’t Churchill we’re dealing with here.
Let’s be honest: it’s likely none of this will be a dealbreaker for diehard Reform voters, if only because it’s precisely what some of them are here for. The revealing thing about Cameo – a platform where B-list celebs, gamers, sports stars and reality TV contestants rent themselves out to record personalised messages for your loved ones’ birthdays or stag dos – isn’t just what performers are willing to say for the money, but what their fans typically want to hear. The actor Miriam Margolyes, for example, gets hired to tell mothers how much their daughters love them, while comedians invariably get asked to repeat their most famous catchphrase ad nauseam. Farage gets commissioned to discuss how secret societies are running the world, obliging by rattling off a list of antisemitic conspiracy theories and then hastily adding that he doesn’t believe them. He didn’t get this far by not finding ways of giving punters what they want, even when what they want is obnoxious.
Yet Reform’s recent tailing off in the polls suggests some of its newer supporters are getting decidedly cold feet. The careless trampling of political norms that used to play so well for Farage has real potential to do him harm, now that we can all see what the Trumpification of British politics might mean in practice.
When the first soldiers’ coffins began returning home from his war on Iran, President Trump greeted the fallen wearing a tacky branded baseball cap from his own range of merchandise, which he did not bother removing for the salute. It’s hard to describe how jolting that is for veterans, but product placement is a hallmark of what has become more a brand than a presidency. The American business bible Forbes estimated last autumn that Trump had swelled his personal fortune by more than $3bn in his first year in office, essentially by leveraging the Oval Office for profit. The president has built a monetised cult of personality capable of flogging everything from memecoins – a growing area of interest for Farage, who recorded several Cameos hyping various cryptocurrencies that characteristically later collapsed in value – to T-shirts, while seemingly treating foreign policy as an extension of the family real estate business. (Having failed so far to turn Gaza into a beach resort, Trump now dreams aloud aloud about “taking Cuba” and doing whatever he likes with it.)
By comparison, Brand Farage is barely getting started. But the Reform leader made more than £1m in a year, reportedly, by juicing the attention economy for all it’s worth, operating more like an influencer than a conventional politician. Besides the Cameos, the GB News shows and the paid speaking gigs in Washington at rates more often commanded by ex-prime ministers, there’s the £400,000-odd earned promoting gold bullion as a “tax-efficient” alternative to retirement savings – let’s hope no pensioner comes to bitterly regret investing in that one – while his monetised blue-tick account on X earns him a cut of the revenue his viral content makes for Elon Musk’s outrage factory.
Yet to take the reputational risks he did on Cameo for (at today’s rate) £79 a pop remains puzzling. Since by his own claims he didn’t check out his commissions first, Farage was potentially laying himself wide open to manipulation by rivals: he couldn’t have known who might potentially have been hiring him under an assumed name, getting him to create material that could later be used to do him damage. Either he has come to believe he walks on water, or else he really wanted that money.
Farage pitches himself as a man of the people who did well in the City and can now afford to do politics for the love of it, insisting over a recent two-bottle lunch with the Financial Times that he’s not the sort to crave a Ferrari. But he was cranking out those Cameos at an industrial rate, slotting them in even on election day. Did witnessing the in-your-face opulence of the Mar-a-Largo set, or even the influence enjoyed by the multi-millionaires he has had to persuade to bankroll his own assorted parties down the years, feed a certain envy? Back in 2023, he defended the £1.5m he trousered for doing ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! on the grounds that his old mates in commodities trading are now filthy rich, whereas in the name of Brexit “I gave all that up”. Perhaps he thinks he’s owed something for the lean post-referendum years, when he’d successfully abolished his own job as an MEP and was in the throes of a second divorce, complaining of being “separated and skint”. Shades of Boris Johnson, who started out dismissing his £250,000 Daily Telegraph salary as “chicken feed”, and ended up engulfed in a scandal over the funding of his third wife’s fancy home renovations.
But perhaps the most damaging thing about those videos in the end isn’t the money, so much as the sense of seeing how the sausage gets made. Nigel Farage’s genius has always been his ability to sound as if he’s just saying what he authentically thinks, whether you like it or not. But what we see here are performances, where he who pays the piper literally calls the tune: a politician essentially prostituting himself, with disturbing ease and fluency, sailing closer and closer to the wind as time goes on. Ironically, it’s how many disillusioned Reform voters have probably always thought politics worked. It’s just that until now, they were nearly always wrong.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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